EU is full of old people and not enough children. The population pyramid looks like a bullet:
https://www.populationpyramid.net/europe/2024/
It's not difficult to see where that leads to, if we stop accepting immigrants.
Like, it's not a perfect solution, there are growing pains, but an adult someone else paid to give a high school education is an insanely good resource. The US's entire gimmick and history has been getting millions of poor immigrants with different ideas and a shred of hope and putting them to work building our country.
But nononono we definitely didn't do this bullshit already with chinese, japanese, german, italian, irish, african, jewish, polish, etc etc etc people. Don't you know it's utterly impossible for people from another country to ever get along with locals? They definitely don't consider themselves just "American" after three generations very reliably, no that would be too easy!
God forbid people in ten generations have slightly darker skin I guess.
False equivalence. You don't have to give up your country to fix it.
> than maybe have a few brown people around who casually speak a different language
The state of most larger european cities is already well beyond that, bringing with it tons of problems.
> "work ten times harder than any local for literally anything"
That's literally saying they help companies regress the standard of living that locals have fought for.
Meanwhile overall these economic migrants are a net negative financial impact overall because most of them do not come to work but to benefit from generous social programs that they have never paid into.
There are other solutions, e.g. that the wealthy boomers pay with their houses for their retirements or are forced to rent out their huge properties.
The retirement ponzi scheme needs to stop at some point anyway. With automation one might also need fewer workers.
Most importantly, many immigrants receive social security and are not employed.
- A political unwillingness to reign in private capital that's exacerbating resident housing shortages / rent increases (read: AirBnb)
- An infrastructure underinvestment in building sufficient new housing (or motivating current housing owners to densify)
- An underappreciation (Germany) that one can't switch energy mix at nation-scale without first building replacement capacity
- (Europe at least has far more child-rearing-friendly policies than the US)
But all of that is a "maintain demographic shape AND ___" problem.
Countries with inverted demographic pyramids go financially south very quickly.
At best, there are some extremely hard compromises to make (higher taxes on a smaller working base, or decreased social/retirement benefits).
At worst, there are no solutions to balancing a budget and things spiral out of control quickly.
It's underappreciated that "young immigrant labor is funding the country".