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I'm not sure that is true.
They're in favor of greatly increasing immigration
EDIT: this is an observation, I am not advocating 'substitution'
Especially if the older generations take up that much space that younger people strugge to find a place on their own. It just makes sense in the context of our dilapidated pension system.
That won't work long term at all and life standards will probably decrease significantly in Germany in the future.
Instead of immigration, we actually should let the pension system collapse and see how we can supply the older generation in a more efficient way. Because the current one is evidently not sustainable.
It's is the economic system the one which should adapt.
Myself and many of my friends who have decided to have zero children or only one child rather late in life, cite the burden of having to take care of children, when one is already tired after work, one would like to pursue leisure activities that do not involve children present, etc. Even in countries where the state provides abundant infrastructure to minimize the financial expense of childrearing, birthrates are still low because of the time and effort expense that remains. So, how do you address that issue? Telling people to just suck it up and accept childbearing as their duty isn’t going to work.
Immigrants are often coming from countries where religious and cultural pressures in favor of childbearing are maintaining the birthrate higher than in the West, but even in those regions birthrates are gradually falling as their countries become more developed.
What I predict will happen: Government will reduce pension and social security payments to those that did not support the system by having 2 or more well-raised children.
I am in immigrant in the UK. You have to prove you have education, funds to support yourself, and a job offer with high salary. Add visa expenses, moving expenses, and you might realise only fairly 'privileged foreigners' can do this.
By all means, address issues causing low birthrates. But don't go around complaining about the unwashed masses, because kids from Somalia are never getting in.
But my guess is that you take issue more with their skin color.
Lol, I feel like having a family is way too expensive and disagree that importing replacements is the only way to go. Giving birth shouldn't bankrupt you, and that has to be a huge reason young people (including me and my friends) are pushing off having children. Combine that with the overwhelming student debt crisis, I don't feel I can take on a child. So it seems weird that the solution is "screw them, just import the people we need".
But sure, make it about me being "racist" so you can imagine yourself as a big warrior fighting off bigots online.
Likewise, the answer to this immigration debate is exceedingly clear, until you throw overly emotional notions about culture and ethnicity and nationality into the mix.
And my personal beliefs about life and what it means to be human in my very finite time here goes far beyond "well the economics work out better if I'm barren forever and the government imports immigrants with higher birth rates due to being from a third world country". I strive to have a complete, well rounded life with a loving family. At the end of the day, my life goal is not to live an " economically logical" life void of emotions. I have 90 years here, if I'm lucky. I AM going to live a full life.
There is nothing wrong with immigration, but the fact of the matter is you can't strip all emotion out of the equation. You can say its overly emotional to want your own family instead of importing people with completely different cultures and values, but the drive to reproduce has been in the works for 3.5 billion years. Having others reproduce for you so the government can get an extra dollar out of isn't enough of an incentive to kick the repro drive.
On balance, it pretty much is. Adult immigrants will generally be productive in a fraction of the time that children will take to even become legally eligible to be productive.
>And my personal beliefs about life and what it means to be human in my very finite time here goes far beyond "well the economics work out better if I'm barren forever and the government imports immigrants with higher birth rates due to being from a third world country". I strive to have a complete, well rounded life with a loving family. At the end of the day, my life goal is not to live an " economically logical" life void of emotions. I have 90 years here, if I'm lucky. I AM going to live a full life.
That's fine. Please explain why we should build policy around your sentimentality, especially since people like you are unmoved (at least, to the point of actual action) by appeals to the human rights of would-be immigrants.
Searching for it yields rather the opposite.
Obviously this can greatly vary. In America, immigration is tied to lower wages for lower tier jobs like chefs, construction workers, factory workers. I don't know enough to state immigration's effects on high tier white collar jobs like software engineering.
Can you show evidence this really happens even within lower wage jobs? Folks point out that not only are immigrants much less expensive labor for communities (in that there are qualified individuals arriving pre-trained and as active adults rather than locally trained and nurtured children), and that they tend to take different jobs than the native population does in most cases.
This is a surprisingly common take on the literature, with an unlikely consensus among both the conservative and radical left, libertarians and conservative libertarians, and even many on the conservative side.
The service industry is a particularly good example of how immigrants arriving into an economy tend to expand the economy to make room for themselves (they themselves need to contribute to the additional demand on the local services industry) rather than displacing the existing infrastructure.
I hate asking but mind citing some sources?
Economic consensus is that labor pool operates on supply/demand, so greatly increase the supply through immigration will reduce demand and therefore reduce salaries. This part of the reason for why doctors have such high salaries: their supply is limited because only X number of people can become doctors each year and demand is very high.
Saying that an increased supply of workers does not affect highly commoditized jobs like cooks and construction works is an unusual claim and I would appreciate a source so i can review their arguments.
That is just my uneducated take on it.
When I search for the terms immigration wages I get the following sources:
https://www.sns.se/en/archive/effects-of-immigration-on-nati... https://fullfact.org/immigration/immigration-wages/
We're debating "replacement rates" and immigration because it turns out only people who are currently in power benefit from a party that maintains the status quo. This leads to that party gripping the status quo reigns ever tighter, and in turn to most non-majority people voting against them. Well, turns out a lot of the minority are immigrants, so the status quo faction now yammers about "replacement rates" and wants to keep immigrants out - because they're aware they can't hold onto power under a democratic system that allows immigration.
And so, racism and fascism takes hold, and facts are jettisoned for the benefit of holding on to power.
But good luck with that; I think the data shows that it's not a very pronounced effect.
Yes, you're right, H1-B visas and offshoring have done wonders for the average US software engineer's wages.
I don't see that unfettered immigration need be linked to capitalism, just the belief people can move around freely being OK.
> increase competition and lower their wages (immigration), whilst railing against capitalism
I'd guess they are railing not against immigrants that undercut their £8/hour bar work but the executives at the top of companies that can earn millions, even many millions a year, while the yoof serve them drinks from the bar at £8/hour. Even more so when those executives prove incompetent or corrupt.
> Ideology has gone so far as to confuse young Americans
Well I'm a brit an not young but I guess their ideology is "I'd like to be treated with economic decency", which I support.
Because many young people are increasingly sympathetic to the anarchist argument for the dissolution of borders. That's not paradoxical, the argument is that the national state should stop having the power to limit the movement of people.
> Simultaneously they are pushing for policies that increase competition and lower their wages (immigration),
This isn't actually a true statement. Immigrants are less expensive labor for a community, freeing up more capital for civil services, education and facilities. The idea that immigration lowers wages is a populist argument made by capitalists and reactionaries alike. Modern corporate capitalists actually LIKE the state limiting the supply of immigrant labor behind elaborate processes and form-filling. So long as they get their quota promptly, that is.