this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2025
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Oh no, learning the language of the country you immigrate to, the horror
Make it a requirement of continuing occupancy. Must be taking classes or working. Classes are free.
Still takes years to learn the language with those classes and these classes are social transfers to the immigrants, but a good investment with return.
The requirement is neither of those things. The requirement is self sufficiency.
If you're rich enough, then I don't care if you don't learn the language and that you don't work.
You're spending into our economy with likely passive income coming from your global investments.
Or you have family members that take care of your cost of living. All fine.
If you want to have a job, then as I priorly stated. Either in Dutch or English.
Both would work. If the infrastructure is in English, then the ability to make immigrants self sufficient becomes a lot easier. Good for our economy.
If we don't want to do these investments, then the immigrant needs to learn Dutch.
Those are the only options.
My wife speaks English at her job. Did 2 Dutch classes. Most of the people in flanders speak English so communication goes well.
Ego of natives to be spoken to by their preferred language is economically irrelevant so I ignore that.
The premise of this discussion was economic refugees, so I assumed we were only talking about those who are not self-sufficient.
These people can't legally enter the country as far as I'm aware. So yeah, they become homeless.
Giving money to economic refugees that aren't self sufficient is just.. at best, turning them into baby factories for next generation worker bees.
My country has an aging population, perhaps it's beneficial? Not sure.
Actually it's easy to see if it's beneficial. Look at social refugees. Their kids get higher education.
There's enough war in the world though. We don't need economic refugees on top of the social refugees.
But then again, need to question how easy those economic refugees are to integrate.
They aren't traumatised by war, so it should be easier.
A lot of angles to look from
I don't see why that's the case. Surely within a few years at most, they will have acquired the skills and security to get a job or start a business and become a productive taxpayer. Unless they're permanently disabled, but that's a small minority of people.
The problem usually is lack of education within their home countries. That's the difference between EU migrants and non EU migrants. I suppose.
Someone that went to school until age 14 won't have it as easy to integrate. Mostly they'll get minimum wage jobs. Which don't pay taxes.
That's why they do bad on statistics I guess.
But nowadays, places around the world have been booming education wise. Now it's pure brain drain to get young abled people to come here.
The statistics are more based on older generations, which globally, were less educated.
I'm pretty confident that even a person with no formal education can gain the training to do a skilled trade job.
Difficult.
https://www.nbb.be/nl/artikels/de-economische-impact-van-immigratie-belgie-0
The difference between first generation immigrants and locals/2nd generation is staggering.
Which is why I suggest more training and schooling for first-generation immigrants. Instead of leaving them to develop the skills on their own, proactively teach those skills to jumpstart their earning years.
From your linked study:
The part of the source you're quoting is about 2nd generation, not first generation.
We do set a high level of segregation based on school performance. But they all have education.
I'd take this with a grain of salt. We have labour, technical and general. They each have their pros and cons. I don't really like the way they choose who to put where. They put me in technical, after a few years I chose to go to general.
Kinda a mistake, technical had better teaching than general. Perhaps just the school, but with technical it felt like the education was just of a higher quality. While it's ranked lower than general based on people stereotyping it.
We definitely need to get away from that kind of thing. Streamline it. All kids in the same segment and let them choose themselves what they want at age 14 instead of being chosen for at age 12.
My source says that second generation immigrants outperform native population. Simply because they have to catch up on the ladder. They see how their parents struggle. How their family struggle. They want to make the best of it.
So then they simply put in more effort. Perhaps will develope a bit of an unhealthy relationship with money but whatever.
My point was that if greater access to education and training opportunities lowers the gap for second generation immigrants, surely that also applies to first generation.
They all have access to education. My wife can go follow a master in European and international law in the university of Antwerp right now if she wishes to do it. It's in English.
She can follow baking classes. Pretty much anything. Since she arrived here with a bachelor's degree already.
The older generation that came here without formal education. They didn't speak English. All the effort invested in them was just to teach them Dutch. There's training at vdab for jobs that are easy to get. But these jobs don't pay that much.
Our economy is based on human capital. We are quite competitive on this. So to compete with natives for jobs, you need to be educated from a young age.
That's just a reality. The best paying jobs that immigrants that can't speak the language would get would be construction.
So teach them better job skills.
How? How are you going to teach someone to be an engineer when the person can barely read?
Gradually.