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The point is to try to prop up pension obligations without making the compromises to women's empowerment necessary to goose the fertility rate/tame inflation at the same time. If you don't acknowledge HBD or the structural problems with western economies it makes sense, and these people don't acknowledge those things.
I see this a lot. And I suppose it could be conditionally true. But considering a French banlieue of poor unemployed unintegrated immigrants or their unintegrated unemployed children: are these people propping up pensions?
Or as American, considering illegal Mexicans working for day wages. If they are paid under the table, in what sense are they propping up social security?
I get that productive employed taxpaying H1Bs are a net tax benefit. But other examples of mass immigration are not clearly net tax benefit to me.
A lot of illegal immigrants pay payroll taxes in America; roofers and meatpackers and such are usually on the payroll through fraud. Daylaborers aren't, but most illegal immigrants have more stable employment scenarios, often through contractors who commit identity fraud for them. They wouldn't be net taxpayers if they were able to access benefits from the government but they aren't, and contractors are more concerned with avoiding the wrath of the IRS than ICE.
In any case, we as a society do need some people to do low-productivity hard work for low pay on an ad-hoc basis, and local roustabouts no longer have their once upon a time single redeeming virtue(being willing to do that), so daylaborers from Latin America enable some real economic activity which eventually gets taxed that otherwise wouldn't get done.
A lot of the American elite's attitude towards immigration is driven by the assumption of these people being largely Mexican construction workers who mostly intend to retire in their home country due to cost difference and are employed by contractors who genuinely fear the IRS; I know less about France and Britain, but in America this was true up until relatively recently.
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Western states want to maintain a high ratio of working-age population to retirees and that definitely will help to achieve certain goals. Even if the immigrants are destined for low-wage roles, that means that hiring care workers won't be as expensive (higher labor supply equals lower wages) and current levels of care can be maintained. Another common reason was to address the ostensible post covid labor shortages that business interests in many Western countries were arguing for. And yet a third is that many of these countries feel it's in their strategic interests to make their populations as large as possible, which I've seen French, Canadian, and American establishments explicitly endorse. In reality, I think the first two explanations are serving a few powerful interest groups at the expense of general welfare and future prosperity, and that the third explanation is misled as it's not overall population that matters but high value HBD, but this isn't taken into account by the establishment probably because it serves other purposes to deny. There's also a dark fourth reason, which is that elite interests converge on diverse populations as they are easy to divide and conquer and thus dominate. We do live in an era of anti-competitive corporate consolidation, top-bracket tax cuts, corporate welfare, and persistent privatization of inappropriate industries despite gross failures, whilst the broader populace bickers primarily over matters of racial prestige, so if the elites indeed orchestrated this they've done a good job...
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