[wisethrowaway]

"We need immigration;"

No, we don't. This is a mantra that keeps being repeated without much substance.

Housing affordability, job quality, public finance sustainability won't get any better with immigration. Maybe salaries keep being depressed, consumer demand increases, and that's good for profits. But I can't think of much more!

[tluyben2]

We are not making enough babies in the EU ourselves to take care of the elderly... so yes we do. Or we need some other revolution that does not depend on work per hour. We already here are doing our best, not really successfully, to get the ultra rich to chime in and to get foreign companies to pay more than peanuts. Also the AI overlords are, in all practical ways, very far away (and mostly benefitting the very rich).

[adventured]

> We are not making enough babies in the EU ourselves to take care of the elderly... so yes we do [need immigration].

Amazing.

That's right up there - identical premise - with the ever popular HN refrain: but who will pick the strawberries if not for the immigrants. Inevitably stated in most every thread on immigration.

Philosophically it's perfectly aligned with the big business types that also want cheap labor for exactly the same reasons: more people to take advantage of, more people to cast into cheap labor roles of servitude to the aging/dying/lazy/entitled affluent classes.

But how will we prop up our collapsing entitlement systems, which were poorly managed and poorly funded and poorly thought out, if we don't import massive volumes of labor to pay taxes so the entitled classes can pretend their system isn't failing and so those immigrants themselves can get screwed later on when the entitlement systems they're brought in to prop up are bled dry.

[joelbluminator]

> We are not making enough babies in the EU ourselves to take care of the elderly

Any source for that? Is that what this is all about - cos I'm sure we can pay more for caregivers and more people will want these jobs. The problem is it doesn't pay well.

[luckylion]

The problem is that (the current form of) immigration doesn't solve that issue. I'm not intimately familiar with other countries, but Germany has very high unemployment among immigrants. At the same time, they need resources, and when they age, they're going to need to be taken care of as well.

That increases the problem and puts more load on the systems that are strained to begin with. That would look totally different if it was a different group of immigrants, but we have to look at reality, not a theoretical ideal.

[ahefner]

> We are not making enough babies in the EU ourselves...

Don't you think this is the real problem that needs to be addressed? If your society cannot sustain itself, it will be replaced.

[wisethrowaway]

I don't think it's a major issue to take care of the elderly. If anything we need to take care of the young!

Pensions are very high in Europe, salaries stagnant, the elderly are property owners while the young are not.

Enough of cheap fallacies!