7 ms·

The article is a nicely illustrated analysis of the issues (migration policy) driving the increase.

anovikov 3y ago
What's wrong about migration policy? I am probably a fairly far-right person, or at least on the extreme right as far as programmers go, but what can be changed in migration policy to which will improve things without completely undermining the future of Europe? We have experienced demographic change. Our birth rates do not, and never will, provide for support of our population numbers. We need immigration or we will live through "Japanisation" - with almost none of our cultures being as tight and homogenous from the beginning to do it as nicely as Japanese. The need for mass immigration - not only of qualified employees, but simply of "bodies" in numbers - is a fact. No amount of far-right wordplay can change that.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Simon_O_Rourke 3y ago
  [flagged]
- jdthedisciple 3y ago
  > Our birth rates do not, and never will, provide for support of our population numbers How about stop propagandizing against the family unit and children in the name of climate protection and freedom for starters? (This is obv directed at the German Political Landscape (minus AfD), not you personally)
  - anovikov 3y ago
    It can't and won't help them. Unless you physically deprive women of rights and let them be married off against their will and others control their fertility, as it was in the "good old days" when the birth rate was sufficient. It never worked in any country. Even in those with, to say the least, highly questionable human rights record and complete control of government over mass media: see China. Or with those with ample resources and willingness to spend them towards this goal: see Sweden. Women are not having lots of children not because some evil forces are telling them not to, but simply because they can. They never wanted to procreate in "sufficient" numbers, they just didn't have a choice then. If we go as far as to deprive them of that choice, we will completely cancel everything we know as a civilised society - and also fail, because a huge emigration wave will ensue, and if we try to ban emigration, we will quickly fail into economic, technological and cultural irrelevance. It's a choice between being Japan (controlled, predictable dieoff, slow but certain death), being Iran (nice population growth but...), and being America. To me it sounds like a no-brainer which one of the evils to choose.
    - jdthedisciple 3y ago
      The happiest women are married women. The happiest among them are those with children. Don't take my word for it, just look it up yourself, too tired to pull up the dozens of studies for you. Clearly women want to have children. Nobody needs to force them to. But rather, society is (indirectly) forcing them NOT to have them. No need to deny human nature. Your caricature of a society that has children is complete and utter fantasy which has no bearing on real life. It is a product of aforementioned propaganda.
      - hnhg 3y ago
        There is perhaps a survivorship bias in those studies, since divorce is so easy now, only people who are happy in marriage remain. i.e. reported happiness in marriage increases while everyone unhappy simply divorces and so the numbers would get swayed that way. Divorce rates have rocketed and women are very likely to leave marriages these days in many countries. So you end up with a tiny happy cohort that has no bearing on the wider population. So you should produce your sources to see how this is accounted for, ideally.
      - rtz121 3y ago
        The problem with this is that women are of course happy when they have children, they love their children after all (father do too of course). But you don't love potential future unborn children do you? Before having children they are a burden and a detriment to your lifestyle. After having them they are the best thing that could have happened to you.
      - orwin 3y ago
        And happiness is higher in countries with high divorce rates. Figures.
      - HDThoreaun 3y ago
        This could just as easily mean that people who are happy have more kids, not that having kids makes you happy.
        3y ago
  - hnhg 3y ago
    Have you seen the price and dearth of family housing these days? Why would you would think that propaganda is the main cause when just the economics are prohibitive?
  - haizhung 3y ago
    Who is propagandizing „against the family unit“ and „in the name of climate protection“? What are you talking about?
    - friend_and_foe 3y ago
      What he's saying is incentives in these countries are just not aligned to creation of families and rearing of children. And it's true, when you expect women to go to school til they're 25, a home requires two incomes and then some, everything is taxed to the breaking point, and birth control is ubiquitously available, you can expect a decline in fertility to the point that you eventually have a demographic crisis. Our countries resolve this by importing people from countries with more people than they can handle, but if you look at the situation globally, as countries become richer this appears to happen universally. It's a matter of 100 years until we can't play this population shuffling game anymore and we will experience a global fertility and demographic crisis. And what's more, it appears that it is unavoidable and it's not clear if humanity will stabilize to a population level or if these fluctuations are inevitable. See https://fractalfoundation.org/OFC/OFC-6-1.html https://fractalfoundation.org/OFC/OFC-6-1.html
  - rtz121 3y ago
    I am not sure of thats really going to work. Another commenter here said it quite well. If you have the "choice" to have kids whenever you like, then you don't have kids because they are always inconvenient. And the time window for women is a lot smaller than they themselves often like to admit. The highest birth rates in Europe you always find in the "bible belts", in places where contraception is religiously prohibited.
    - jdthedisciple 3y ago
      > because they are always inconvenient This strange obsession with materialism is what lead to kids being considered "inconvenient". Rather, materialism is and should be considered inconvenient when it comes to what really matters in life (children). That's the root of the issue.
      - rtz121 3y ago
        > Rather, materialism is and should be considered inconvenient when it comes to what really matters in life (children). The problematic part is that most people only understand this after they have children.
        anovikov 3y ago
        About half of women never understand it having or not having children. They don't want to admit it because it's a shame to regret one's own children, but many of them do. Vast majority of men never understand it (mostly because they are married off before they want it, if they married at appropriate age i.e. 45-50, they'd be ok with it, but this is not what women want, they want to take men before they understand they don't want it). Key is choice. People are not having kids for one stupid simple reason - because they can. This is why the problem is just the same in every civilisation or culture, it is not at all confined to "Western", "Christian", "Liberal" or "Rich" world. It's everywhere without exception, maybe (hopefully) except Israel. Because Haredim don't give their women a choice.
      - caeril 3y ago
        Materialism has long been a driver of human behavior, and children are no exception. The only thing that's changed is the migration of children from net capital assets for the family to net cost centers. The same thing has happened to animals. What used to be productive workers on the farm are now wholly decadent useless eaters, earning their keep only by being adorable. Imagine how the calculus of couples saying "we can't afford children" would change if little Timmy could start defraying his own costs in only eight years by doing some basic bookkeeping, junior development tasks, running errands, cooking, personal assistant work, etc for the family. And then becoming a net capital asset from 12 to 20. That's how it was for most of human history, just with slightly less modern tasks.
- no_time 3y ago
  I'd rather have my country die out naturally and peacefully than to have anything a "multicultural" society has to offer.
  - meowface 3y ago
    True. Who would ever want to live in the US, with their abysmal GDP and lack of innovation. The US is a prime example that people of multiple cultures or ethnicities can't even be in the same city, let alone the same corporation or government.
    - locopati 3y ago
      Have you been to NYC? Take your racism elsewhere.
      - porkbeer 3y ago
        Nyc is hardly representative of america, thank god. And plenty of racisim and inability to adapt by a few cultures endemic to the area. Take your accusations of racism elsewhere.
      - meowface 3y ago
        I think you misunderstood my post.
    - no_time 3y ago
      >True. Who would ever want to live in the US, with their abysmal GDP and lack of innovation. Not me for sure. If your utmost measure of value in life is GDP, then I feel like we won't understand each other. Worst part is I can't escape this mindset here, thanks to US billionaires generously bankrolling "NGO's","think tanks" and "independent news outlets"
    - Ekaros 3y ago
      It is pretty clear that immigration ruined Americas. Just look at the outcome for them, it is absolutely horrid.
    - 3y ago
- veavo 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - meowface 3y ago
    And if that immigrant is more merited than the unemployed native? (Meritocracy for me, not for thee.)
    - jdthedisciple 3y ago
      To your typical immigration-advocates, this very argument would never hold up in the context of unequal employment chances between men and women. Classic leftist hypocrisy.
      - meowface 3y ago
        Classic "well someone else who holds the position you espoused probably believes [X] (because I say so) therefore you're a hypocrite".
  - Zardoz84 3y ago
    perhaps the real problem really is those who are paying depressed wages to desperate people.
- stormfather 3y ago
  > Our birth rates do not, and never will, provide for support of our population numbers. Extinction. What a strange thing to resign oneself to.
- locopati 3y ago
  Why is change bad? Strong institutions enable rights, yes? For all people, yes?
- fit2rule 3y ago
  [dead]
- wsc981 3y ago
  > I am probably a fairly far-right person, or at least on the extreme right as far as programmers go In what way are you far right though? Based on what I read here (pro mass-immigration regardless of skill, against the family unit) I would classify you as far left.
  - jemmyw 3y ago
    Perhaps they favour small government and low regulations and taxes? The problem with left/right is that there are several axes of policy you can be on. Old school left can be socially conservative which is why a lot of left leaning people seemed to veer right. Free market + socially liberal folk that were previously right are now seen to be more central as the political gravity moves around.
  - anovikov 3y ago
    I support gun rights (but also abortion rights), support criminalisation of homelessness, and support border walls/some other "hard" ways of regulating migration (simply put, illegal immigration should be punished severely enough to make people even from the most rundown places too scared to try). I don't think "asylum seekers" should exist (and government should be hard - "one bullet each" hard - with those trying to sneak in), unless it is in the interest of the country to invite them (e.g. Ukrainian refugees). "Choose your refugee" policy. I think it makes me pretty much right. And no i am not at all against family unit. I only accept the objective fact that sustaining population through natural procreation is no longer possible in any halfway advanced society and that measures should be taken to do it otherwise. Anything that gives a chance of doing it through natural procreation will go way beyond acceptable for any Western political entity, no matter far left or far right. A simple proof to that is that it doesn't happen in any rich country anymore - except Israel because of a large chunk of their people bent on religion a lot more than any other free country could accept. Most people who criticise immigration, housing or other policies in the view of demography, usually have their perception confined to one particular country and come to logical conclusion: "things are bad and getting worse and politicians seem to be moving them even further into wrong direction". If they looked at the world at whole they'd stop blaming their politicians, because same shit happens everywhere - and it is in fact mildest in Western, rich, Protestant, liberal countries.
- schroeding 3y ago
  For some people I know, the thought of more (mass) migration is negative because they think it will aggravate existing problems in other areas like a low wages (especially in low skill labour due to increased competition) or the FUBAR housing market in some cities (again, due to increased competition on an already strained market). For the last part they're definitely right, IMO, and german politics must find a way to solve the housing problem in big cities. The government must find a way to break the "migrants take away part of your cake" narrative, and this is only possible by increasing the size of the cake. In this case, we need to aggressively build (and incentivize to build) more housing. We're doing the opposite at the moment, if the german construction industry is to be believed, which is very very bad. Building a house became insanly expensive in the last 20 years, especially in the areas where it is needed most. Redistribution by moving senior tenants in big cities to suburban or rural areas will not solve the shortage, neither will "just go to rural east germany, there's enough housing". We have to solve these problems and prevent the formation of zero-sum games where migrants are seen as (external) competitors, stat - it'll be an existential social question and a threat to the country (and the long-term perspective of migrants) if we do not, IMO.
  - mytailorisrich 3y ago
    A big issue with immigration in Europe is not about economics but about identity, society, and culture. This is caused by too many people coming in from vastly different cultures. And so there is nothing wrong with being in favour of vastly reduced immigration numbers. Your take is to accept high immigration numbers as an unavoidable fact and therefore to only look at how to deal with them, and still only in terms of economics.
    - lordnacho 3y ago
      This is the elephant in the room. I have two overlapping observations. - The big one is Islam. Islam seems to be the only religion in modern times that is actually religious. The only religion that can muster up people to actually get really angry about defending it. It's also the only religion the locals are actually scared of in any meaningful way. - Color. If you have a bunch of local-looking kids meeting up at the mall, nobody thinks anything of it. Get a bunch of brown kids, and people get scared. Walk around as a typical Polish person, nobody will think anything of it. Walk around while brown and people are alerted to the presence of someone who needs to explain themselves. This isn't always mean-spirited and aggressive, but if you're not white you will constantly be asked by curious people how on earth you ended up walking around Copenhagen. "Where are you really from?". Put these together and many people constantly see that there's a pernicious foreign influence on their society. They feel it's visible, even though probably a lot of the brown folks aren't even religious.
- friend_and_foe 3y ago
  Nothing, but that doesn't stop people from not liking it. Turns out, when women have the option to turn off their reproductive capacity, people opt for "hmmm nows not a good time I think I'll do it later" often enough that the population goes extinct. It's never a good time to have kids. That's why evolution ensured we don't have a choice, made us irrationally horny and ensured that it happened by accident. But people still see the drastic change within a single generation and don't like it. And you can't blame them, if you started settling white people in some African country by the million a year you can very much expect the same from the people who already live there. They'd call it colonialism. And they'd be right, and if they were facing a fertility rate crisis like the west is they'd be screwing themselves over, but you still wouldn't be able to convince them that they have to do it.
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    People have many kids when their life is unstable. That's why improving quality of life across the world is how it balances out?
    - friend_and_foe 3y ago
      I don't know that the cause of reduced fertility is prosperity. It might even be the other way around: as population growth decreases people have more because less people to split the wealth with. Our father's dug the gold from the ground and only had 1 child between them. It's probably a bit of both, when you're prosperous you have more to lose by feeding hungry babies. But it most certainly doesn't balance out. Either a population grows or it shrinks, when a population grows it can produce more but there are more to feed, when it shrinks it ages, at first you have prosperity from that but eventually you wind up poor and old.
  - pseudo0 3y ago
    > Turns out, when women have the option to turn off their reproductive capacity, people opt for "hmmm nows not a good time I think I'll do it later" often enough that the population goes extinct. Or we have a society and an economic system designed to push women into the workforce and makes having children an expensive luxury good? That is a policy decision that can be changed. If it were economically beneficial for a woman to have two to four kids instead of grinding 40-50 hour weeks in the office, a lot of women would reevaluate their choices. And it's much better for us to figure out a sustainable solution now than to wait a generation or two for the world to have a general fertility crisis. Right now it is localized to first-world countries, so we have some time to figure out a solution before things get really dire.
- hdjjhhvvhga 3y ago
  The crux of the matter is from where these "bodies" will arrive. There are relatively few problems with immigrants from Vietnam or Ukraine. They don't feel entitled and work hard. There are others, however, who just create problems. That's all.
- rtz121 3y ago
  Kinda weird to consider yourself "far-right" and be in favor of mass replacement migration in the same sentence.
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    Left/right is too simplistic, I am fairly left on many issues but I think making it so that people don't need to migrate is better than allowing unlimited migration which is not a good long term solution...
  - pandaman 3y ago
    This is not weird at all if you ever tried to argue with the Left, making blatantly obvious false statements is their way to bait you into arguing semantics and accept the main narrative. E.g. in this case many went after the semantics of the "far-right" and not on the main claim of "birth rates can never recover".
    - rtz121 3y ago
      I interacted with that guy in another comment and well... You are probably right, even though you are getting downvoted.
- kozzz 3y ago
  [flagged]

What's wrong about migration policy? I am probably a fairly far-right person, or at least on the extreme right as far as programmers go, but what can be changed in migration policy to which will improve things without completely undermining the future of Europe? We have experienced demographic change. Our birth rates do not, and never will, provide for support of our population numbers. We need immigration or we will live through "Japanisation" - with almost none of our cultures being as tight and homogenous from the beginning to do it as nicely as Japanese. The need for mass immigration - not only of qualified employees, but simply of "bodies" in numbers - is a fact. No amount of far-right wordplay can change that.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Simon_O_Rourke 3y ago
[flagged]
jdthedisciple 3y ago
> Our birth rates do not, and never will, provide for support of our population numbers How about stop propagandizing against the family unit and children in the name of climate protection and freedom for starters? (This is obv directed at the German Political Landscape (minus AfD), not you personally)
- anovikov 3y ago
  It can't and won't help them. Unless you physically deprive women of rights and let them be married off against their will and others control their fertility, as it was in the "good old days" when the birth rate was sufficient. It never worked in any country. Even in those with, to say the least, highly questionable human rights record and complete control of government over mass media: see China. Or with those with ample resources and willingness to spend them towards this goal: see Sweden. Women are not having lots of children not because some evil forces are telling them not to, but simply because they can. They never wanted to procreate in "sufficient" numbers, they just didn't have a choice then. If we go as far as to deprive them of that choice, we will completely cancel everything we know as a civilised society - and also fail, because a huge emigration wave will ensue, and if we try to ban emigration, we will quickly fail into economic, technological and cultural irrelevance. It's a choice between being Japan (controlled, predictable dieoff, slow but certain death), being Iran (nice population growth but...), and being America. To me it sounds like a no-brainer which one of the evils to choose.
  - jdthedisciple 3y ago
    The happiest women are married women. The happiest among them are those with children. Don't take my word for it, just look it up yourself, too tired to pull up the dozens of studies for you. Clearly women want to have children. Nobody needs to force them to. But rather, society is (indirectly) forcing them NOT to have them. No need to deny human nature. Your caricature of a society that has children is complete and utter fantasy which has no bearing on real life. It is a product of aforementioned propaganda.
    - hnhg 3y ago
      There is perhaps a survivorship bias in those studies, since divorce is so easy now, only people who are happy in marriage remain. i.e. reported happiness in marriage increases while everyone unhappy simply divorces and so the numbers would get swayed that way. Divorce rates have rocketed and women are very likely to leave marriages these days in many countries. So you end up with a tiny happy cohort that has no bearing on the wider population. So you should produce your sources to see how this is accounted for, ideally.
    - rtz121 3y ago
      The problem with this is that women are of course happy when they have children, they love their children after all (father do too of course). But you don't love potential future unborn children do you? Before having children they are a burden and a detriment to your lifestyle. After having them they are the best thing that could have happened to you.
    - orwin 3y ago
      And happiness is higher in countries with high divorce rates. Figures.
    - HDThoreaun 3y ago
      This could just as easily mean that people who are happy have more kids, not that having kids makes you happy.
      - 3y ago
- hnhg 3y ago
  Have you seen the price and dearth of family housing these days? Why would you would think that propaganda is the main cause when just the economics are prohibitive?
- haizhung 3y ago
  Who is propagandizing „against the family unit“ and „in the name of climate protection“? What are you talking about?
  - friend_and_foe 3y ago
    What he's saying is incentives in these countries are just not aligned to creation of families and rearing of children. And it's true, when you expect women to go to school til they're 25, a home requires two incomes and then some, everything is taxed to the breaking point, and birth control is ubiquitously available, you can expect a decline in fertility to the point that you eventually have a demographic crisis. Our countries resolve this by importing people from countries with more people than they can handle, but if you look at the situation globally, as countries become richer this appears to happen universally. It's a matter of 100 years until we can't play this population shuffling game anymore and we will experience a global fertility and demographic crisis. And what's more, it appears that it is unavoidable and it's not clear if humanity will stabilize to a population level or if these fluctuations are inevitable. See https://fractalfoundation.org/OFC/OFC-6-1.html https://fractalfoundation.org/OFC/OFC-6-1.html
- rtz121 3y ago
  I am not sure of thats really going to work. Another commenter here said it quite well. If you have the "choice" to have kids whenever you like, then you don't have kids because they are always inconvenient. And the time window for women is a lot smaller than they themselves often like to admit. The highest birth rates in Europe you always find in the "bible belts", in places where contraception is religiously prohibited.
  - jdthedisciple 3y ago
    > because they are always inconvenient This strange obsession with materialism is what lead to kids being considered "inconvenient". Rather, materialism is and should be considered inconvenient when it comes to what really matters in life (children). That's the root of the issue.
    - rtz121 3y ago
      > Rather, materialism is and should be considered inconvenient when it comes to what really matters in life (children). The problematic part is that most people only understand this after they have children.
      - anovikov 3y ago
        About half of women never understand it having or not having children. They don't want to admit it because it's a shame to regret one's own children, but many of them do. Vast majority of men never understand it (mostly because they are married off before they want it, if they married at appropriate age i.e. 45-50, they'd be ok with it, but this is not what women want, they want to take men before they understand they don't want it). Key is choice. People are not having kids for one stupid simple reason - because they can. This is why the problem is just the same in every civilisation or culture, it is not at all confined to "Western", "Christian", "Liberal" or "Rich" world. It's everywhere without exception, maybe (hopefully) except Israel. Because Haredim don't give their women a choice.
    - caeril 3y ago
      Materialism has long been a driver of human behavior, and children are no exception. The only thing that's changed is the migration of children from net capital assets for the family to net cost centers. The same thing has happened to animals. What used to be productive workers on the farm are now wholly decadent useless eaters, earning their keep only by being adorable. Imagine how the calculus of couples saying "we can't afford children" would change if little Timmy could start defraying his own costs in only eight years by doing some basic bookkeeping, junior development tasks, running errands, cooking, personal assistant work, etc for the family. And then becoming a net capital asset from 12 to 20. That's how it was for most of human history, just with slightly less modern tasks.
no_time 3y ago
I'd rather have my country die out naturally and peacefully than to have anything a "multicultural" society has to offer.
- meowface 3y ago
  True. Who would ever want to live in the US, with their abysmal GDP and lack of innovation. The US is a prime example that people of multiple cultures or ethnicities can't even be in the same city, let alone the same corporation or government.
  - locopati 3y ago
    Have you been to NYC? Take your racism elsewhere.
    - porkbeer 3y ago
      Nyc is hardly representative of america, thank god. And plenty of racisim and inability to adapt by a few cultures endemic to the area. Take your accusations of racism elsewhere.
    - meowface 3y ago
      I think you misunderstood my post.
  - no_time 3y ago
    >True. Who would ever want to live in the US, with their abysmal GDP and lack of innovation. Not me for sure. If your utmost measure of value in life is GDP, then I feel like we won't understand each other. Worst part is I can't escape this mindset here, thanks to US billionaires generously bankrolling "NGO's","think tanks" and "independent news outlets"
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    It is pretty clear that immigration ruined Americas. Just look at the outcome for them, it is absolutely horrid.
  - 3y ago
veavo 3y ago
[flagged]
- meowface 3y ago
  And if that immigrant is more merited than the unemployed native? (Meritocracy for me, not for thee.)
  - jdthedisciple 3y ago
    To your typical immigration-advocates, this very argument would never hold up in the context of unequal employment chances between men and women. Classic leftist hypocrisy.
    - meowface 3y ago
      Classic "well someone else who holds the position you espoused probably believes [X] (because I say so) therefore you're a hypocrite".
- Zardoz84 3y ago
  perhaps the real problem really is those who are paying depressed wages to desperate people.
stormfather 3y ago
> Our birth rates do not, and never will, provide for support of our population numbers. Extinction. What a strange thing to resign oneself to.
locopati 3y ago
Why is change bad? Strong institutions enable rights, yes? For all people, yes?
fit2rule 3y ago
[dead]
wsc981 3y ago
> I am probably a fairly far-right person, or at least on the extreme right as far as programmers go In what way are you far right though? Based on what I read here (pro mass-immigration regardless of skill, against the family unit) I would classify you as far left.
- jemmyw 3y ago
  Perhaps they favour small government and low regulations and taxes? The problem with left/right is that there are several axes of policy you can be on. Old school left can be socially conservative which is why a lot of left leaning people seemed to veer right. Free market + socially liberal folk that were previously right are now seen to be more central as the political gravity moves around.
- anovikov 3y ago
  I support gun rights (but also abortion rights), support criminalisation of homelessness, and support border walls/some other "hard" ways of regulating migration (simply put, illegal immigration should be punished severely enough to make people even from the most rundown places too scared to try). I don't think "asylum seekers" should exist (and government should be hard - "one bullet each" hard - with those trying to sneak in), unless it is in the interest of the country to invite them (e.g. Ukrainian refugees). "Choose your refugee" policy. I think it makes me pretty much right. And no i am not at all against family unit. I only accept the objective fact that sustaining population through natural procreation is no longer possible in any halfway advanced society and that measures should be taken to do it otherwise. Anything that gives a chance of doing it through natural procreation will go way beyond acceptable for any Western political entity, no matter far left or far right. A simple proof to that is that it doesn't happen in any rich country anymore - except Israel because of a large chunk of their people bent on religion a lot more than any other free country could accept. Most people who criticise immigration, housing or other policies in the view of demography, usually have their perception confined to one particular country and come to logical conclusion: "things are bad and getting worse and politicians seem to be moving them even further into wrong direction". If they looked at the world at whole they'd stop blaming their politicians, because same shit happens everywhere - and it is in fact mildest in Western, rich, Protestant, liberal countries.
schroeding 3y ago
For some people I know, the thought of more (mass) migration is negative because they think it will aggravate existing problems in other areas like a low wages (especially in low skill labour due to increased competition) or the FUBAR housing market in some cities (again, due to increased competition on an already strained market). For the last part they're definitely right, IMO, and german politics must find a way to solve the housing problem in big cities. The government must find a way to break the "migrants take away part of your cake" narrative, and this is only possible by increasing the size of the cake. In this case, we need to aggressively build (and incentivize to build) more housing. We're doing the opposite at the moment, if the german construction industry is to be believed, which is very very bad. Building a house became insanly expensive in the last 20 years, especially in the areas where it is needed most. Redistribution by moving senior tenants in big cities to suburban or rural areas will not solve the shortage, neither will "just go to rural east germany, there's enough housing". We have to solve these problems and prevent the formation of zero-sum games where migrants are seen as (external) competitors, stat - it'll be an existential social question and a threat to the country (and the long-term perspective of migrants) if we do not, IMO.
- mytailorisrich 3y ago
  A big issue with immigration in Europe is not about economics but about identity, society, and culture. This is caused by too many people coming in from vastly different cultures. And so there is nothing wrong with being in favour of vastly reduced immigration numbers. Your take is to accept high immigration numbers as an unavoidable fact and therefore to only look at how to deal with them, and still only in terms of economics.
  - lordnacho 3y ago
    This is the elephant in the room. I have two overlapping observations. - The big one is Islam. Islam seems to be the only religion in modern times that is actually religious. The only religion that can muster up people to actually get really angry about defending it. It's also the only religion the locals are actually scared of in any meaningful way. - Color. If you have a bunch of local-looking kids meeting up at the mall, nobody thinks anything of it. Get a bunch of brown kids, and people get scared. Walk around as a typical Polish person, nobody will think anything of it. Walk around while brown and people are alerted to the presence of someone who needs to explain themselves. This isn't always mean-spirited and aggressive, but if you're not white you will constantly be asked by curious people how on earth you ended up walking around Copenhagen. "Where are you really from?". Put these together and many people constantly see that there's a pernicious foreign influence on their society. They feel it's visible, even though probably a lot of the brown folks aren't even religious.
friend_and_foe 3y ago
Nothing, but that doesn't stop people from not liking it. Turns out, when women have the option to turn off their reproductive capacity, people opt for "hmmm nows not a good time I think I'll do it later" often enough that the population goes extinct. It's never a good time to have kids. That's why evolution ensured we don't have a choice, made us irrationally horny and ensured that it happened by accident. But people still see the drastic change within a single generation and don't like it. And you can't blame them, if you started settling white people in some African country by the million a year you can very much expect the same from the people who already live there. They'd call it colonialism. And they'd be right, and if they were facing a fertility rate crisis like the west is they'd be screwing themselves over, but you still wouldn't be able to convince them that they have to do it.
- throwaway290 3y ago
  People have many kids when their life is unstable. That's why improving quality of life across the world is how it balances out?
  - friend_and_foe 3y ago
    I don't know that the cause of reduced fertility is prosperity. It might even be the other way around: as population growth decreases people have more because less people to split the wealth with. Our father's dug the gold from the ground and only had 1 child between them. It's probably a bit of both, when you're prosperous you have more to lose by feeding hungry babies. But it most certainly doesn't balance out. Either a population grows or it shrinks, when a population grows it can produce more but there are more to feed, when it shrinks it ages, at first you have prosperity from that but eventually you wind up poor and old.
- pseudo0 3y ago
  > Turns out, when women have the option to turn off their reproductive capacity, people opt for "hmmm nows not a good time I think I'll do it later" often enough that the population goes extinct. Or we have a society and an economic system designed to push women into the workforce and makes having children an expensive luxury good? That is a policy decision that can be changed. If it were economically beneficial for a woman to have two to four kids instead of grinding 40-50 hour weeks in the office, a lot of women would reevaluate their choices. And it's much better for us to figure out a sustainable solution now than to wait a generation or two for the world to have a general fertility crisis. Right now it is localized to first-world countries, so we have some time to figure out a solution before things get really dire.
hdjjhhvvhga 3y ago
The crux of the matter is from where these "bodies" will arrive. There are relatively few problems with immigrants from Vietnam or Ukraine. They don't feel entitled and work hard. There are others, however, who just create problems. That's all.
rtz121 3y ago
Kinda weird to consider yourself "far-right" and be in favor of mass replacement migration in the same sentence.
- throwaway290 3y ago
  Left/right is too simplistic, I am fairly left on many issues but I think making it so that people don't need to migrate is better than allowing unlimited migration which is not a good long term solution...
- pandaman 3y ago
  This is not weird at all if you ever tried to argue with the Left, making blatantly obvious false statements is their way to bait you into arguing semantics and accept the main narrative. E.g. in this case many went after the semantics of the "far-right" and not on the main claim of "birth rates can never recover".
  - rtz121 3y ago
    I interacted with that guy in another comment and well... You are probably right, even though you are getting downvoted.
kozzz 3y ago
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