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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30730 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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There are two options for countries, go liberalism or the Iran route. Even Poland is opening up for mass immigration and the Ukrainian parliament is ramming through all sorts of LGBT stuff in the middle of a war. Either one cooperates with the neoliberal order or one takes the Iran/North Korea or Russia option and goes to war against it. China might be the exception simply because neoliberalism can't cut them off.

Italy is a deeply indebted country with a chronic unemployment problem. If the major financial institutions want them to increase their labour supply they either comply or they will get regime changed or have their economy crashed.

Few countries are actually sovreign, the majority of them are effectively controlled by finance.

PiS apparently backpedalled on the non-European migrant visa program.

Iran actually has a big problem with Afghan migrants, doesn’t it?

Aren't Russia, Iran, etc., and the rest mainly beneficiaries of the fact no one wants to immigrate to those countries in the first place? It's not like they have especially exclusionary migration policies... I'm not sure about Iran, but Russia is mired in demographic decline as well (probably accelerated a few years ahead by the R-U war: lots of dead young men there); why wouldn't they want immigrants?

Russia had positive net migration for most all post-1991 years, first a large fraction of that was ethnic Russians repatriating, now it's mostly Central Asian Muslims, both gastarbeiters and permanent setllers. ... of course, streams in and out are quite different in IQ etc.

The less is Russia connected to modernity, the higher the odds of them getting a better birth rate are.

At least for that the war is good.

I mean, if they have a major unemployment problem it seems like ‘increase the labor supply’ has a built in solution- all the people currently unemployed.

Italy is weird, especially in the South a lot of younger people do ‘odd jobs’ their whole lives and because of family property, the welfare state and cheap cost of living their standard of life isn’t that bad, certainly not by global standards.

Yeah but then you’d have to increase wages and benefits until those on the margins of the labor market return to a state of employment.

Which is exactly what was happening pre-pandemic under trump with that ultra tight labor market.

But firms don’t want to pay for that so they just pay people to call you a racist if you point this out.

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