#8 Immigration: The Inconvenient Solution

Exploring the inevitability of sustained immigration in developed nations.

POLITICS

Immigration is one of the hottest political topics in most developed nations. Whether its the US, UK, EU or other similar nations, the discourse usually goes two ways:

1. The left are in favour.

2. The right are against it.

Now it is of course far more nuanced than that. The left look toward the empathetic and ‘humane’ issues with immigration - especially illegal immigration.

The right look more toward sustained and merit based immigration. Illegal immigration is largely off the table.

Now what if I told you that neither side, at a party level, is being honest? You'd be shocked right? Of course not! It's politicians we're talking about…duh!

MONEY

As nations develop they experience fast and booming growth in commerce, living standards and, theoretically, quality of life. These metrics are important to understand a nation’s progression. The major metric that matters however is GDP.

GDP (Growth domestic product) measures the value of goods and services produced by a country. The US, no surprise, leads the GDP boards with a total monetary value of 23.3 Trillion…TRILLION…dollars. That means that the US produces goods and services that amount to that value.

GDP is a good measure of country’s productivity and provides a strong insight into the economic makeup. The problem with GDP however is that it is absolutely fundamental for it to increase every year, if not every quarter. It is the equivalent of sales targets at a corporation. It doesn't matter how good your sales were last month, you have to do better in the following month.

This creates an unsustainable system that incentivizes the need for constant and often unnecessary consumption.

CYCLE

A developing nation with high GDP, especially per capita, creates a strong local economy. That in turn creates jobs and an increase in public revenue through taxation. Armed with more tax money, a good government will invest in education and infrastructure to better support the economy now and for generations to come.

As students enter the workforce with higher qualifications and a better job market, they naturally veer towards higher paying and higher status jobs. This is where gaps start to appear.

As the ‘white collar’ jobs get filled, ‘blue collar’ jobs that are fundamental to our society get overlooked. They don't pay enough, are far more labour intense and generally don't offer much career progression. These jobs however must be done. Think of construction, trades, catering etc… All these jobs require on the job knowledge rather than a degree.

And this is where the EU is. It's where the US is. Its where the UK is. Its where more and more countries are finding themselves. The fast growing Emirates for example. These countries are short on labour. They are particularly short on workers to fill their blue collar vacancies. So what do they do?

They import workers.

PONZI

The economy dictates our way of life. Without a strong economy we would be killing each other for bread and milk. This has been the story of mankind for millenia before capitalism began to dominate in the late 1800s.

Now in order to sustain a strong economy you have to keep finding ways to get consumers to spend their money. If consumers start saving their money, which is obviously financially savvy, that creates a burden on the economy. So the job of Government is to encourage commerce so that more money is spent. The more money spent by consumers, the more jobs will be created. This in turn creates new consumers and thus fuels the economy further.

But what happens when you start running out of workers and consumers?

PEOPLE

It's a fact. The birth rates in developed nations are dropping. An ideal birth rate to sustain a population is 2.1 children per woman. Anything more is a bonus whilst anything less is an upcoming burden. Not a single developed nation has a birth rate that matches the target.

To give you an example, the first country in the Top 10 by GDP to appear in the birth rate ranking is India. They are in 107th place with 2.0. It will come as no surprise perhaps to anyone in Europe that the top 10 is made up entirely of African nations.

The decline in the birth rate is leading to a declining population growth rate. This is capable of bankrupting the developed nations. This is why in most developed nations, governments are shifting pensions to private companies. These governments know that social security will not sustain the millennial generation and beyond.

Millennials getting scammed again!

Millennials will not get a state pension when they retire because they bought too much coffee during their working life.

Below are some illustrations from the United Nations showing the actual growth rates from 1950 to date and projections going forward. A striking figure shown in the third image is that by 2033, just 10 years from now!, the most developed nations growth rate will be in negative.

Source for charts: HERE

The global population growth rate has been in decline since the 60s and is projected to be in negative territory by the turn of the century.

The top 10 countries by GDP are all below the World Average fertility rate and crucially all are below the the ideal target of 2.1.

The growth rate in the more developed regions is plummeting and will be negative within 10 years.

Native populations aren't large enough to sustain or fuel more growth in their economies. Furthermore they aren’t populating enough to plug the gaps visible in the near future.

So, going back to the cycle mentioned earlier, a solution is to import cheap labour which solves three issues:

1. Plugs the labour gap immediately.

2. Creates consumers immediately.

3. Adds procreators to the population.

Supply and demand being serviced at the same time. This is also why workers imported are largely male and of working age. These people are being allowed to be trafficked to fill the blue collar jobs.

TRAGEDY

So the next time you hear politicians throwing hot air at each other over illegal immigration keep in mind that both those politicians understand why illegal immigrants are being allowed to enter the country at ease. They are here to work. They are here to provide cheap labour to sustain the blue collar jobs. They are here to populate and they are here to spend the little money they make.

This is why neither side of the aisles actually implement effective policy to limit immigration. It’s why no matter how much a candidate states immigration will stop…I’m looking at you Meloni…they will all cave to necessity. Just this week Lampedusa, an Italian Island, received 112 boats containing 5,000 immigrants from Africa. The population of Lampedusa is 6,000. These people will be processed and distributed throughout the EU.

A tragic image of the dangers people are put it in by traffickers.

It’s important to understand that this post isn’t meant to attack immigrants. More often than not the immigrants themselves are scammed of thousands of euros, are held as slaves in inhumane conditions and then trafficked in overloaded dinghy’s across the dangerous Mediterranean graveyard. These poor people are victims of organised human trafficking that the EU facilitates by not stopping it at source.

Now whether or not the traffickers themselves are paying a pretty penny into a fixer’s pocket that finds its way to the EU and local state parliaments is another question. All I’ll say is that if the immigrant that travelled thousands of miles through several countries without any knowledge of where the traffickers are, found the traffickers, then I’m quite sure our governments know where they are too.

Everything is by design.

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Jack Daniel Muscat.