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Comment by jessedhillon | Hacker News Reader

Encourage immigration from poorer countries with younger workers.

The ever popular pro business (multi-national mega corp flavor) type solution: turn your country into a hell hole, and we'll make it a better hell hole, we promise!

Like another poster astutely put: create an underclass, and diminish their country's cultural heritage.

We must keep ze culture pure for ze motherland!

Really, do immigrants diminish a country's cultural heritage, or enrich it?

Freezing culture in stone sounds like a great idea for stagnation.

> "and diminish their country's cultural heritage"

Woah woah woah. Careful there, this line of argument has been used in the past.

Ditto with a previous mention of immigration making the country "less Japanese", which has shades of certain groups making a certain country "less German".

Point taken. But don't they have a right to restrict immigration enough to enable some assimilation of the immigrants, rather than feeling overrun?

They have the right to. Is it a good idea for the long-term though? If the issue is that the birthrate is too low and the deficit you need to make up is, say, 300,000 people per year, then the numbers say you need to let in 300,000 people per year, which may be far above what a xenophobic society can assimilate (I feel like we're talking about Master of Orion 2 here btw :P)

This is Japan we are talking about. One of the most xenophobic societies that exist today. Encouraging immigration is equal to political suicide.

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