Why immigration isn't saving Europe's economy

Facts are good, but I'm saying he missed an important aspect which colored his final opinion on the subject. He bifurcated it to either you have

• social cohesion, less growth, and less immigrants
• less social cohesion, more growth, and more immigrants

And as usual in life, there aren't only 2 options. He completely missed the reason why low skilled workers are migrating. Reasons include: we extract wealth from their countries and let our companies run rampant there, we fight our proxy wars and trade wars there, our pollution is causing the climate to change so much there that it's becoming much less livable - and that's not "it happened centuries ago", it's going on right now.

Again, IMO, the biggest reason immigration isn't "saving" Europe's economy is because of shitty integration. Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands supposedly have the best "integration models", but that's completely relative, because actually they all suck. They're just better than the rest of Europe, which suck more.

Wat do?

Bind social welfare to education progress: you do badly at speaking the language and are not willing to learn --> less money. But that also means qualified teachers should be provided or trained that treat them with respect. Also, it shouldn't cost a fortune for low-skilled immigrants to get language courses. Germany is good in this regard because they are freely available by public institutions and German TV is freely available without DRM. Denmark has the downside of having a terrible language, but the courses are free for low-skilled immigrants, high-skilled immigrants don't even have to bother learning if they speak English - which isn't good either. And the Danish courses are expensive af for high-skilled immigrants. The Netherlands is just a complete fucking mess, so let's not get into that.

Then, don't put low-skilled immigrants in low-income neighborhoods, far away from amenities, where there are less opportunities to find jobs, public transport is worse, and they cannot integrate. Of course they won't learn the language as quickly, their kids will go to worse schools, hang out with the wrong people, and worse. It's something that's been known for decades and yet the same old policies still apply.

Want to lower the number of low-skilled immigrants? Invest in the communities abroad where these refugees and low-skilled workers are coming from. They won't have to emigrate if there's nothing to escape from or if they like it there more than here. Or invest in the people that immigrated. Remittance is a large part of what they do to help out the families abroad, which partially addresses the problem too.

And of course, make your own damn country better for low-skilled, low-wage domestics. There's no "wage war" with low-skilled immigrants if you have a highly educated and capable domestic work-force. Invest in your own citizens. Raise the minimum wage and make education one the biggest expenditures. Teacher should be paid wages of engineers and managers and CEOs. A good teacher can provide way more to the economy in terms of workpower than a company. Companies depend on skilled workers. It makes absolutely no sense to reduce the wages and worsen the working conditions of those that teach them those skills. It's idiotic beyond belief.

It would've made his video longer or he could've teased with: "but there is one important aspect I didn't talk about: why do we have immigrants in the first place?" or something like that.

Again, facts are good, context is also very important. I could tell you right now that some viruses are made in a lab, but if I don't answer "why", well... you see what happens.

A country that is accepting migrants is already giving them a lot by allowing them to live in peace.

Migrants are people who come to the country whether legally, illegally, out of duress or not, with high or low skill. A Brit moving to Australia is a migrant, a Pole moving to Estonia, is a migrant and a Malawian moving to France, is also a migrant.

You're talking about refugees and most likely also economic migrants. Ask yourself why they are fleeing or migrating. Someone fleeing Afghanistan for example is fleeing a country that was the playground for proxy wars between Russia and the USA. A Sudanese refugee is fleeing a civil war funded by American, German, Polish, and French arms manufacturers. Economic migrants from Congo, Kenya, Burundi, and other countries are hoping to find a better life away from a country at war with militias funded by Western companies to destabilize the area in order to get to ground resources cheaply.

If you are Western, you buy good funded by all of that. You give your money to companies actively making other countries less secure, less affluent, and more difficult to live in. The you probably vote for a party that doesn't want to punish any of those companies, nor strike fair deals with the countries affected by their greed.

Do you think these people would flee a country with a bright future for them? We participate in the robbery of their future and wealth and then want to erect walls to keep them there. And they dare get out and make up less than a single percent of the migrant population, we have people who demand we send them back to the hell we created for them.

E.g. in Germany, refugees are forbidden from working and forced to live on social aid in the beginning. How long that beginning stretches heavily depends from case to case and can easily be years or until deportation.

too many people conflate "not wanting foreigners to come to our country" with "not liking foreigners".

don't get me wrong, i have no problem with foreigners. I'm not a racist. But i don't like them coming to our country.

I understand that we have to accept them, because (a) they need help and (b) we're the reason they need help (the western world caused the wars in the middle east).

Still I think it's wrong to uproot the lives of many people (moving them from one country to another). Especially I think it's disgusting how european politicians are discussing refugees as a way to "support our economy", as if they were a mere tool of production. We have to put people first and economy second again.