35
votes
Europe’s coming reckoning on immigration – large-scale immigration is the only thing that can prevent Europe from becoming an empty amusement park
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- Title
- Europe's Coming Reckoning on Immigration
- Authors
- Howard W. French
- Published
- Oct 28 2023
- Word count
- 1915 words
I take offense to the implication Europe and Europeans still distinguish by
long debunked nonsense such as phenotypes, as well as implying Europeans classify skin colour as nationality. We're not the ones asking for ethnicity on university application forms, Mr Columbia prof sir.Actually, lots of this article rubs me the wrong way. No regard for the short term cost of absorbing migrants, no mention of the millions of Ukrainian refugees being housed, but hey we should just import a billion black people as migrants because Italy doesn't have enough variety in skin colour. As if skin colour is the only cultural or ethnic divide between what constitutes a migrant or an "expat".
He's also woefully ignorant about the colonial past and the incredibly rich cultures that have integrated in "white" societies. Just in my own country there are vibrant Surinamese, Carribbean, and Indonesian diaspora and those do not even include all the different people that have moved here since that (violent) past.
I'm not disagreeing with the meta argument: migrants are a way to stabilise lower birth rates and an aging population. We've done that with, specifically, Turkish workers a couple of decades ago.
I just don't like the implied old-school plantation owner racism argument.Edit: the opening and closing statements were on me for Tildesing while having split focus and reading phenotypes as phrenology. Quite a difference!
Where is that implied? I don't think it's helpful to immediately turn any discussion about racism into "so you think I'm a plantation owner style racist?"
Americans understand and accept that their is a lot of racism in their society, and in this regards they are several steps ahead of (continental) Europe which denies that it is a racist society. Pretending that a problem does not exist (which is basically the limit of any discussion or policy of racism everywhere in Europe, excepting the UK) does not make it go away.
European racism feels quite a lot like a Kafka novel because it usually works like this
If you read the argument a bit more closely you will notice that the author is talking about economic migrants rather than refugees – you seem to be arguing that economic migrants are bad by instead talking about problems with refugees (I assume out of ignorance rather than malice).
Which is a great example of how migrants can be good for a country?
You’re making broad assumptions about continental Europe and it seems you do not have facts to back it up. In order to make the argument that Europe pretends that racism does not exist, you’d have to tackle each country separately ( I would argue Germany is ahead of the US in addressing racism, but this just a feeling I get from living in Berlin so there is a bias there).
You’re also making broad assumptions about Americans. As far as I know maybe 50-60% of Americans accept and (critically) understand that there is a lot of racism in their society. The rest would probably say it’s historical and taken care of.
But I agree with your Kafka comparison in the continental labor market. I’ve had similar experiences in Germany even as a Pole, but other international friends have worst stories.
I'd push back against the idea that Europe is a "racist" society. Europe is not a melting pot, while America is. What this entails is that Europeans are typically more conscious of cultural barriers that in the US would be barely perceived or considered too slight to matter. Xenophobia and racism certainly exist in Europe, but I'm not convinced the amount is much different than any of the other four corners of the Eastern hemisphere. There's also an important distinction to be made between cultural xenophobia (which is obviously not great) and prejudice fueled by an actual belief in the importance of racial categories. Arguably, the US struggles with racism more, even if on the whole it's more accepting to immigrants and different cultures. Another major component to the migrant issue in Europe that's often overlooked is integration. For an assortment of reasons (greater distance leading to self-selection of the type of people who choose to migrate, greater economic mobility and opportunity for home ownership leading to less clustering), immigrants in the US tend to integrate much better into society than in Europe. I would say there's real reason in believing that migration poses a great risk to fracturing European society.
I think one deciding factor here is that the official safety nets don't exist in the US. If you can't work, you're SOL, thus people MUST integrate at least enough to get work.
And on the other hand getting work in the US without "papers" is actually doable, in many parts of Europe it's impossible to exist without an official ID and a bank account.
I've made a comprehension error somewhere I'll need to address before responding, lol.
Europe still has plenty of racism, let's not get carried away with the self-righteousness. It's not expressed in the exact same fashion as the US, but it's still there.
Turks still have trouble becoming German because Germany doesn't allow dual citizenship (except if acquired at birth). The current government are looking to change that though, which is great!
Mavi kart (Turkish Blue Card) is an option but dual citizenship may be preferable.
European racism has never been about "race". It's about culture and countries.
For example black Frenchmen don't usually identify as "black" they are "French". In the US race and culture are intertwined for reasons I can't understand. Black people are expected to "act black" or they might get shunned by their peers.
In Europe we dislike people from specific countries, just because they're from that country. We don't care about their skin color: <stereotype>A Polish worker is a shitty worker because they're Polish</stereotype> If they happen to be black, asian or whatever, they're still a shitty worker - because they're Polish.
Yes, skin-color racism exists too, but not in the scale as it does in the US. We didn't industrialise slavery for example, so the history and culture behind racism is different.
If this helps you understand, it's because African Americans were robbed of their heritage/roots when their ancestors, then slaves, were brought over to America. That's why blackness/race in the US is an intrinsic part of African American culture, because without that shared experience of what it is to be black (i.e not having roots and suffering under systemic racism), African Americans literally have no other heritage to trace from, all of their possible heritage was stolen from them and erased during the slave trade era, so they have no other choice but to build a new heritage (i.e culture) around the one thing they all share: blackness.
What?
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Western-colonialism/Slave-trade#ref25893
https://slaveryandremembrance.org/articles/article/?id=A0056
There wasn't wide-spread slavery IN Europe.
People from Europe have done some nasty shit (Kongo for example), but "regular" people living in Europe didn't own slaves nearly at the scale that Americans did.
Ah yes, they just implemented a system of brutal repression and slavery around the world to further colonialism and benefited immensely from this.
I’m not claiming one is better or worse, they’re both terrible. But you gotta own your own history.
I could be wrong, but I think u/shrike meant that the average person living in continental Europe didn't have any personal experience with chattel slavery, unlike the US. That's a massive difference that really affects how a country's citizens see other people within their country. Sure there was brutal colonialism outside their borders, but Continental Europe's racial history is fundamentally distinct from the US. The cultural attitudes are different.
Exactly this.
Europeans have had "slaves", but we didn't import them from Africa, we just used our own population as de-facto slaves/servants. Nobody born in Europe has any first-hand experience with slavery in their own country. There might be some whose great-grandparents were serfs, but that's not even close to slavery.
On the other hand in the US the last living actual slave died in 1972, so there are still people alive and well who have interacted with people who were literal slaves (although liberated by the 13th amendment).
u/Minori said it better in a sibling comment, but to reiterate: my point was that there were some people and countries in Europe who did some really heinous shit abroad (the Kongo example).
But nobody in Europe owned slaves in their own homes or farms. French farmers didn't use slave labour in the 1800s for example. Neither did we buy and sell actual humans inside Europe.
There are multiple countries inside Europe that weren't even tangentially related to any of the slavery crap the Belgians were pulling off for example and thus have no context for "slavery". It was something that we read about in text books and wondered why people did that to other people just over 100 over years ago.
I'm not trying to argue there's no racism in Europe and I think it's slightly unfair to attribute that to my post. Even so I get why you would assume that. Reason being is that I made a reading comprehension error between phenotypes/phrenology and since that was the starting point of my post it sort of falls apart at the seams from the get go, but consider reading that a professor thinks Europe is still grading by skull size and shape. You'd be miffed too.
I'm curious if a declining population and birth rate is as negative it's portrayed. The economy will suffer, but will quality of life improve or stay the same? The hyper fixation of organizations on short term growth and profit is not healthy and a declining population will make a strategy of constant growth impossible.
Maybe we need to switch to more long term thinking around stability instead of growth.
And ultimately, it's just kicking the can down the road. The whole world is dealing with declining birth rates. European countries are just a generation or two ahead of African countries. Even in Subsaharan Africa, birth rates have been declining along with development and industrialization, just as they did in the rest of the world. Assumptions that people in the global south would just keep having high birth rates indefinitely turned out to be just another racist stereotype.
Countries are going to have to find a way to live with stable or even declining populations. I know, people will complain about finances and wring their hands about how we pay for pensioners. But we need to keep some perspective. We're staring over the edge of an abyss that is a self-induced climate apocalypse. In all likelihood, by the end of the century, the planet itself is going to force a vast reduction in our numbers. It's not going to be pretty. And here we are wringing our hands over modest, orderly population declines, moaning about how what it will mean for the stock market or how we'll pay for national pension schemes.
The simple truth is right now, there are way too many people on this planet. Yes, you can rightfully point out that it's really the overconsumption in the developed world that's contributing most of the ecological problems, and that is true. However, there's nothing particular moral or wicked about either the citizens of the global north or south. The north currently enjoys a resource intensive high standard of living, and the global south is doing everything they can to raise themselves up to that standard. Everyone on the planet wants to have a first world standard of living.
Really, I bristle at all the hand wringing about population declines in developed countries. I want all countries to have declining populations. Really, isn't the best possible scenario we can be facing right now? You can go and watch movies from the 70s where they thought that by now, we would have had to adopt incredibly draconian policies like forced birth control, forced abortions, mandatory euthanasia, or even soylent green, or simply be decimated by complete ecological collapse. But we've been lucky enough to avoid these nightmare scenarios, so far at least. We don't need a Logan's Run "everybody dies at the same age" rule. We don't need to have mandatory sterilizations or require people to have a "birth license." Our numbers appear to be declining in a slow, orderly, and voluntary manner. Isn't this the ideal scenario?
Yes, it would be better if we could maintain our numbers while also greatly limiting our impact on the Earth's systems. But our economic system just doesn't seem capable of that. In today's world, with today's economic paradigms, the a growing population is incompatible with environmental sustainability. If we lived in a golden 1950s space future, where we could grow our numbers via the mass migration to space habitats, then maybe, sure, growth could be decoupled from its environmental impact. But we don't yet live in that world.
Will allowing the population to shrink make it harder for us when we reach retirement? Yes. If the generation currently of child bearing age chooses to have fewer children, their own retirement will be harder and of lower quality. But that is a price paid and sacrifice made by the people of today. We willingly have fewer children, and we do so knowing it will make our golden years a bit less prosperous. We take on that burden willingly, for the betterment of future generations. We have fewer children, but in turn they will enjoy a quality of life better than we enjoyed, and they will have a much greater chance of still having a living world to call their own.
There's that dirty political word associated with policies that lean towards quality of life over continuous shareholder growth.
The problem is that declining populations don't just negatively affect companies (even if we ignore how companies failing would impact regular people). Declining populations also screw up a lot of social welfare systems that rely on the assumption that young, healthy workers' taxes will pay for the care of the elderly and disabled. This isn't an example of focusing on growth at all costs, and is indeed pretty centered on long-term stability as a goal.
At some point that would have to be addressed in what kind of expectations we can have to our welfare for the elderly population. But the problem is that same aging population is also a huge voter base, so the politicians is to an extent trying to please their needs with various plans for early retirements along side with ever increasing retirement ages for the younger generations.
I don't have the time (or will really( to get into that argument, but afaik all serious economic analysis that doesn't depend on "if we completely change the economic system in a fantastical way that has never been tried and nobody really knows its consequences" shows that the answer to your question is a definite resounding NO. And that's the problem.
Historically isn't the opposite usually true? There is a period of turmoil followed be rapid advancement and an improved quality of life.
Example:
The transition from a Hunter-Gather economy to an Agrarian Economy (Feudalism, etc..) was likely an improvement in the quality of life.
The transition from Agrarian to Industrial also improved quality of life (while harming it in other ways).
Imo this often works when it's done mostly naturally by technological advancements, but usually not when it's planned and done through social engineering, which is what de-growth tends to propose. 40 years of communism were mostly terrible for my country, but it was still nowhere near as devastating as the great leap forward or the cultural revolution.
Also notice that through the examples you listed the population and economy both increased afaik.
I’m only just beginning to understand the deep causation/correlation between birth rate and economic repercussions. The Daily Zeitgeist is a podcast that one day just sort of casually pointed out several massive global upheavals that were in part at the very least significantly magnified if not outright caused by population growth spurts and age changes. Including the Industrial Revolution, the world wars, and something in Russian history? I don’t recall specifics, only that it was kind of a jaw dropping moment for me.
Yep, a lot of countries are going to have a reckoning with their population demographics. By 2050, 74% of Italy will be over 65 years of age. 78% of Spain. 60% of Germany. Of course, even worse off are South Korea and Japan, where 80% of the population will be above 65 in 2050. Hopefully Japan gets over their xenophobia in the next half century, or Tokyo's going to have more robots than people.
Japan has been opening up in recent years, but is selective with a strong preference for young, skilled professionals. For example with one system that’s been added, an individual racking up an adequate number of points based on things like age, achievements in education and at work, language capability, and area of skill can obtain permanent residency in as little as 1-3 years of living there with an education visa, work visa, or spouse visa.
I honestly think the only way they can stabilize their economy in the long term is relying on robotics and AI to replace manual labor and leaning far more into social programs funded by those robots efficiency.
74% of the population will be above 65 by 2050? That sounds... incredibly high. Do you mind sharing your sources on this one?
It's from the OECD: Pensions at a Glance 2021 report. Specifically, look at table 6.2
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/ca401ebd-en/1/3/6/3/index.html?itemId=/content/publication/ca401ebd-en&_csp_=9d37797bd84847326841f27f588be463&itemIGO=oecd&itemContentType=book
Ah, okay. That says the ratio of people over 65 to the working age population will be 74. Not 74% of the total population, but 74 people for every 100 people of working age. That makes a lot more sense. Thanks for clearing that up.
This is the most cynical take: The pool of immigrants can be made to be self-renewing if more powerful countries are willing to take certain measures.
Voila, a renewable pool of blue and white collar workers that you don't have to put the effort into cultivating yourself or providing the standard of living your citizens expect.
But this is certainly not something that any current nations engage in. Certainly not.
That kind of grand strategy might work in a Paradox game, but I imagine you’d be hard pressed to find leaders in a democratic country anywhere that had the combination of semi-competent leadership, centralized power and decision making, and getting elected off a platform of increasing the number of immigrants to pull this plan off
I've laid it out in a Machiavellian form, but you can see the result with multiple forces working together.
Laid out like that the throughline between the parts is less obvious, but it results in the same consequences.
I mean all of these factors can certainly combine to create a lot of immigrants, but it still means nothing if the wealthier country doesn't let those immigrants in, hence my comment about pro-immigration leaders/candidates. While immigration might be good for a country on a grand scale, democratically elected leaders rarely put foreign policy issues before their desire for reelection, and allowing lots of immigrants in just isn't a popular position to hold in most countries.
My point is that even the politicians who talk negatively about immigration don't necessarily turn that rhetoric into concrete, effective action to prevent immigrants from arriving or turning them back when they do arrive. Especially among political parties where the voters are more vulnerable to fear-based politicking, it's enough to talk shit about immigrants and support a visible signal like "build the wall". Few voters will dig into their representative's voting record to determine if the votes they cast and legislation they brought forward was truly effective at reducing immigration.
I don’t think I’m misinterpreting anything here but do you live in a developed country? Because if so the above reads as a pretty privileged position to take. Like, /we should limit immigration from developing countries so they don’t start producing all the GHGs we do/. What would happen instead? I’m no economist and I know it’s dangerous to reorient conversations like these with such broad strokes, but with populations declining in the developed world, developing world markets will just be increasingly leveraged as a sources of revenue to satiate endless growth capitalists. The solution isn’t to deny migrants a future of their choosing based on their potential carbon footprint, it’s to embrace robust sustainable development practices the world over and rid ourselves of the notion that there should be no upper bound on the growth of a given company or net worth of an individual.
It is a top down policy proposal that would overlook quite a bit. I’d be able to put a sharper point on it if this were my field but I’m just another concerned individual so I’ll just try and do my best to explain my view below.
Basically, I don’t think you’d really get the desired effect of long term net GHG emission reductions by implementing this policy by itself.
Even if Canada changed its policy tomorrow, years later you’d still see the oil sands have continued to be tapped for all their worth. If the domestic market for oil were down due to population decline that’s just oil that’d be sold elsewhere (read: developing countries with population growth).
If any number of Canadian companies had similar issues they’d do the same thing. Development would happen elsewhere.
Without, as I previously mentioned, robust sustainable development practices implemented the wold over, your policy would at best just be transferring GHG emissions from one geographic area to another and from one point in time to a future point in time.
Importantly, this would all happen while millions of immigrants were denied an opportunity contribute to Canada’s future. They would just go elsewhere, and I think that’d be a loss for Canadian society. Finally, and not the least bit perversely, this very same policy would by its own logic more easily allow for an Australian or U.S. worker to migrate to Canada, since they’re already producing around as much GHG emissions as your average Canadian is responsible for.
The whole thing just doesn’t work. It has the net effect of pushing into the dirt the faces of millions of people who have as much of a human right to bettering their lives as anyone else. I agree with you wholeheartedly that GHG emissions need to be decreased the world over, but I don’t think this policy need be part of the solution.
Spain and Portugal could easily import millions of willing migrants from Latin America that would have no problems assimilating.
We've been doing it for years. Portugal has had a stable ~10 million inhabitant population for a very long time. According to the border service's report, in 2022 we had 240k immigrants from Brazil. It's the largest group of immigrants in the country out of a 780k total. Immigration grew in 2022 as a whole, and there were 75k citizenship requests. If it wasn't for immigrants, Portugal would have collapsed a long time ago.
Archive link
A lot of words to convince readers of ‘Foreign Policy’ that immigrants are good mmkay?
Hmm, well that is if they survive the next bowling alley shooting.
‘Hey not all Americans are gun loving rednecks’ you yell. ‘Well, Italians are like, the small boot of Europe you know.’ As far as I know, industry and academia are loving them some expats, it doesn’t matter if they’re from Africa or Asia, they will be either subsidized, or bring money to spent in the European country, or will bring a great work ethic to the labor force. ‘I choose D, for all of the above.’
So the piece is telling me something, I either already believe (a leftist liberal almond milk enjoyer), or I’d never ever will come near (a right wing Fox News connoisseur).
Truth is, it is about the ‘refugee crisis’, but is being rebranded as non-European expats desperately trying to get an in at EY. They just forgot more convenient ways of travel.
It is neither, but what does ‘Foreign Policy’ care? It’s another hot ad click, ahem, journalistic contribution for readers that already know who they will vote for. They feel even beter, knowing that they don’t have live in that medieval ‘country called Europe’.
Spoiler alert (if you want the message clearer than clear): The West should indeed get ready for the reversal of the baby boom, in which you either will grow old without anyone to care for you, or you will grow accustomed to refugees/foreigners/expats helping you get into the bath.
I truly don’t get what the author tries to add, except trying to show us that he wrote a book about this issue.
Wow this is really impressively cynical. It almost sounds like Alf Garnett discovers Tildes.
I'm sorry I couldn't really see the application of this remark; would you mind explaining?
Or it could change people's minds, if they consider the economic benefits of migrants more thoroughly? I don't think people are in general so set in their ways that they will literally never change their minds about things – priorities, beliefs, etc change constantly.
I really don't understand what you mean by this, would you mind elaborating?
I’m not entirely sure if I agree with cynical, however I will take the comparison to a socialist roleplaying as a cynical ranting conservative as a compliment. I do think we might agree quite a bit, but we’ll see as I try to clarify my ranting. I failed to be concise and to the point though.
The feelings I try to - evidently not so clearly - display, is the following.
I find it a bit dishonest of the author to criticize a continent (Europe) on base of an outlier (Italy), which not coincidentally borders a continent (Africa) the author has studied intensively. I do the same on some other hot issue (guns and USA), which is to underline the unfairness of the authors stance, legitimate or not.
With regard to clarifying the quoted bits. They are two sides of the same coin, there is not really a concrete point or argument to be found, rather loose associations. I shall try to elaborate.
2.a.
So I try to amplify one aspect of the authors column, but I kind of missed the point, reading it back.
So one the one hand the author mentions the so called ‘refugee crisis’ with all its humanitarian obscenities.
On the other hand he mentions immigrants who not only do ‘menial work’, but go study and bring knowledge, I made the jump to expats; which makes it a whole other debate in my opinion. Because no question, those are people who are in high demand because of the mentioned reasons.
On his third hand he calls upon the demographic data; the graying of the population, the low birth rate. Suggesting a need for immigration (I don’t disagree).
He finishes up with some suggestion of racism and a false dichotomy:
While maybe the best solution - he studied for it - there may be other options. He proposes that we need A (compensate the low birth rate, to continue our lifestyle), for this we need to do B (accept refugees), and C (we need high in demand economic migrants) is the reason why we do B.
Concluding my reaction; it’s an over exaggeration and nitpicking, not necessary for making a point.
2.b.
Well watch what you hear. So we can both read the article and think things. You distill a hopeful message from the article, I think I read the same words, but somehow I don’t feel that the author wants to instill hope on me. It’s a warning that has been repeated many times. Rather, you could question ‘who is reading this’? I mean, who is the demographic of ‘Foreign Policy’? Are they pro or contra globalist solutions? Are they prone to agreeing or disagreeing with the author? Is it useful to write a slightly polarizing article that is propagating an opinion that the readers probably agree with and dunking on another continent? Other than generating clicks and attention for his book, I’m not really seeing the point.
They spent some time in Italy and wrote about what they learned. There’s nothing wrong with that, in principle. Attempting to draw very broad conclusions tends not work so well, though.
My hope: someday, someone will run on the slogan “smart immigration” and figure out a meaning for it which will satisfy most people.
I'm not entirely sure if you’re referring to the broad conclusions of the article - in which case I agree, or to the conclusions drawn by me - to which I plead guilty.
I think smart immigration is an elegant framing, which could sadly be used both ways (pro or contra immigration). As if we’re not all humans looking for a better/friendlier spot on this earth.