World News

and investing in the young

We are afraid of immigration because there is so few housing that bringing people will just add to the pressure and make rents even more ridiculously expensive . Also, in my country (Portugal), these workers accept working for less and live in miserable conditions (overcrowded homes, tents outside of Lisbon, etc), making it worse for everyone else, causing an exodus of qualified people and a flood of “tourism workers” because salaries just not increase when there are people accepting to work for less.

Meanwhile our public services are collapsing left and right because qualified people just leave and there are so many new people trying to access public healthcare etc.

This is not the black and white immigration is good/bad you are making it out to be .

I'm not against immigration but it's no solution. You're in Europe. You're trying to replace a workforce that has free education, in a place with high quality education infrastructure, therefore most of them have bachelors and probably at least one or more masters degrees, with essentially illiterate (and i mean this with all due respect) people from a completely different culture who are not prepared to do anything remotely useful for at least 10 years, probably more.

I've literally had migrant refugees from Lebanon, Somalia, Eritrea, Morocco and such as flatmates in Brussels. Some of them are my close friends. They are not remotely prepared to take over 90% of European jobs. You either need social skills, labor skills, language skills or technical skills which they simply do not have. If i was in their shoes, it would take me decades to catch up to how Europeans work.

The migrants come here for what ? Uber eats ? How are they supposed to support themselves ? With government integration money we don't have available ? But say we figure it out and they live and then they will have kids one day. Those kids will behave exactly like the local population. They will go to University, they will be highly qualified, they will be socially adapted to the place, culture and language and, they will also not have kids, just like the locals. So which problem did these migrants solve then ?

So the issue here isn't that we lack people in Europe. It's that our economic doctrine is deficient. We need to change the doctrine, not the people. Immigration will not solve this problem, it will perpetuate it. Young people not having kids is an economic issue that will still happen whether you have a European young person there or a Iraqi young person there. You can't simply transplant a young couple from a country with very high birth rates in a totally different part of the world, subjected to an entirely different set of circumstances and expect them to be the same in Europe. That's not how this works.

Not when you consider that so many are rather old and afraid of change (something which correlates with age).

Many comments below (->above?) about housing. But it seems to me, the problem in much of Europe is that many old people hang on to large half-empty family houses, so over 65s are occupying a lot more space than under 15s (although the latter have more energy, need space to play ...). It's a pity they blame immigrants for this.

And now they've spent all their money just in time to rely on social security from the young ones. Try and screw us from every angle. Most selfish and greedy generation that existed.

Yeah... That's not where the money went. Some of it, sure. But some very few people have hoarded a lot more than it seems people realise.

Scary though they will be making the rules for a long time to come yet

Because at least you are thinking about such problems (unlike too many). I thought similarly back in 1998, many records broken since, we're still here, now glad my children are too and getting educated, to help society get through this. By the way the original post is from Ireland which may not get so much warmer (depends thermohaline circulation...) - maybe stormier, although much (not all) of europe will still be nice to live in 2050, adaptation may include many people relocating.

Yeah. To be honest most liberal and social democrat governments are playing right into the hands of the right wing too.

Too afraid to crack down on the far right, but still too conservative to commit to large public spending on housing and sustainable infrastructure. Or in Germany's case, nuclear energy.

I have hope for those organzing outside of electoralism, those organzing within it in the West are in for another rude wake up call soon. They keep ignoring them.

Westerners are not more tolerant or intolerant then any other people on earth, we generally just have higher standards of living as a result of economic and military hegemony. As that continues to decline for more and more previously " wealthy " people the fascist radiclization will get worse in the West.

We need new ways of living and bold ideas. The far right nor neoliberals can offer that to people. Liberals will tolerate dissidents but they will never take meaningful action on the issiues of class, the military industrial complex or encomcis for the most part. It needs to change from the outside in.

Yes, this seems inevitable, and given Europe's relative historical contribution to climate change, I think we have a moral obligation to welcome some, as (to some extent) their right, not charity. An issue, however, is that immigrants tend to gather in crowded hot cities near sea-level, just the places we should plan to slowly depopulate, while it's rarer to see African faces in sparsely populated upland rural areas, where there are more empty houses and older people needing services. Research about climate migration focused mainly on where people will move from, not enough about where it would make most sense for them to move to.

Having sex is easy. Being able to balance childcare and afford raising children is a feat that grows ever more difficult by the day

Reductions in population will happen after the climate change issues go unresolved when they needed to be, and resource scarcity forces an economic global crisis never seen in modern history. It won’t be gradual. Every pop model predicts going from 10B to 1B in less than 100 years post vertex. Or at least it seems if we stay on the track we are on.