Originally posted by aldra
1. The way he talks about Germany's aging population, it seems that he's not only concerned with the workforce but also population sustainability - implying that he sees supplanting the historically European population with MENA immigrants as a solution. In terms of the workforce, Germany needs skilled workers and last I heard, something like 0.3% of the recent immigrants had sought employment at all; a large portion of them could not communicate effectively in the language of the host country and virtually none had any level of recognised education.
I don't see the problem with supplanting the native European population with other demographics, I don't see anything inherently wrong with that, assuming proper integration.
And that would be a problem of improperly handled integration, no?
2. "Integration depends on socioeconomic backgrounds, on skills, on language knowledge more than on "ethnic", religious or cultural origins."
Even if that were true, the majority of the recent immigrants from MENA have virtually no marketable skills (except maybe rape) and the majority have poor skills in the host language, if they're able to speak it at all. The fact that he has to go back to 19th century France as an example of similar populations failing to integrate/assimilate is telling - I'm not familiar with the situation but I'd hazard a guess that there was a very definite reason for that.
What Eastern European nations have a bunch of immigrants who can speak German? The only thing I can think of are ethnically German peoples in countries like Hungary and Poland, neither of which are massive enough shitholes to where Germany can fix it's problems regarding an ageing population.
I'm not sure what the problem with the 19th century example is that you guys keep trying to needle at; three point is simply that being white Christian Europeans didn't guarantee or bring confidence in their assimilation.
The argument at that point should not be about region or culture but about skills, education, perhaps their
capacity to learn the language and integrate beneficially with European society.
Additionally, my previous dw link states that 50,000 refugees found employment in FY2015-2016. In this time, it received around 300K refugees (obviously these new arrivals are probably not the ones who found new employment).
I don't know about you but it seems like the push towards better integration seems like it is more worthwhile than digging in their heels and refusing the refugees, specially when they could be such an important engine for economic growth.
3. The host country is the one providing for the immigrants - it needs to ensure the safety and prosperity of it's own people before 'helping' others, and it must be mindful that if it overextends itself trying to be a 'good samaritan' it won't have the resources to support immigrants OR citizens.
Germany's problem is not the lack of resources to deal with said refugees, it is an inability to follow through. Of course it needs to ensure the safety of its people first, but then it's a question of the time scale you are looking at.
Secondly, you can create this protection for your populace either through proper integration of the immigrants into peaceful and productive members of your society, or through protectionistic policies:
http://m.dw.com/en/when-refugees-want-to-work-in-germany/a-18737104But if you're going to bring in refugees, make it hard for them to even get a job, then complain about the number of jobs they get when they are there... Then what the fuck?
Germany's issue is very much mishandling, and not at all that they are taking on the task at all.
It's extremely easy to say "if we didn't tackle this humanitarian issue, we wouldn't have to deal with this humanitarian issue". No duh. But it's important to tackle the humanitarian, and more importantly it can be a
giant benefit to Germany (or other host nations), but the stipulation for that is that you can't be fucking bad at the task you have taken upon yourself.
https://theguardian.com/business/2016/may/09/germany-imf-economy-growth-refugees-migrants-labour-ageing-populationI think this argument is a pretty balanced rundown of both sides of the argument:
http://www.aicgs.org/publication/burden-or-blessing-the-impact-of-refugees-on-germanys-labor-market/
