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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

We need the people of Africa, to replace the people we aren't having in the developed world. We should stop all this warfare against refugees and accept them willingly, as people with strong motivations to work.

Remittance money will boost the local economy and in time, as their education and middle class grows, the flow will stop and so will their higher birth-rate.

I've made variations of this post about 5 times in HN in the context of stories like this, or the problem of refugees in the UK and Europe.

Merkel accepted the 1.5m for sound economic reasons. Japan will be taking anyone it can soon, at their historically low birth rate. There's only so much robots can do for you.

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Just to make sure there's no misunderstanding, please note I'm a first, second AND third generation migrant.

The problem is that "we" need people to do the dirty jobs we don't want to; wait tables, mop floors, clean toilets, change diapers for the elderly, and so on. Most of those jobs come with a fair deal of risk of physical injury or verbal abuse and the pay is usually crap. What makes you think that migrants would be content with those jobs when we refuse to do them ourselves?

Besides, in large parts of Europe, Eastern Europeans have already grabbed most of the decent jobs available to foreigners. The millions of Ukrainians currently fleeing the war will grab what's left once they start settling in and become available on the job market. In that situation, importing a vast amount of African youth into several generations (at least) of low social status is both cruel and unneccesary.

There's definitely reason to revisit the way we look on migration, but flooding the market with cheap labour is not going to solve anything. We need to reform the labour market and automate the jobs that cannot be made into decent ways of making a living. Other shitty jobs will need to have working conditions improved until the jobs themselves are worth taking.

Nothing you said is wrong, or unfamiliar to me. The recent lorry driver shortage in the UK, and European truck driver comments about how Britain treats long distance drivers (disgusting toilets, abusive behaviours towards drivers) are just the most recent example of jobs british people won't do, and assume foreigners will do for low pay.

Or field work. Or nursing, in the sense of general nursing duties not necessarily high paying theatre and post operative recovery nursing, although Britain needs them too. No, I absolutely do mean the disgusting, dirty, low paid menial jobs that western working class poor people won't do.

That's the story of migration to the USA, the ubiquitous Mexican labour in hotels, cleaning, cafes and bars, meat works that keeps America working.

I absolutely agree "flooding" the market won't help. I'm talking about a 25 to 50 year problem here.

All migrants are exploited at some level, even H1B. They need unions as much as anyone else.

You're not wrong about the next five years. There's going to be a lot of racism at play, and right wingers like Orban and Le Pen will make much of it.

But the underlying economic truth I believe in remains: the west needs migration more than most people realise, and immigration and refugee law is regressive and unhelpful.

Oh, migration is well underway; Russia's making damn sure of it.

As for fixing the job market, we need to raise the status of the low-status jobs rather than consider people as commodities where you can just get another source rather than solving the supply issues. Importing people straight into the lower classes will just grow the lower classes, with all the downsides that has to offer; crime, prostitution, political or religious extremism, etc.

One thing at the time: Make working in a nursing home an acceptable occupation rather than something that's done by the most desperate. Service personel should be valued, rather than threatened or constantly pushed down. When the guy who pays someone else to mow his lawn stops looking down on the guy who mows it, that's when we can start considering attracting foreign labour to fill positions. If it's still a problem at that point.

Most of the Ukrainian refugee population consists of women and children at least for now, and in women's case, they are not particularly drawn to hard manual work, these open jobs will ultimately need be filled.

Low wages is a problem that will fix itself. When there was a shortage of truck drivers, wages for truck drivers went up.

That’s how a market economy works. If there aren’t enough people willing to do a job, then wages for that job will go up until there are.

A lot of European countries have significant African populations (incl. Spain, Italy and France). It does not seem to lead to any economic Wunder. If I meet a black guy there, they are usually trying to sell me or my wife a fake handbag.

Gone are the times when what was needed was raw work force = muscles. One of the reasons why we have fewer kids is that schooling and training for modern job now takes so long that it envelopes a lot of the most fertile years. And one of the reasons why Africa has as many kids as Europeans used to have in the 19th century is because a lot of African youth does not have access to higher education.

But that means that they won't be having good jobs in modern society.

Your comments speak to the feudal markets in most of Europe more than the capabilities of human beings. Here in Portugal businesses are typically depressingly from the same five categories or so, and manufacturing is limited to low tech with much raw material exported. When this failure mindset isn’t present you see all sorts of innovations from the Portuguese market (some Fraunhofer-like startups linked to the universities etc.)

The lack of imagination that comes from forcing everyone to eat pop culture for breakfast in this Eurovision mentality also limits innovation.

Small minded belief in the boxes and categories and a refusal to consider new possibilities is a real limitation in much of Europe that money cannot help us get over.

We’ve become a weak inbred continent incapable of competing on the world class level that our grandparents did in so many fields.

Europe thirsts for new blood, even if some of its less clever locals think otherwise

European job markets and societies are simply at a higher level than anything in Africa. Whatever problems you can find, Africa has them five fold.

"We’ve become a weak inbred continent" ... "Europe thirsts for new blood"

That sounds really weird, like a rehashed mix of old style eugenics.

By the way, the worst problems with inbreeding are either in royal families, or in countries that condone cousin marriages. As you can see from this map, it is not Europe that takes the top spots in consanguinity.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-prevalence-consan...

> We’ve become a weak inbred continent

Europe is one of the continent with the lowest actual inbreeding rate contrarily to Africa, the ‘new blood’ you seem to cherish. Could you, who is so clever compared to the stupid xenophobes, explain something to me? I am very curious about me how the crack dealing migrants from Mali and Niger that regularly vandalise my street will rejuvenate our economy?

Also it seems that in your indisputable intellectual superiority you seemed to forgot something rather… basic: that a country may not just be an economy?

Can you please elaborate on these five categories you mentioned in your comment?

> A lot of European countries have significant African populations (incl. Spain, Italy and France). It does not seem to lead to any economic Wunder. If I meet a black guy there, they are usually trying to sell me or my wife a fake handbag.

Nah. Here in Italy, and in France too, there's a well integrated amount of north Africans since two or three generations. And we're glad they are here.

Then explain why Le Pen + Zemmour were over 30% in the last election, knowing that there is now a sensible amount of votes from people of African descent? Your personal experience seems to contrast a bit with mine on that point

Explain why blacks and mexicans voted for Trump, and voilà.

69% of Muslims, which comprise a large part of African immigrants in France, voted for Jean-Luc Mélenchon. They are not responsible for the high score of Le Pen and Zemmour

1) Ethnics statistics aren't allowed in France 2) care to show the source for this ? 3) what does it even mean ? "69% of Muslims" : who went to vote ? Who are french citizens? Who are over 18? who are on the voting lists?

Throwing "information" like this is misleading.

Come on it’s literally the third google result for “premier tour religion”. https://www.ifop.com/publication/le-vote-des-electorats-conf...

I am sure I am not the only one who doesn't get your analogy : mind to explain what those two situations have in common?

Will you still say that if Le Pen gets over 35% on Sunday? 40%? 45%? What if she wins?

> But that means that they won't be having good jobs in modern society.

You said it yourself, the western worker goes into school to work non physical jobs, that means there's a big gap in the physical job part of the labor force that can be filled by immigrants.

That gap is much smaller than it used to be.

At the peak of the muscle era, steelworks in my city of birth employed 100 000 people. Now they are down to fewer than 10 000, even though their production has actually grown.

Automation took those jobs away. It is not dissimilar to the collapse of the rural areas: once, almost everybody was a subsistence farmer. Now, 1 % of the population can feed the rest.

Automation is certainly a big thing, but we still need people to care for the elderly, drive buses, clean public spaces, paint buildings, work on roads, take garbage, deliver goods, and so on. Some societies, such as Japan, are banking on automation filling these gaps but the affects of low birth rates will be felt long before it can take over completely.

Also see the stagnation of Central American and Caribbean countries despite their large populations of migrants in the USA.

Remittances are not some kind of economic cheat code or the basis of a national development policy, they’re basically a painkiller that might help prevent a complete collapse of the country.

Same with Moldova or Kosovo.

It’s hard to disentangle cause and effect here.

Those regions could be in even worse shape were it not for remittances.

Or they could be in even better shape if the migrants had stayed at home and worked on improving their own countries instead of brain draining to the USA.

>Gone are the times when what was needed was raw work force = muscles.

Not at all.

Modern economies require huge amounts of people to do service jobs, and many b of these do not require advanced degrees. Here in Melbourne (not Europe, but we have a fairly sizeable African refugee population) you see plenty of black people working in aged/disability care, security and driving jobs.

Of those jobs you named, aged/disability care is the only sector that is going to grow, because of the demographic development. Unless medicine makes great strides in treating aging, more nurses and caretakers will be needed.

Growth in security jobs is possible, though it spells a bad omen: if more security is needed per capita, there is something going wrong with law enforcement policies.

Human driving jobs will disappear one day, much like horse drivers did. Even though autonomous driving is proving to be a harder nut to crack than people expected, by 2050 it will be solved.

In the meantime, Africa will add about a billion people. They must be educated, there simply isn't enough muscle jobs for them in the developed world.

> Even though autonomous driving is proving to be a harder nut to crack than people expected, by 2050 it will be solved.

In 1960s, top researchers believed that scene understanding (one of the hardest computer vision problems) will be solved by an undergrad during summer internship. I feel that this prediction that we'll for sure autonomous driving in a couple decades is an example of similar hubris.

There is steady improvement in the field and roads can be adapted over time, too (special beacons etc.) I feel that the main hurdle to clear will eventually be human psyche.

We have grown accustomed to the non-zero chance of a fellow human crashing into us, but being flattened by a robot gone wild is deeply repulsive, even if the actual rate of accidents sinks way under the current norm.

>Growth in security jobs is possible, though it spells a bad omen: if more security is needed per capita, there is something going wrong with law enforcement policies.

Possibly a cultural difference; "security" here basically means nightclub bouncers and the occasional guy at the supermarket/chemist.

No we don’t. We need controlled and ‘value added’ migration. Shall I point to Swedens current events to show what non controlled migration does to a country where the cultures are not compatible?(with similar examples having happening in various european countries)

If you think only letting elites migrate is helpful you know nothing about the nature of society. Sweden will drown in a lake of its own human waste without migrant labour to clean.

Every western nation likes to think migration should be skilled labour only.

They're wrong. It's actually far better to get lots of young, healthy motivated untrained people and invest in them, than import skilled labour only.

You just ignored an empirical evidence of a possible failure of your creed to then just reaffirm them. There can be no discussion if you decide that reality is not worth reevaluating your ideology

As you can see from this thread, the mere thought of investing in black people is controversial, though no one will admit it in those words.

No, there are far more charities to help black people than white people, which is in itself not controversial. What is controversial though is replacement migration of white people in North America and Europe (the last of which they are actually indigenous) by black people because the western economic elite find it more economical than to enable the conditions necessary to raise the natality rates

The unhealthy fixation on the so-called Great Replacement conspiracy theory purportedly occurring in US/Canada primarily, and to a lesser degree Europe is tedious and unimaginative to say the least.

The intellectual efforts need not to be invested not in proving/disproving this theory but on why the Anglo countries in the New World get to absorb all the migrants from the Old World (excluding Europe) when Central and South America should at least theoretically attract migrants when in practice that this in not the case, and to make matters worse they export migrants to other countries outside of that bloc because let's face it, the New World will always be fluid when it comes to the legitimate claim to the lands since all the nation-states in that part of the world are byproducts of the Age of Exploration.

These are the questions that should be investigated and researched and not some lunatic conspiracy theories that do more hard than good for the concerned people.

So I guess foreign aid and NGOs money thrown into Africa is a myth ?

Going from "we should make MASSIVE foreigners come cos it's so cool" to "they don't want to invest in black people" is disingenuous.

The debate is about 1) the quantity 2) the type (qualifications).

And if I wanted to be as disingenuous as you I would ask you : why don't black people invest in black people?

There is a difference between elites and just about anyone.

The lack of labour to 'clean' or wait tables is not because locals don't want to do it. Is because locals don't want to do it in the exploitive conditions they have to work. Raise the conditions/pay and they will want to do it. 'Poor' immigrants take those jobs because it is better than what they have back home, but we shouldn't aim to exploit immigrants to keep our cheap shit.

Pretty much all over europe fruit picking companies/owners exploit this. No-one in their right mind want to work for less than minimum wage, temporary contracts, 12hour days under the sun skirting any kind of health and safety laws. So they go and pick poorer people from other countries where it is a step up from where they are from. Think the covid lockdowns proved pretty much that. In my country, owners complain they don't have people to work in turism/service industry and beg beg beg government for more open borders. And of course no-one wants to. Unpaid work hours, salaries paid under the table so owners don't pay employment taxes on that. No labour security because 'who needs a contract'. So now we have a bunch of pakistani people (nothing against them), that hardly speak the language working in shitty conditions, because owners don't want to pay the required legally mandated salaries + work conditions.

I am far in the income ladder compared to 'these jobs', but I want the people working them to have a decent standard of living, higher salaries and better work conditions, but that will never work if we keep exploiting 'poor' immigrants with open door policies.

Not only the unscrupulous business owners are guilty of exploiting these poor migrants but there are other accomplices like the government turning a blind eye to these practices as they get to benefit from the exploitation of cheap migrant labor but also the general public is an accomplice with their apathy and indifference to the suffering of these workers and also, and I hate to do this, by reframing the debate in nativist terms like you did here.

The solution should be to offer a decent immigration path/track for these workers that balances all the interests of concerned stakeholders, and also make sense from an economic standpoint because sometimes you can't make a business case for paying high rates for low-skilled jobs as this might weigh negatively on profitability and drive some establishments out of business.

Yes, governments are accomplices in this, and yes, as I mentioned, we want cheap shit and turn a blind eye.

But we have laws like minimum wage, hours of work per week, social security contributions, health and safety etc. I don't care if it is a white or a black or a green man from mars that does a job, but I want him or her to have the protections we establish by law. The only reason there is these 'imports' of low skilled poor people is because business men know they can get around these laws and exploit them since most of them don't know better.

Wether is abiding by the law makes a business go out of business, then so be it. You may disagree with the minimum wage, the safety laws, and I encourage anyone to vote in accordance to that, but as soon as they are laws, either a business can work following them, or should not exist. We don't go and say 'well, loansharks can only exist by breaking some kneecaps, otherwise the business model wouldnt work' and let them do it.

And I am pissed because I saw these things first hand many times. Even called the respective government entities to expose the situation, and nothing was ever done, because as you said, governments benefit from this also.

For example (and I saw this happening more than once), minimum wage here is around 700 euros. Of this, the employee pays 70 to social security getting net 630 (minimum wage doesn't pay taxes basically). The employer has to pay around 200 euros on 'extras' to social security and other things. So it costs around 900 euros. I saw foreigners that didn't know better saying they wanted to get 500 at the end of the month. Employer paid them in cash 500 at the end of the month illegally, no contributions to social security or unemployment. Working more than 40 hours per week and id something happens to employee, he is fucked, and for this privilege, the owner saves 400 euros per month. So no, I don't want even more open borders to allow more and more exploitation.

edit: just today this comes up https://ionline.sapo.pt/artigo/769046/escravatura-de-200-mol...

200 moldovians in slave conditions, a quote: > When asked why he continued to work like this, the Moldovan migrant explained that his boss did not give him money because he withheld it and deducted it to Social Security to guarantee European citizenship.

As you seem to know so well what is right or wrong : can you name me 3 countries who "[massively invested] in young, healthy motivated untrained people" and got better ?

The problem with your statements is they are so extreme on one side that even people like me who usually don't care about such topic have to weight in in the other direction to make another voice heard...

we need full spectrum population growth. imagine in your head that these new people are arriving by birth. they will follow a bell curve in many respects, and so will immigrants.

growth is growth, you have to stop thinking that immigrants are a threat.

No, and I am willing to stake everything I have to fight anyone pushing this experiment.

People that engineer the future of countries they will never live at, happy to displace cultures for a fucking basis point, make me deeply sick.

Who in the bloody hell are you, or anyone at Davos for that matter, to dictate what my nation, my town, or my family needs? Have you even been asked? Or is this just the usual arrogance ingrained in all globalists of just "knowing better"?

People in Africa should live sustainable lives in their huge continent itself. That way they will be happier and more satisfied compared to doing degrading jobs to serve their colonial masters once again.

They have failed time and time again. I think that at a certain point we should understand that this is not our fight and leave them alone to do whatever they want with their societies.

How do you know they have motivations to work? Do they also have qualifications to work?

Why do you assume this planet needs billions of people to function?

This has to be a troll surely. You cannot believe that that is the most sensible option.

Our economic paradigm is based on an ever increasing population. This is not sustainable and is coming to an end as the global population cannot keep growing and should in fact decrease for the good of the planet and of our quality of life.

Immigration is a short term, economically lazy option, and on large scales leads to major political and social issues, and people do not want it. Politically it is either naive or a tool to advance an agenda.

Our societies need to face the issue of constant (even decreasing in the medium term) population and adapt to it economically and socially instead of trying to kick the ball down the road. The sooner we realise this the better.

> Remittance money will boost the local economy and in time

This pie in the sky thinking. All countries developed today or on their way have got there through their own development and industrialisation work. Countries that rely on remittance have an interest and need to keep sending people abroad as that is de facto their "export product" they rely on to survive.

Immigration is and has always been a hot button. Take for example, the US during the era of exclusive European migration and how it was a challenging and fraught process that entailed tensions, conflicts and even episodic bouts of physical violence to integrate new arrivals and this will always be the case for immigration forever.

So, making it sound like this wave of immigration is particularly different in essence doesn't hold water.

I think claiming that it is not different is disingenuous.

Europe is still grappling with the large wave of non-European immigration from the second half of the 20th century up to now, which has been and is still causing a lot of social and cultural problems.

The last thing Europe needs is to add more fuel to the fire, especially that, again, immigration is not a solution and is not needed.

I still stand by my statement.

IN ESSENCE, absorbing migrants is not an easy task, and this applies to ALL migrants, no exceptions made. IN PARTICULAR, some migrants might pose additional challenges to integrate but they are not necessarily to blame fully for this, sometimes the host population are biased against them making the process more arduous for them, while giving at the same time a preferential treatment to other migrant populations.

Yes, some migrants are more 'challenging' to integrate, especially to assimilate partly because some cultural differences mean that they do not want to assimilate and will not assimilate. This is key to what Europe has been experiencing.

Of course, for instance when Italians migrated to France that did create some tensions at the time but a generation later there was no difference apart from the Italian family names, because French and Italian cultures are very similar and, yes let's be honest, they both look pretty much the same.

Europe can and should pick and choose who to let in. As things stand there is no benefit for Europe in mass immigration from outside of Europe.

That sounds the ultimate form of globalization, manufacture children where it's cheaper and import the adults

Most couples eventually want to have a children, they just don't feel they can because the increasing cost of living and lack of support and preparedness from most developed societies, since more people move nowadays they lack family support which would make it easier

If population is reducing is because governments don't mind it and doesn't think they should incentivize it like other things

Birthing a and raising a person is not cheap or easy, but treating it the same as commodities seems wrong

And what is the problem with population shrinking? Some countrifies would well benefit from less population. Everyone complains about stained health services, lack of housing, climate activists "the world has too much population"... Is it just a economic problem that everything has to grow for ever? Change the economic model to allow for natural population oscillations

No we don’t need to be ‘replaced’, thank you for your kind offer but I and also a vast part of the European population want to reject it

If I wanted to trigger the opposite idea in people's minds I would exactly write what you just wrote... I don't know if it's trolling or manipulation...

Why “people of Africa”?

Sub-Saharan Africa is where the population boom is.

Comparisons:

- https://www.populationpyramid.net/africa/2020/

- https://www.populationpyramid.net/asia/2020/

- https://www.populationpyramid.net/europe/2020/

(Northern America is still growing: https://www.populationpyramid.net/northern-america/2020/)

Yes and why arbitrarily constrain yourself to Africa. Why not China? Why not the top 10% of each country

China's population growth has already mostly stopped. In 2021, they had 0.03% growth.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/china-population

Focusing on Africa isn't arbitrary. They are where the majority of future human population growth will be coming from.

Again I ask, why do you want "booming" populations and not "work-ready, healthy" populations, aka 1sigma upwards?

Are you saying Africans aren’t “work-ready, healthy”? I guess you mean “highly educated”

I would think that, in aging populations, many of the jobs most difficult to fulfill by count would be in service jobs (care homes, nursing, Uber eats cyclists, bus drivers, etc)

There likely will be millions of people in Africa willing to take on such a job and capable of doing so.

Also, chances will be higher that those people would want to emigrate than, say, Chinese nurses, as there will already be plenty of demand in China.

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