Why is migration considered a good thing? Migrants are taking away jobs from locals. Moving places is hard, you leave family and friends behind. It’s better when everybody finds jobs locally where they live.
Migration in general maybe not so much because then it's mostly just used as wage suppression, but skilled migration in niche fields like the one ASML operates in is absolutely necessary since a small county like NL can't produce all the specialized labor a large and growing company like ASML in a short timespan to satisfy their massive order books.
Training a skilled semiconductor engineer can take 6+ years but you need them right fucking now. You can't compress 6 years of education and training experience in an instant no matter how much you were to pay for the locals.
TSMC and Intel won't want to wait 6 years. They might as well wait for Nikon and Canon to solve EUV.
Wouldn't they be better off filling most positions locally even if quantity dips because long term those skills transfer rathering then hoping a migrant becomes a local? 40% is a high number required.
The realities of the world never work on "wouldn't it be better if...".
Yes it would be better if there was no war in Ukraine, no war in Gaza, no COVID, no economic downturn with inflation, etc. but the world doesn't function on our wishes, and companies operate on quarterly profits and can't wait for the world to become as they wish.
Long term they would be in a better position. Short term vs long term thinking.
The war piece is more complex. Ukraine war is about NATO expanding into Russian influence zones. Without that war we would be looking at a war in a different place, maybe even a nuclear war fighting over the same thing. The Gaza war is a proxy for a Iran/Israel war. COVID become a proxy war for a power grab by health officials. They still want countries to handover power over citizen to the who by the end of this month.
> better when everybody finds jobs locally where they live
This is a valid position. But naturally, those jobs won’t be of the high-value globally-connected variety. Plenty of agricultural communities do okay; they just aren’t going to be a good place for an ASML to be based.
> Why is migration considered a good thing? Migrants are taking away jobs from locals.
This is just not true generally.
Migrants usually barely make up for natality rate reduction. Many migrants with low level of education usually fill low skilled jobs that most locals aren't willing to do. Those with high level of skills usually fill up markets that are in dire need of those skills anyway or can become entrepreneurs themselves.
> Moving places is hard, you leave family and friends behind. It’s better when everybody finds jobs locally where they live.
I am a migrant, my SO is a migrant. Neither of us would have been as happy as we are had we stayed in our respective countries, and I am pretty sure given the feedback we get the companies we are working for wouldn't have been happier without us.
The irony is as a white, european guy, I am generally never targeted as the migrant who is taking away jobs from locals while my SO, as darker skinned migrant from a country in latin america still considered a developing country, is facing racism and is considered as a migrant stealing job by people having similar views as yours. Yet we are both working and contributing to the country we are living in the same way.
Let's face it, these kind of opinions is never about locals missing jobs but xenophoby.
Migrants more often than not create jobs for locals (just not uneducated locals, who get mad when uneducated migrants are willing to do the same work for less money).
The EU overall is in a less than reproduction rate. With less than two kinds per woman on average. With the boomer generation going into pension now there are a lot of jobs left unassigned. At the same time people are getting better educated and strive for higher jobs.
The notion that immigrants take away jobs is bullshit that has been fed to you by exactly those right wing shills. It's not the 2000nds anymore. We need so many workers l, especially in those low wage/low skill jobs.
At the same time employing an immigrant is much harder cultural wise that every employer probably picks a local over a immigrant when having the choice.
In Finland we've been told that there will be a huge shortage of workers since early 2000s or so. Yet it seems like barrier for entry in low-skilled jobs is only rising. In some areas even minimum wage jobs for teenagers require multi-step BS recruiting processes. Unemployment rate is not going down either.
Really at least in this country there is no general worker shortage, except in some skilled fields like healthcare. There are just lots of underpaid, part-time jobs that do not pay enough that you can survive off them - cleaning, food courier, over the phone sales etc. I don't believe creating a new class of underprivileged working poor from migrants is ethical, I believe any job worth doing should pay an adequate wage. It's not state's job to subsidize companies with slave labour. Attracting skilled workers to enter the country is entirely another matter, ones who can actually earn a livable wage benefit the society as a whole.
They said that about Canada too. As a result we had a surge in immigration that led to huge jumps in youth unemployment.
If companies are so desperate for workers why are wages stagnant and why are so many people getting ghosted during job interviews and why does it take so many applications to find a job. This doesn't add up.
We have record numbers of women in the workforce basically doubling the number of workers compared to the 50s. But apparently we can't find workers.
And now we're right wing racists because we object to you bringing in people from low income countries to work low skill entry level positions in a proposed system that a little too closely resembles colonial era slave trade.
Meanwhile there's a huge strain on housing prices and infrastructure and social services as we struggle to absorb this influx - why so corporations can have higher profit margins. So GDP can get a little higher.
And these clueless out of touch elites wonder why people are moving to the far right.
Prices are dictated by a global purchasing market. This means that salaries cannot grow because otherwise companies wouldn’t make profit, as they have to compete with products built by Chinese companies with much lower salaries.
This sounds like a race to the bottom where we keep demanding workers accept less and less to compete with poorer and poorer nations - while simultaneously ignoring that economic powerhouses like the US who pay workers relatively well
Globalization is exactly that, until there’s global equality of salaries. We’re seeing it at the moment where Chinese cars are taking over the market because they’re better priced than European or American alternatives. To compete they have to move production to Chinese, see for example the large production of teslas in china, or they replace humans by robots…
The biggest problem with free markets is that it’s not really a sustainable system in the sense that with a certain income you can’t afford the things you need provided by people enjoying similar incomes. Hence we need to mass import product from lower income countries, and even local labor needs to be imported from lower income countries. Cleaners from low income countries, construction workers from low income countries.
I don't buy that idea, an economy full of very poor people who can barely afford anything is not sustainable not at the national level and not at the global level.
Countries with very low wages are also countries with very low productivity (throwing cheap labour instead of technology and expertise at problems)
Relationship between low wages and low productivity isn’t true, low wages are enabled by low costs of living. Cheaper employees can be more productive, and more expensive employees aren’t necessarily more productive. Or do you think every software engineer in SF is more productive than software engineers elsewhere?
Maybe not all but for the most part yes I do think software engineers in San Francisco are by in large more productive than software engineers in Kansas city.
Just like I think finance professionals in NYC are more productive than finance guys elsewhere.
There's a culture around that in those places and opportunities and tools that promote excellence in those fields in a way that is very difficult for someone acting alone.
Just like it's very difficult for a kid in Africa to become a Olympic runner while there are many African American sprinters too, the tools and training and instruction and mentorship is simply not available, the opportunity is not there for him to be able to reach his potential. And that often matters more than innate ability
Workers in many poorer countries are overcoming comparatively more barriers just to work, while in rich countries we have systems set up to help us be as productive as possible
Overall, as the OP says, the key issue is demographic. That doesn't mean that the issues you note don't exist. The pressure on housing is very real, but much of it is due to an ageing population. Certainly in many places there is a lack of a suitable housing mix that enables empty nests to downsize once the kids have left home, but still remain in the same community. So they rattle round in oversized houses, leading to pressure's the housing stock.
>Overall, as the OP says, the key issue is demographic.
Here's a weird thought: Maybe the EU could figure out what issues the locals are having preventing them from wanting kids, and fix them, instead of importing more migrants from impoverished nations, and calling it a day.
