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I’d like to point out that the open door policy to refugees came because Europe was trying to escape the demographic trap and the collapse of the social safety net. The hope was that young refugees would become net positive GDP contributors for decades, an idea borrowed from the US. If that has failed, it’s due to a failure of integration. Europe can actually be quite a racist place and in many ways the US is better at offering big opportunities to immigrants and encouraging them to become big tax contributors. The US’s secret sauce is that the only real cultural purity it has to protect is consumer capitalism.

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>I’d like to point out that the open door policy to refugees came because Europe was trying to escape the demographic trap and the collapse of the social safety net.

This sounds like post hoc justification. If you want immigrants, wouldn't you want to pick the best and brightest, rather than whoever washes up on your shore?

Depends on what you need -- chemical engineers can make for good pizza delivery guys, but that's not making the best use of them

But all things being equal, wouldn't you rather have an immigrant who

* speaks the local language

* is highly educated (eg. post-secondary degree)

* is young

* has expertise in an in-demand industry

than one who is missing one or more of the above? For non-refugees, you can screen for the above factors and only admit the ones who are qualified, but for refugees you can't.

No, because then you have no one to do manual jobs because the native well educated youth won't take those.

>then you have no one to do manual jobs

And that's fine, because those jobs can either be automated, outsourced, done domestically (ie. driving yourself rather than getting delivery), or at worst case paying more. All things being equal I'd rather have a chemical engineer who can do chemical engineering and deliver pizza, than someone who can only deliver pizza.

It's not that easy, because:

- not all jobs can be automated

- manual laborers make less money

If you see immigrants all around you doing great, while you clean toilets and struggle to feed yourself, that breeds resentment of your government.

And sure, it's easy to say the jobs should just pay more, but that's not the reality today, and if your choice is working a shitty job or starving then that's not really a choice at all.

I would also rather have the chemical engineer, but I think it would be even better to live in a society where both the delivery driver and the chemical engineer are net positives to society.

Refugees have a selection mechanism as well because you have to be enterprising and resourceful to travel all the way to the EU. The US became big by taking in the unwashed masses fleeing Europe, and I think much of its entrepreneurial spirit goes back to that origin story.

>Refugees have a selection mechanism as well because you have to be enterprising and resourceful to travel all the way to the EU.

I never claimed that refugees have no selection effects, but is that selection effect comparable to proper immigration screening?

The US needs agricultural workers (and fills this with h2b visas) and restaurant (including fast food) staff over the last 10 years but accelerating with the baby boomer retirements (also accelerated by COVID).

I think a lot of it comes down to political possibility. Lots of EU countries are quite homogeneous and have thousand year old cultures. Importing labor is a harder sell than in the US where everyone is just a few generations removed from immigrants anyway. Europeans were sold the humanitarian angle to get the door open.

Immigration is unpopular in the polls. If you're doing proper, structured labor immigration, it needs a political debate on who we want and in how many numbers. With refugees you can just pull on the heart strings, "how can we turn away people fleeing from war?"

The US has something similar with its illegal immigration from Mexico. Every politician since Clinton has pledged to stop illegal immigration but nobody actually does anything about it, because they know that that their labor is essential to the country, and replacing the illegal immigration with legal immigration is too much of a political sore point.

it's not always unpopular, it's unpopular when the integration costs (as in both actual budget but also cultural/psychological) become bigger than what the population expected.

for example look at Hungary. immigration is very unpopular at the polls, yet now the same government that created this sentiment through endless propaganda passed laws to allow more immigration of laborers, because the new Chinese battery factories that are under construction will require a lot more unskilled labor than which is available. they try to limit any kind of anchoring, no family unification, no visa for non-working spouses, etc. but it's not clear that this will actually attract enough workers...

> I’d like to point out that the open door policy to refugees came because Europe was trying to escape the demographic trap and the collapse of the social safety net.

Also, the US was bombing a couple of Middle Eastern countries then: creating the said refugees who could reach Europe on foot and/or boat, but not the American mainland .

It’s true, but as cold hearted as it is, they didn’t have to let them in. Poland sure decided to pick and choose. The Greeks are not having it either.

One day there will be a massive wave of climate refugees rushing out of the uninhabitable zone and there will be US soldiers in the border guard towers with flamethrowers. The US will welcome immigrants when it suits them and roast them when it doesn’t.

As I am in Berlin right now I’ll remind us it wouldn’t be the first time people on top of a wall had kill on sight orders.

> One day there will be a massive wave of climate refugees rushing out of the uninhabitable zone

Are you talking about Canada?

Sorry to break it to you, but by the end of the century Canada will be the bread basket of America. Go quietly and pretend like it was your idea and you may even get statehood.

Are you saying canada will be uninhabitable, or people will be going to canada?

No, the US was not causing massive Syrian refugee flows to Europe by bombing Syria.

Which countries? I imagine they were already churning out refugees. Syria, for example.

US intervention turned Syria from a relatively quick civil war (to be won by Assad and his Russian pals) to a conflict of interminable duration. Elements of the fight against Assad were connected to groups arising from the chaos in Iraq, in the wake of the US invasion (remember ISIS?) complicating matters and surely leading to even more suffering for non-combatants. IIRC the bulk of the refugee waves came after the initial clashes, when US aid and air cover let the resistance dig in for the long-term rather than getting quickly crushed by government forces and their allies. Somewhat later, the ISIS mess made it all even worse.

Whether all this was in some sense worth it for mysterious realpolitik greater-good reasons—I dunno. Looks pretty bad on its own, anyway. Not enough help to win—but just enough to keep the fight going forever. Doesn't make much sense to me unless the point was to accomplish exactly that (to disrupt Russian and/or Iranian interests in the area without pushing too hard? To keep Syria too distracted to mess with Israel? Destabilize Syria so it can't interfere with Iraq's fledgeling state? I have no idea what the real motivation is or was, but it sure as hell doesn't seem to have been "help the Syrian people"—if it was, we've screwed that up pretty badly)

US didn't want to be involved in the Syrian conflict at all in the beginning. It were its European allies, in particular France, that were pushing to intervene and fight the Assad regime.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-the-united-states-has...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-syria-crisis-un-idUKBRE87...

Interesting, thanks for the context.

[EDIT] Worth noting that (and, yes, I checked Wikipedia because I don't trust my mental timeline on this) US aid dates back to 2011, before even that 2012 article about Euro allies agitating for intervention, but overt direct action (air strikes) by the US didn't start until 2014. Probably one of those things that only the youngest of us will ever get anything resembling a full, clear story on, given some of the early intervention ('12 and '13) beyond non-lethal aid was evidently by the CIA (unsurprisingly) and carried a price tag (I gather over ~4-5 years, to be fair) of perhaps a billion dollars. Maybe in my twilight years I'll get to read an account of this whole thing that makes any amount of sense. I'm really hoping it's not just one of those "yeah, we fucked up and couldn't admit it so we kept fucking up for quite a while longer, on the taxpayer dime and at the cost of immense human suffering" things we do sometimes. But at least it looks like, if it was a mistake, the UK and France were making the mistake with us. Which is... something, I suppose.

[EDIT EDIT] Looks like Jordan and Israel played a key role in tipping the scales for getting Obama to agree to that early CIA op, and the Saudis were also participants once it got going. Sigh. The usual players, for US intervention in that region, I suppose. Israel and the Saudis make sense, but I'm not well-read on Jordanian foreign relations. I'd suppose they're just broadly Saudi-aligned, and I know they're relatively friendly with the Israelis.

This is just plain wrong. The millions of refugees came from Syria. The US was hardly bombing Syria at all, it just bombed Libya. Actually it was mostly EU countries, in particular France, that pushed for fighting the Assad regime at the time. The Obama government didn't even want to be involved at first.

> The US was hardly bombing Syria at all, it just bombed Libya.

I was mostly thinking of Syria and Daesh, and had forgotten about Libya. A non-insignificant chunk of refugees headed to Europe transit through Libya - which didn't use to be the case before Gaddafi was deposed.

Relevant:

https://www.businessinsider.com/qaddafi-warns-france-if-i-go...

I think you got things backwards. France wanted to bomb libya (as well as the UK) whils the US was a reluctant partner.

The US went for Syria/Assad leading the intervention and whilst France picked up it's involvement against ISIL & the like particularly after the Paris attacks it wasn't as big on it as Libya.

France was also eager to bomb Libya, that's true. But the US really didn't want to intervene in Syria at first.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-the-united-states-has...

> idea borrowed from the US. If that has failed, it’s due to a failure of integration.

Yeah, that sounds like 'blaming the victim'

This is not a magical solution where you bring people and the GDP magically increases

It works in the US due to a variety of factors, but I agree with you that being a bit less racist at the same time pushing them to success (read: sink or swim) helps. Oh and the US has much less tolerance for people who come with bad intent and deports a lot more

In a developed country, low-skilled labor will be a net negative even if well integrated. That's the definition of being below the average of the recipient country.

In the US, the immigrant labor does not stay low skilled for long or was never low skilled in the first place. See: tech company CEOs

I assume they were referring to seasonal farm worker types, who don’t seem to experience as much social mobility.

Evidence?

Evidence against: https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/mariel-impact.pdf

The evidence is math. Even if you have a flat rate and everyone in the population is equally benefitted with social services, there are 50% of people who are contributing less than they take and 50% who are contributing more than they take. That looks even worse when we relax the flax rate assumption (most countries have progressive taxation) and the amount of social benefits a given segment receives (poor people tend to cost more). The only way to counteract that is if those low-skilled workers can generate more wealth (in the form of GDP and taxation) than they are consuming from public service, which of course will depend from country to country (the ones that have a higher social welfare will require higher output to be produced by the low-skilled immigrant to make the costs neutral). But then they won't be low-skilled anymore, they will be median or high-skilled.

Edit: the paper you linked mention the effect over wages, not over tax revenue and spending.

Isn’t this assuming people stay in fixed “compartments” over their lifetime?

My experience with social safety nets in EU is that they have been there when I’ve needed them - when I was a poor student, when I was sick — and now that I’m in a different life phase I pay that forward

Your math makes sense at any given instant, but who is on what side changes if you view it over time

Take a look at net contribution to Danish welfare state over time. https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/print-e...

Danish are the highest contributors with Western immigrants close behind. Non western immigrants contribute a lot less and MENAPT (middle east, north africa, pakistan, and turkey) are doing even worse.

The immigrants will have children that will be better-acclimated and contribute more, no?

The graph includes the descendents.

I see, thanks.

Approximately how many generations of descendants are included? Is it possible that intaking non-western immigrants is an investment that will pay off in the future, but the payoff has not materialized yet?

> 50% of people who are contributing less than they take

Do you have a citation for that broad brush number for what they take?

I was modeling a ficticious society with a normally distributed income, flax taxation and equally distributed social benefits. In reality it's more skewed and fewer than 50% are net positive.

I’m curious - what would a citation give you? An authority you may trust or distrust? Do you not understand the dynamic he outlined?

> The evidence is math.

If there are 101 people, 100 making 101 sandwich per year and 1 doing nothing, and everyone needs 100 sandwiches per year, 99% are contributing more than they take. This works the other way too.

You are talking about economic output, and I agree it is very difficult for someone to be a net negative in this metric (someone would have to contribute almost nothing to the economy and take what they need to survive as donation). We are talking about a tax system with contributions and expenses. In this system, less than 50% are net contributors.

What are you talking about? The above system is 1% tax on everyone who makes something, and all expenses go to hit minimum 100 sandwiches for everyone. Clearly 99% are net contributors.

> everyone in the population is equally benefitted with social services

Already your argument is falling apart. Government spending goes disproportionately to children and the elderly who don't work. Workers, even low skill ones, are almost always a net positive.

Is there data on the average skill level of refugees?

are you assuming that all refugees entering the country are the bottom of the barrel?

I didn't say refugee. I said low-skilled labor.

Refugees tend to be low skill.

High-skilled labor often depends on low-skilled labor, though. If you want a chip factory, you'll first have to find someone to pour the concrete. There is no reason that being "below the average" has to imply being a net negative, both high-skilled and low-skilled labor are essential for a well-functioning economy.

The US’s secret sauce is that is an empire that can, will and does constantly project its massive military and clandestine power around the world to further its interests at all times, while never having to deal with any of its blowback. And then americans laugh at the EU welcoming refugees you created in the first place, or pretend the EU is socialist while laughing at its massive energy crisis caused by its completely batshit insane liberalized energy market. We are ruled by atlanticist neoliberals you put there in the first place.

This is nonsense. Blaming it on US policy is insanely narrow, and ignores years of colonial interest from almost every European nation.

I’d largely agree with that, though I originally meant the secret sauce that gets better results out of immigrants.

The effects of empire go far beyond military. The monetary dominance serves as a hidden tax on all other currencies as the US enjoys more money creation than other central banks can manage. The US prints and the world gets the inflation consequences. Plus the cultural dominance lets the US reshape the world economy, legal systems and behavior to suit the interests of US companies. And yes, there is massive political interference and an absolute fit when foreign governments don’t bend the knee.

Your big mistake here is to imply some kind of us vs them. Regular Americans are not laughing at you, they are under the same boot heel that you are. This whole system is for the benefit of maybe a few thousand or tens of thousands of incredibly rich and powerful people. They don’t care about the citizenship of of the people they are exploiting. Actually, people in the EU have done a better job fighting back for more comfortable lives for all. Working class Americans are a lost cause.

Pretty sure Europe's massive energy crisis is an own goal caused by replacing all their energy generation with Russian natgas.

The own goal was buying the gas in the first place!

Is that not what he just said? Surely a prime example is Germany shutting down nuclear and and bypassing Ukraine as a Russian natural gas hub woth Nord Stream 2. Whoops.

That was not the mistake. The mistake was not to put NS2 into operation due to pressure from the US, and now, cutting ties with Russia while you keep shutting down your nuclear.

> We are ruled by atlanticist neoliberals you put there in the first place.

And who exactly was running continental Europe before that?

pretty certain it's the germans that decided to use the russian gas

meanwhile the US was pretty upset about the idea

It was economical to buy the Russian gas delivered by pipeline. The US wanted to sell its more expensive LNG. And it ended up getting its wish after it supported a western aligned Ukraine and while no one wants to claim responsibility for blowing up nordstream, someone definitely blew it up and it helped cement the US as the gas supplier of Europe.

I think the message is clear that it’s best not to upset the US.

> It was economical to buy the Russian gas delivered by pipeline.

see I can understand this logic pre 2014, but post 2014 (i.e. Crimea), absolutely not

the euros paid to putin were used to re-arm and those weapons are now being used in Ukraine

and if he wins then Eastern Europe is next in line

but yes germans saved 2% on their gas bills for 10 years

>"and if he wins then Eastern Europe is next in line"

I doubt Putin is suicidal. Eastern Europe is in NATO, hence protected.

it'll never be so obvious that NATO can declare it as an attack

you've seen the playbook in ukraine twice now

there will be an russian speaking minority in estonia/lithuania/... that will that rebel against anti russian oppression, guerilla warfare against the authorities, then they'll hold an rigged referendum, then a decade later the Russian government will formally annex what they've effectively controlled for years

he won't send tanks across the border that will trigger Article 5

> that will that rebel against anti russian oppression

So you mean it's OK to oppress people just because they are Russian, or speak Russian? And the bad guys are those against oppression?

Eh but Wagner is not the Russian army, right? They are an "independent contractor" after all. And Russian speaking minorities may "suddenly" decide to rebel. And NATO may be not so eager to activate article 5 since they are not suicidal too.

Long story short I am not sure NATO Eastern Europe is protected 100%. Luckily for now Putin cannot afford another front but there is already some saber rattling between Belarus and Poland and Wagner is in Belarus.

It was economical for Germany to partner with Russia at the expense of Ukraine.

Do you really believe that the USA would commit an act of war against Russia to… sell Europe natural gas?

The US supplies weapons, training, intelligence and logistics to just one side in an active war. Clearly “act of war” is a line they’ve been dancing on for awhile.

And I don’t know who did the sabotage, and I don’t know if it was on the suggestion of the US, but the winner certainly seems to be the US which has very effectively pulled Germany away from Russia and Russian energy markets.

The US has been trying to sabotage German energy markets for a while:

https://gpil.jura.uni-bonn.de/2021/01/germany-rejects-u-s-sa...

It finally got its wish with the destruction of the NS2 ..

> We are ruled by atlanticist neoliberals you put there in the first place

You all created us. So, you all are technically responsible for your own problems. ;)

I don’t doubt the intention and I don’t blame those people either; if you work really hard and still live in poverty it’s only logical to move to a country where you can live reasonably on handouts. It’s just not sustainable.

The statistics are clear, these are just facts.

That's just untrue. Open door for refugees has always been motivated by humanitarian reasons by European rulers. Otherwise other immigrants would do just as fine or better.

> due to a failure of integration.

whose failure? Why are Europeans the default racists? The US is not even integrated and is going through large scale migration right now that has never happened before so the success of US integration is still too early to say. What does integration look like because the US has ethnic enclaves, everyone knows that.

It's absolutely right that the US promoted demographic change to Europe who followed along but the migrants lack the skills who arrive and I don't think this even solves the problem. It may exacerbate the demographic trap for various reasons.

European people aren't called racists as much as they are called deluded and self-righteous. The European govts were so confident of being in the right that they failed to counter the social changes happening in their own backyards, while lecturing other countries on their policies.

And by Europeans here, I mean the EU, the govt of some individual WE countries and a small minority of vocal activist personalities who haven't got any other purpose in life. Most run of the mill folks I meet are either strongly opposed or negatively indifferent to migrants, in direct opposition of their govts.

Most countries could have just said no to migrants, like Poland, Greece and Switzerland did. But they all wanted to play the self-righteous card.

I think you forget that many of the southern countries that did say no to immigrants (recognizing that most of those did not intend to stay in their countries but they ended up stuck with them when faced with more closed borders) pushed for a redistribution scheme. In fact when italy didn't have french backing for this they did what a few balkan countries had been doing and simply bussed migrants to the border which caused a quick reversal of stance.

Additionally many blame the likes of Merkel for the self righteous stance unaware of the fact that she (and her Dutch partners and such) had the greatest effect on building down inflow with an agreement she started brokering with turkey well before her famous comment. On the other hand fences and hard rhetoric in Hungary or the like did not visibly affect the numbers of incoming refugees.

The redistribution scheme was pushed by the Northern countries though. The southern countries would oppose the immigration, and redistribution was sort of the compromise the Northern countries wanted to keep the inflow of cheap labor.

The Turkish agreement is meaningless - if all of Europe had been vehemently opposed to importing immigrants, immigration would have stopped at the Turkish-Syrian border. Immigration did not happen because of the Syrian war - it was a constant trend. What opened the spigot was the fall of hard regimes in North Africa such as Libya, Tunisia and North Africa (something EU biggies like France, Netherlands, Germany supported because "dictators bad!"), which led to their own borders becoming much weakened.

Third, no immigrant wants to settle in Hungary because they're immigrants, not refugees. And as immigrants, they're simply choosing the country with the best welfare. There was even an article in 2016ish I read (I'm sure there are loads) where an interviewee said that he was taking his family from Greece all the way to Sweden because the welfare benefits were better.

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