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‘I’m fighting for my country’: anger over immigration spills into rage on Dublin streets
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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Not, that it would not be stupid to hate foreigners, but this argument is as well and slolely based on a mixture of wishful thinking and motivated reasoning. Immigrants are a limited ressource and using them as the fundation of your economy is unsustainable. Economies have instead to be restructured and adjusted to declining populations - e.g. later and lower pensions. Immigrants should if at all only used to reduce the transition pain.
And this is just blatantly wrong. Productivity is defined as output per input. If you produce half the output with half the population, productivity stays exactly the same. You could even argue, that productivity increases in the real world with declining populations, as less people are producing only slightly less output by compensating with more intense work and by eradicating unnecessary work.
Okay, I chose the wrong word, but it's semantics, I'm pretty sure you know what I mean by the word "productivity". There are already plenty of countries where there are jobs going unfilled for months or even years. Teams stretched thin and expected to do the same amount of work as 2 or even 3 people would have done in the past, and it's only going to get worse if immigration is limited because developed countries currently depend on immigration to fill the gaps.
You're right that it's totally unsustainable to depend on immigration to fill gaps in your labour pool. The hope many governments seem to be hinging on is that this crisis will rectify itself as the bloated elderly population of the pyramid starts to die off. There definitely needs to be systemic change, but that takes time. In the short term, there are plenty of immigrants that can fill those roles and keep your country's economy strong in the short term. Countries that fail to recognize that are going to have a rough time.
Of course there are plenty of other reasons that immigration should be accepted. I just figure conservatives are really the only ones who oppose it and they tend to think in terms of the bottom line and their own selfish interests, so I thought I would frame it in a way that would appeal to them.
No, not really. Maybe it's GDP, but why should anybody be interested in GDP over GDP per capita?
That's one of the transition pains, I was mentioning and nothing to be worried about. Using immigration as a pain killer is actually preventing a sustinable solution like most pain killers do.
Have a rough time now or a much rougher time later with further problems on top. The choice is easy if you're willing to face reality. You're literally admitting, that what you are suggesting is only a short term solution, even though you again use the wrong word here: it's not short term but temporary and it's not a solution but an arrangement.