>But without immigration they don’t have enough workers.
Youth unemployment in France is at 17%.
Youth unemployment in France is at 17%.
If that is the case you don't actually need more workers, but you have a very serious issue with young people leaving society and either by choice or circumstance not entering vocational training.
You do not need a 5 year degree to become a carpenter or nurse, if your country has a lack of those AND a significant unemployed youth population, the solution is obvious. Importing workers for those roles, just means that you are removing those training opportunities from your own population.
This has been a significant problem in the UK since brexit for farmers⁰: local workers are not willing to do that sort of work for that little pay¹ so the reduced availability of migrant workers has meant some crops simply went un-picked because the farmers were unable to afford to offer more³.
In other parts of the employment market where significant learning/experience is required before starting, there potentially are a different set of difficulties meaning jobs go unfilled despite there being unemployed people otherwise available.
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[0] and others offering seasonal or otherwise temporary physical work
[1] and/or in many cases unable to do it as fast² increasing costs to the employer
[2] though that problem would fix itself in time with practise, if people at least started the job
[3] as they'd have to swallow the cost on already miniscule margins in many cases, to the point where wasting part of a crop is financially better than paying more so they don't have to
Upper class does not care about price of food.
I don't think pushing up the retirement age matters too much for youth unemployement, as those two groups compete for very different jobs (no 60+ year old will start vocational training as a nurse).
"How do we make the economy good" is obviously an extremely hard problem. I think a very important question is whether the 17% are actively seeking for jobs or considering themselves already entirely removed from the system.
France has a large industrial base, with many, many large companies (and suppliers for those companies), training people to have skills relevant to those companies seems an important consideration.