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Comment by sbinthree | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that you can't have a liesure class of healthcare consuming old people without an underclass of young working age people toiling for high taxes. Eventually you have an even worse social issue. Further, people probably don't realize they are voting to close the border to their sole source of future dependency. A vicious cycle. The other problem is there is a huge gap in the quality of immigrants, some stay dependent where others drive the economy like no native can. Complicated issue all around.

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Quality of immigrants matter. I do not care for country of origin, but importing people who are from poorer backgrounds back home is not going to make it any better in one generation. I am not saying poor people should not allowed, but most of the immigrants should be ably educated enough to operate in the complex economic infrastructure of advanced economies.

The first generation of migrants will mostly fail to get jobs[1] and become a burden on the welfare state.

1) https://www.ft.com/content/022de0a4-54f4-11e7-9fed-c19e27000...

That’s not true in Canada. Most immigrants I know do pretty well. And the reason is that Canada actually actively tries to integrate and assimilate. To the point that you get paid a small amount to attend language classes in QC, and other provinces have other programs.

Technology will solve the problem - immigration just kicks the can down the road.

If you import a large amount of immigrants they will have less hereditary wealth than the same amount of native Germans.

This increases state dependence when these immigrants become old themselves and enhances the viscous cyle

There is always the option of reversing the decline of fertility in Western countries.

But as Peter Zeihan says, it takes 20 years to make a 20 year old. So the policies to support family formation need to be in place asap.

Fertility is declining globally it’s not a western thing. The only way to realistically improve fertility rates is to recess women’s rights back to the 1950s.

Instead we should focus on improving quality of life for all through more efficient and automated production methods. The end goal is to increase productivity per hour such that we don’t need as many young people to support the older population.

sure you can. the US government can lower taxes and spend more by simply selling more debt, while at the same time increasing the size and productivity of the overall economy by creating more Googles and Facebooks. Other countries however do not have this luxury. They don't have a large influx of high-IQ talent nor the ability to raise money so cheaply. It used to be very expensive to produce food, and food expenditures used to be a much higher percentage of income than it is now. Now food production is very cheap. Same for electricity.

But also the possibility of rationing healthcare is a politically untenable issue

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