What do Germans fear the most?

The same exact thing happens in Korea, Japan, China, Eastern Europe, Norway, and pretty much any other country that isn’t explicitly built on the idea of immigration and assimilation.

Taking large waves of refugees with no filtering will gurantee that the honest working ones will suffer by association with the bad ones.

Edit: Huge numbers of desperate refugees will also accept pay and working conditions that put local workers out of options.

Immigration is not a good thing just like it's not a bad thing. The devil is always is the details.

In other words, fear of going from 40-45% is greater than hope for going from 40-35%.

if you're an EU citizen you can move to germany and work there. this creates high incentives for workers from poorer eastern european countries to work in germany but send a huge chunk back to their family. some industries would not exists without this model, most notorious asparagus harvesting or private nursing services.

Germany accepted millions of migrants since 2015, but it's highly doubtful that this will be a net positive within the next century. Most of them are unskilled and only granted asylum which is temporary and by german law asylum seekers or migrants with temporary resident status are heavily restricted from taking up work. I guess the argument once was, why allow them to work if they will be deported anyway soon. But usually this is a long legal process leaving them in a limbo state for years. There are special programs however to train them to be nurses to obtain permanent residency. But it is unlikely that then german refugee policy from ~2015 will be a net benefit for social security etc.

You can see similar developments in the UK (triple lock, Brexit, NI increases, ecc…), even though not as pathological, probably because its economic system is healthier than the Italian.

Italy would need millions of immigrants not much to pay pensions, but to reinvigorate the national debate and economy. Maybe if there were enough under-40s, pensions could be reduced and that money could be spent in more productive endeavours.

Extend the retirement age, raise taxes, offer less public services. Of course people won't vote for any of those so you are correct, there is a lot of cognitive dissonance going on.

The cost of immigration, especially from outside of the EU, is catastrophically high, and remains that way, even for 2nd or 3rd generation immigrants. A paper studied the cost of immigration in the Netherlands to be around 400 billion euros between 1995 and 2019 (I can only find the paper in Dutch from the Renaissance institute, performed by several PhD / processors). The people arriving here from outside of the EU are often unskilled, in certain cases illiterate, and come from a cultural and religious background which proves to be nearly impossible to integrate, let alone assimilate.

As a result, in Brussels and many cities all around western Europe, it's riddled with ghettos, people living outside of the system, in poverty, with ideas that aren't compatible with our society (about topics such as religion, rule of law, sexuality, equality and so on). In my own neighborhood there are parts where as a woman you can't walk the street without a headscarf or you'll be harassed. And I'm not even suggesting what happens if you're openly gay in said streets.

Even multiple generations down the line the situation doesn't improve.

Why, in countries that are supposedly democratic, should mass immigration be the one thing that is shoved down our throats, without having any influence or say in it?

Side note: Belgium has a very flexible and generous social security system. We are known for providing unemployment benefits without any limit in duration, and with too little stimulus and followup, resulting in a lot of people simply exploiting the system. This is why immigration and the access to said system is a sensitive topic. We are also famous for having bungled the topic of integration for decades, resulting in people having lived here for ages and still not even speak the local language.

These days is all about the next hard-to-grasp concept that has little chance of ever actually happening (like the earth literally catching fire because of 2 or even 10 degrees celsius of rising temperatures, something even otherwise sane people do bring up from time to time.)

Political parties and the interests they represent remain the same. Also, Germany is a democracy. So “idiots” reflect the population.

The problem - unfortunately - is that German politics and parties disproportionally cater to the older generations. They vote at a much higher percentage, so it's opportune for the parties to tailor their offerings to them. This in turn disenfranchises younger voters which thus turn up in lower numbers to vote thus giving even more weight to the elderly vote and so on.

As a result we're stuck with an ever growing pension system, little appetite for innovation and three potential candidates that couldn't be any less inspiring, but are just non-threatening enough to be acceptable by the post-war generations...