this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
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More people won't fix shit.
Young people will fix shit. Western European societies have significantly ageing populations. That means they need to choose between three options to maintain their pension systems:
Cut benefits for pensioners and/or increase the retirement age.
Increase taxes for the young to pay for pensions for the old.
Keep tax and benefit levels the same, but allow foreigners to move to Western Europe where they can work and pay taxes.
1 and 2 both have huge intergenerational consequences - and bluntly, having seen how the baby boom generation have pulled the ladder up behind them, I have no great urge to pay taxes through the teeth for the rest of my working life to fund their cushy retirements. 3 hurts nobody and benefits everybody - it's a no-brainer.
And what happens when those foreign workers in Solution #3 age, retire and need pension payouts...? Just keep hiring more and more foreign workers? Besides, "benefits everybody" is only from an national economic perspective. From the cultural, social and personal economic perspective, having a huge influx of foreigners in your country is terrible.
I don't think foreign labor is completely off the mark but there has to be guards against them costing more money than they contribute to the system, which means strict culture, skill and income requirements for permanent migration.