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Comment by stuckinthepast | Hacker News Reader

Good job there's no feeling of decline in Western Europe

Thanks to immigration, young generations have all they need and there's plenty of optimism

I take this as sarcasm. Inmigration is trying to solve social policy failures of the government.

Errrr no, there really isn’t? And yes, immigration has helped us keep relatively strong economies and filled positions that natives don’t want to do anymore

I live in Western Europe and immigrants make up most of our bus drivers, trash collectors, store assistants, nurses, taxi drivers, builders and basically anybody who has repair skills (clothing, tech etc). Also, many of my colleagues in tech came to this country to work. So it's a mix, because immigrants also take jobs that the natives aren't qualified to do. And that's a good thing.

*Don't want to do for low wages anymore

Of course, so let's close the doors and magically I'll get paid £30/hour to collect trash off the street, because there's no competition with the immigrants. Simple as.

We've tried that in Britain. Come see how's that worked out for us.

In this country those are municipal jobs that give you a pension. One could do worse.

So it’s ok if it’s some immigrant who gets the shit pay without any chance of a career, got it.

well we can employ robots to do these low qualified tasks, if you think it will help those poor immigrants. I guess their jobs taken by robots is better option for you

That's some dishonest retort right there. It's not so black-and-white. I never said people getting paid below minimum wage to collect trash is a good thing, you just assumed I did to take my argument down.

I just pointed out that removing the layer of population that has no other choice than working below minimum wage will not solve the economic and social stratification. The point of my comment is that immigration and low pay are two completely unrelated phenomena that some loudmouths want us to believe they're correlated. The average voter, then, goes on to believe closing borders magically means they'll finally be able afford a mortgage and a better life while doing unskilled work. Less immigration, fewer candidates, they'll have to pay us more, no? If only it were that simple.

For any hard problems, there is a clear, simple and wrong answer, which usually works quite well as a slogan for a political campaign. "Immigration" it's a classic example.

This leads to everyone getting poorer, as there are no more immigrants to exploit. People no longer can get their houses renovated on the cheap, municipalities don't have cheap labor to pick up the trash and clean public toilets. Of course, since the immigrants come from even worse conditions, actually being economically exploited in the UK is a great deal for them. A win-win.

> This leads to everyone getting poorer, as there are no more immigrants to exploit.

I'm an immigrant to the UK. No-one exploited me. I had a choice of lots of countries to go to (EU passport) and chose the UK voluntarily.

Not every immigrant is doing hard labor for minimum wage or less... Those are the exploited ones, not people hanging on HN.

I worked as a barman, a shelf stacker, a fruit picker, a stock picker (I mean the guy at the back of the warehouse stacking trolleys with orders) before I transitioned to software.

I was on minimum wage. I wasn't exploited, it was a means to an end.

I don't think you would really care about me as an individual. I think you just didn't want my type here.

>We've tried that in Britain. Come see how's that worked out for us.

With Brexit? The UK ended up replacing EU nationals with non EU nationals. Not much changed. Nobody is getting the kind of wages you'd get in Norway or Switzerland for picking trash off the street.

Its amazing how much people thinks economics and the capitalist elite are just supposed to magically align with their phantasmic vision of an ethnic monoculture purged of all otherness

I see you are not British.

That’s entirely self-inflicted

Are you another one of those that think everything is going to shit because of immigration?

What used to be something only old racists and simpletons would loudly declaim 30 years ago, now it's become a common, yet still utterly moronic, party line.

But it's so easy to blame everything on the brown and the gaijin, when thinking hard about a hard problem takes too much effort.

Your diatribe seems based on a projection.

The implication I glean of namdnay's point is that woes could be alleviated by immigration, and the responding user suggests that it's not a silver bullet. That's different than saying "everything is going to shit because of immigration".

Also, being critical of immigration policy is not tantamount to criticizing the immigrants themselves. That's another projection.

There are surely advantages to immigration, but I think it's disingenuous to suggest it has zero potential downsides especially with higher rates as other policies and structures don't necessarily shift in tandem to accommodate it.

For example, wage suppression - it's just simple supply and demand, which should be uncontroversial. But maybe one that might speak to some people more: everyone in the West has a higher carbon footprint, and no one moves here to consume less. The things we enjoy and take for granted are what make it a better life. So any conceit of potentially lowering waste/emissions qua consumer choice is wholly undermined by the fact that it is a matter of policy to increase consumption - with more bodies - to boost the GDP. Rates of global emissions are growing not just through growing economies like China (which is probably the largest factor of the last 20 years), but immigration.

I also read the comment as blaming Europe's ills on immigration.

It's possible they meant that, but it wasn't explicitly said. I just put it in the context of the response to the other user.

> Are you another one of those that think everything is going to shit because of immigration?

Not everything, but Paris isn’t what it used to be.

> Not everything, but Paris isn’t what it used to be.

Yeah, now there are bike lines and it isn't suicidal to bike here. Or do you mean something else?

There have always been poor people in Paris, and there have always (ok, not always, but since France has been a colonial empire and since it has been the preferred destination for Portugese and Spaniards to come work here for better wages, so for multiple generations now) been immigrants.

You started your irony well, then had to blame immigrants and ruin your point.

No, they blamed immigration, not immigrants. Stop using people who are hoping to improve their lives as a shield.

Immigration or immigrants, doesn't change the point: blaming immigration for Europe's ills.

> Stop using people who are hoping to improve their lives as a shield.

I'm taking the side of those people, and against the old racist/xenophobic canard that seems to be on the rise again, sadly.

Only among "racial purists" is immigration seen as the drive force of pessimism.

Most of society view politicians and the failed project of neo-politics responsible for this development.

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