Germany Fights Population Drop

I understand the motivation for this policy - to me the all-to-common idea that child-rearing age women are a liability is awful.

However, and its a big however, the law-of-unintended-consequences is going to come round to your house and set light to the sofa after nicking your TV.

Bullshit. "24h" child care simply means that you don't have to choose your job to fit the opening hours of your child care provider.

> I have a different proposal: pay employers for every child that a women employed with them has. So instead of being a liability, employers could earn money by encouraging their employees to have kids.

And of course there's not chance that will be abused...

After 5 years in the country you can file for permanent residency.

German politicians, in the past (60s,70s,80s), have brought in many worker-immigrants mainly from turkey. They were badly needed to fill the many vacant spots in the booming economy.

They left no thought to integrating / assimilating them into the german society. Up until the 1990s the political parties in germany could not even come to grips with the fact that germany was in fact an "immmigration country". They were in denial.

Today germany has 12-14% foreigners, mostly from turkey, and many of them have not been integrated well into the german society. Also, unemployment is high among this group. Education chances are depressed, etc - you get the picture.

Now, we are in a bind. On the one hand the birth rate has been dropping for decades. This has to do with societal trends (more women working, etc) - but is a complicated issue in itself.

Only group with a healthy birth rate, ironically, are the turkish immigrants.

Politicians do not have any idea what to do about the birthrate. That has to with a cultural memory of nazi-era family policies, which rewarded having many children. It's a taboo today in german politics to try to directly induce families to have more children in any way.

The german economy is already suffering. The term "fachkräftemangel" has been coined for this- which means the industry is already finding it difficult to fill all the vacant spots with qualified personell.

And if you get a salary above a certain threshold, you even qualify for a "Blue Card" that allows you to work anywhere in the EU !

This will yield down votes, but I'm an immigrant from the subcontinent and I understand what I'm talking about when I say this: it is vital to preserve western culture. Immigration done right can strengthen it and keep it vital, but done wrong it can dilute and corrupt the culture.

Germany is better than India or China or the Middle East or the other countries immigrants would come from. Full stop. Westerners don't appreciate the extent to which a lot of the bad things we perceive to characterize those countries is baked into their culture. Sexism, racism, corruption at the basest level. That will follow immigrants into Germany and take root there unless immigration is slow enough to acculturate the immigrants.

It's not only about giving the immigrant right to work, live, later vote in Germany. It's about absorbing them, making their life easier, and truly helping them to integrate into society. That's the effort that, right now, an immigrant has to make himself, but there's no much support from the state.

My own example, I came here on Blue Card. That was easy. Then, I had to wait for half a year before my wife and children could join me. Then we had to wait for another half year before my children could start with the kindergarten. Only after that, my wife could actually start going to language / integration course. All in all, a year wasted before we could even start integrating. In addition to that, my son will start school next year, and will have only one year at German kindergarten instead of two. That will severely impact his ability to actually attend school in a yet unlearned language.

What I want to say is that integration of immigrant is not easy, and there's much more that needs to be done. If you want them to integrate into the society, you should treat them much better, even better than citizen. Why? Because Germany needs them?

If it's not done properly, in 50 years there will be no more German way of life. Majority of the people will not know how to use "der", "die" and "das" properly and would not even care about that. Half of the German population will be made of non integrated immigrants, leaving in small communities of people with the same origin.

It's a balancing act for sure. Previously, most western countries enjoyed a population growth, which meant more workers paying in than taking out, as this trend is reversing in nearly all western countries, it will be interesting to see how each country deals with it. In the U.S. the focus is on immigration and putting additional limits on what one can take out of the system - I'm not entirely sure that this is the right response, but I don't think simply ratcheting costs up on tomorrow's workers is the right answer either.

As to robotics, well, that's a whole 'nother basket to deal with. I don't think that expanding robotics automatically creates worker revolts - if done well, it can create opportunities where they didn't exist before. Where once the only low-skilled jobs available were heavy labor and highly fungible services, we could create whole new classes of jobs relating to less fungible services (e.g. hyper-localized services), and with the possibilities of expansion off of the planet - there will be many opportunities for new work. I do believe that robotics will reach the tipping point right around the time that space exploration truly opens up. If it doesn't, my prediction that most employment will be in the armies of nations - as we fight over dwindling resources.

But I wouldn’t suggest moving here permanently without knowing, or at least planning to learn, some German. After all, it’s a nice language with a decent amount of original content and if English is your native language probably one of the easier ones to learn.

*I say this as someone learning through Duolingo at the moment.

Though I have to admit it's not a pretty sight when a Russian programmer is having a disagreement with a German project manager and both rely on mediocre English skills. The problem is not so much with direct miscommunication as with the inability to express more complex thoughts.

However in many such companies employees might speak English with foreigner colleagues only for work related issues, leaving them alone for about anything else. Meaning little social interaction besides work requests.

Being invited for lunch while most of the table speaks German can be a common scenario, for example.

For an acceptable social life in Germany, having at least a basic grasp of German is a must have, specially outside big cities.

Could you define "overpopulation" or cite sources that show this is a problem in the United States?

While the population has risen more than 50 million people in the last 60 years (1), housing stock, food output, and economic activity, has also risen. In addition, while there are many urban and suburban areas that are more crowded now than they were in the mid-20th century, there are also thousands of small towns and cities that began losing residents long ago (2).

1. http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=kf7tgg1uo9ude_&c...

2. http://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/04/us/dying-rural-towns-play-...

Immigration is probably a major feat of beaurocracy but not too hard in principle if you have looked-for skills ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Card_%28European_Union%29 ).