As an Australian I'd say the single largest issue here is the cost of living. It is a massive problem. Housing is expensive (and scarce), public infrastructure is shocking (Roads are bad our public transport is terrible), utilities like electricity and gas are quite expensive, common goods like groceries are expensive.
Don't get me wrong the standard of living in this country is very good, we have a great public health system, our education system is good and crime rate is generally low but it comes at a cost.
Cities like Sydney and Melbourne regularly rank highly as some of the most expensive places in the world to live. It is really not affordable to have children, especially at a young age. As a result most of my friends, work colleagues etc. have waited until their 30's to start a family.
Immigration has not done a lot to bring down the cost of things. Personally I think if they want people to have more children they need to make life in general more affordable.
It doesn't. These societies are permanently changed because of immigrations. This of course works fine for the immigrants (like myself!) but if I was a Canadian in the 70s I would be greatly opposed to this movement.
I'm not Japanese, but in objectively thinking about what's best for Japan, "immigration" is not on the list. In fact it's on the list of things to never ever do. I don't mean it as in "do not accept foreigners". I mean do not adopt the policy of mass immigration to offset the shrinking population.
Japan is completely unequipped to take immigrants at any significant scale. It’s a delicately balanced society that depends heavily on people being socialized into the same rules from birth. Even if Japan could socially and economically integrate those immigrants, which is doubtful, it wouldn’t be Japan anymore. Tokyo would become like London or New York or Toronto, chaotic places where nobody knows the rules because they just got there five minutes ago.
Indeed, it’s doubtful to me that immigration is a fix even for Western Europe. Most European countries have failed to integrate their growing Muslim populations. They’ve imported an underclass, one that’s going to be increasingly furious that they’re stuck in socioeconomic ghettos. For whatever reason, European countries are starkly different from the United States, where immigrant groups have long enjoyed similar economic mobility to the native born (which continues to be true for the contemporary wave of Latin American immigrants).
More generally, it just outsources the problem to immigrants. You’re compensating for a culture that has become broken in a key respect by importing people from a culture that isn’t b
>Most European countries have failed to integrate their growing Muslim populations. They’ve imported an underclass, one that’s going to be increasingly furious that they’re stuck in socioeconomic ghettos
Muslim from London here - my father came here as an immigrant in the 80's, and stayed here. I would say that I'm integrated. Your outlook reeks of no only condescension and disdain for class struggle, but complete misunderstanding of how cultures develop and work. Come to London and tell me immigration is an outlandish idea - your barrista, your off-license shop keeper, your NHS keyworker and your TFL underground marshall will all laugh in your face.
> Muslim from London here - my father came here as an immigrant in the 80's, and stayed here. I would say that I'm integrated. Your outlook reeks of no only condescension and disdain for class struggle, but complete misunderstanding of how cultures develop and work.
I’m not talking about individual experiences, but aggregate statistics. In the UK, poor Muslims get more education than poor whites, but that doesn’t translate into better jobs: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/asian-muslims-and-black-p.... They have lower income mobility than similarly situated whites.
The statistics are much worse in continental Europe, where Muslim immigrants are stuck in inter-generational poverty. Turkish people started immigrating to Europe in significant numbers around 1970, around the same time Vietnamese people started immigrating to the US. Half a century later, Vietnamese Americans have fully caught up with British Americans in terms of income. But the situation for Turks in Europe has been starkly different: https://theconversation.com/many-turkish-people-who-migrated... (“By the third generation, around half (49%) of those living in Europe were still poor, compared with just over a quarter (27%) of those who remained behind… Migrants from three family generations residing in countries renowned for the generosity of their welfare states were among the most impoverished. Some of the highest poverty rates were observed in Belgium, Sweden and Denmark.”).
To an American those statistics are unbelievable. Germans, Italians, and Irish all came over a cheap labor and reached parity with British Americans within three generations. The Latin American immigrants coming to America today are on the same track: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353. Several groups of immigrants who came here as impoverished refugees, such as Koreans, Vietnamese, Lebanese, and Cubans, achieved parity even more quickly.
Your point about “class struggle” and the “barista, off-license shop keeper, [and] NHS keyworker” underscores my point. In Europe immigrants take those jobs, and then their kids take those jobs. That creates a politically and socially volatile situation. In America that doesn’t happen because immigrants have relatively high economic mobility. Irish and Italians did those jobs, and a lot worse, when they came here in the early 20th century. Today there is no meaningful class struggle centered around Irish or Italian identity because those groups fully integrated. In fact it’s a consistent struggle for US Democrats to build durable movements. Irish and Italians got FDR elected, but their kids and grandkids favored Reagan in a landslide.
Coz those countries will get to same slump in decade or three, and meanwhile you're just increasing public unrest because the vastly different cultures very rarely mix well
