BBC: Why Germany needs migrants more than UK

Robert Peston:

There is an economic and demographic backdrop to the differential policies towards asylum-seekers of Germany and the UK - to Germany's relatively open door, that compares with the UK's heavily fortified portal (which will be opened just a bit by David Cameron later today).

The two relevant points (leaving aside moral ones) are that:

1. the UK's population is rising fast, whereas Germany's is falling fast;
2. the dependency ratio (the proportion of expensive older people in the population relative to able-bodied, tax-generating workers) is rising much quicker in Germany than in the UK.

So to put it another way, it is arguably particularly useful to Germany to have an influx of young grateful families from Syria or elsewhere, who may well be keen to toil and strive to rebuild their lives and prove to their hosts that they are not a burden - in the way that successive immigrant waves have done all over the world (including Jews like my family in London's East End).

Here are the European Commission's projections from its Ageing Report that was published earlier this year.

It projects that Germany's population will shrink from 81.3 million in 2013 to 70.8 million in 2060, whereas the UK's will rise from 64.1 million to 80.1 million.

As you can see, what is striking is that the UK is set to become the EU's most populous country, ahead of Germany and France, as a result of a relatively high fertility rate and greater projected rates of net migration.

It is probably relevant that the Commission forecasts that the proportion of the German population in 2060 represented by migrants arriving after 2013 would be 9%, compared with 14% in the UK. So Germany would be a lot less multicultural than the UK.

As for the dependency ratio, the percentage of those 65 and over compared with those aged between 15 and 64, that is forecast to rise from 32% to a very high 59% in Germany by 2060.

Or to put it another way, by 2060 there will be fewer than two Germans under 65 to work and generate taxes to support each German over 65.

...

Here is the thing. Wherever you stand in the debate on whether immigration is a good or bad thing - and most economists would argue that immigration promotes growth - right now immigration looks much more economically useful to Germany than to the UK.

That is perhaps one of the unspoken reasons why Germany is being much more welcoming to asylum seekers from Syria and elsewhere right now.

That said, some business leaders and a couple of Tory ministers gave me what can only be described as an off-message critique of David Cameron's approach to the migrant crisis over the weekend.

They said that Angela Merkel is creaming off the most economically useful of the asylum seekers, by taking those that have shown the gumption and initiative to risk life and limb by fleeing to Europe.

Precedent suggests they will be the ones that find work fastest and impose the least economic burden on Germany or any other host country.

By contrast, David Cameron appears to be doing what many would see as the more morally admirable thing - which is to go to the Syrian camps and invite children and the most vulnerable of refugees to Britain....

Ah, the politics of population-replacement...

Here we are in the age of the robot, and yet still we talk of too few workers.  One might think our policies...and our politics might reflect the same...As if !  What they do reflect, as always, are the interests of capital.

The Beeb has a poll out on public attitudes in the UK towards taking in more refugees.  They note that those of a working-class background are much less supportive (24% to 54%) than the middle-classes.  Wonder why that might be ?*


* No, not that they are simply uneducated and/or racist.

That 'Soft Power' Bullshit

Can't even remember now where I was hearing it discussed, whether it was R4/X or some podcast...

Then, I come across this chart, and, hang on a minute, Austria ?  The country that should be, were it not for the historical existence of a certain empire, and the later genocide at the hands of one of its own sons, part of Deutschland ?  A country routinely confused by the world at large with a continent in the South Pacific ?  What cultural or other 'soft power' does the Österreich possess ?  I'll give you Wolfgang & Falco, granted, but then ?

And Singapore ?  Singapore has a culture ?  Of its own ?

And the UK at number one ?  What, because of the popularity of British themes in Japanese manga ? The UK is viewed by the majority of the world as some sort of heritage-themed resort for tourists.

And Canada, shit !  What, other than a handful of slang-words, traditional spellings, the Queen on plastic currency, and poutine, really defines Canadians as separate from Americans, eh ?

I just don't understand anything any more.*


* I just liked the way that sentence sounded in my head.

Speaking of Risky Business...

This piece seems to be making the rounds regarding the situation in Greece.  Especially this:

With respect to Greece, the precise thing that European elites did to set the current chain of events in motion was to replace private debt with public during the 2010 first “bailout of Greece”. Prior to that event, it was obvious that blame was multipolar. Here are the banks, in France, in Germany, that foolishly lent. Not just to Greece, but to Goldman’s synthetic CDOs and every other piece of idiot paper they could carry with low risk-weights. In 2010, the EU, ECB, and IMF laundered a bailout of mostly French and German banks through the Greek fisc. Cash flowed into Greece only so it could flow out to rickety banks. Now, suddenly, the banks were absolved. There were very few bad loans left on the books of European lenders, everyone was clean, no bad actors at all. Except one. There were the institutions, the “troika”, clearly the good guys, so “helpful” with their generous offer of funds. And then there was Greece. What had been a mudwrestling match, everybody dirty, was transformed into mass of powdered wigs accusing a single filthy penitent (or, when the people with their savings in just-rescued banks decide to be generous, a petulant misbehaving child).

I won't claim to understand all the economic arguments involved, but I do think it speaks well to the degree to which the EU's handling of the Greek crisis is symptomatic of an overall disintegration over the last few years in any sense of solidarity between European countries.  Not so much a Union increasingly as a real-life franchise of Big Brother, wherein the various roommates squabble more and more over time as their proximity in a shared household (to the upkeep of which the various roommates' contributions vary wildly) breeds enmity.

The complete disunity over how to handle the refugees from North Africa is another example, what with Britain refusing to participate in any apportionment of the refugee-populations, and Denmark reintroducing border-controls.

When the game was up, when the global house of credit cards collapsed in the late Aughts, European leaders had a choice. They had knowingly and purposefully brought weak states into the Eurozone, because they genuinely, even nobly, wished to build a large, strong, United Europe. When they did so, they understood there would be crises. A unified Europe, they had always claimed, would be forged one crisis at a time. The right thing to have done for Europe at this point would have been to point out the regulatory errors and misaligned incentives that encouraged profligate lending and enabled corruption and waste among borrowers, and fix those. Banks that had made bad loans would acknowledge losses. The banks themselves would have to be restructured or bailed out.

But “bank restructuring” is a euphemism for imposing losses on wealthy creditors. And explicit bank bailouts are humiliations of elites, moments when the mask comes off and the usually tacit means by which states preserve and enhance the comfort of the comfortable must give way to very visible, very unpopular, direct cash flows.

The choice Europe’s leaders faced was to preserve the union or preserve the wealth, prestige, and status of the community of people who were their acquaintances and friends and selves but who are entirely unrepresentative of the European public. They chose themselves. The formal institutions of the EU endure, but European community is now failing fast.

It is difficult to overstate how deeply Europe’s leaders betrayed the ideals of European integration in their handing of the Greek crisis. The first and most fundamental goal of European integration was to blur the lines of national feeling and interest through commerce and interdependence, in order to prevent the fractures along ethnonational lines that made a charnel house of the continent, twice. That is the first thing, the main rule, that anyone who claims to represent the European project must abide: We solve problems as Europeans together, not as nations in conflict.

...

The fact of the matter is no country, not Germany, not France, would voluntarily put up with the sort of “adjustment” that has been forced on Greece, for the good reason that gratuitous great depressions are not actually helpful to an economy. Creditors have had five years to mismanage Greece and they’ve done a startlingly effective job. Syriza has had five months to object. However much you may dislike their negotiating style, however little you think of their competence, Greece’s catastrophe was not Syriza’s work. If creditors respond to Syriza’s “intransigence” with maneuvers that cause yet more devastation, that will be on the creditors. Blaming victims for having insufficiently perfect leaders is standard fare for apologists of predation. Unfortunately, understanding this may be of little comfort to the disemboweled prey.

Europe’s creditors are behaving exactly as one might naively predict private creditors would behave, seeking to get as much blood from the stone as quickly as possible, indifferent to the cost in longer-term growth. And that, in fact, is a puzzle! Greece’s creditors are not nervous lenders panicked over their own financial situation, but public sector institutions representing primarily governments that are in no financial distress at all. They really shouldn’t be behaving like this.

I think the explanation is quite simple, though. Having recast a crisis caused by a combustible mix of regulatory failure and elite venality into a morality play about profligate Greeks who must be punished, Eurocrats are now engaged in what might be described as “loan-shark theater”. They are putting on a show for the electorates they inflamed in order to preserve their own prestige. The show must go on.

Austerity may or may not be a viable option* for a country like the UK, but Greece is not the UK.  Greece's GDP is in freefall, and its ability to repay debtors will only worsen even more the longer this is dragged out, no matter what reforms are put in place.  It needs to be able to default, with all the consequences that brings, and/or inflate its currency.  If we had any sense we'd have let it do so long ago.  But Deutschland et al want to maintain the image of Europe, the illusion.  And letting Greece default or exit the Euro makes for bad optics.

Of course, were this truly a Union, then the debts of one would be the debts of all...


* Last time I checked, most patients who received a treatment of leeching didn't actually die.

Rammstein: Du Hast

Fantasies of a few years ago are at this point less terrifying than the day-to-day reality of ordinary politics.  And from the United States to the United Kingdom, we find ourselves celebrating what was once the right-wing as liberal emancipators.  We are so very fucked.

Terrifying Numbers for NATO

And yes, they terrify me, critic as I may be of our general insanity towards Russia post-Cold War, and our specific insanity regarding the situation in Ukraine.

Public opinion in some European countries could be reluctant to support collective defence for fellow Nato members if they were to be attacked by Russia, according to a new international survey.

The report by the Pew Research Center - a non-partisan US think-tank based in Washington DC - surveyed attitudes in North America and across Europe as well as Ukraine and Russia to assess public attitudes towards the current Ukraine crisis.

...

Among Western allies, it includes Europe's six largest Nato members (France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and the UK) as well as the United States and Canada.

While some of its findings are in keeping with other recent surveys, it also throws up what may be noteworthy trends.

What is particularly striking is the reluctance among many of those surveyed in Europe to get drawn into a deeper military conflict with Russia - either in Ukraine, or elsewhere on European soil.

Perhaps the most interesting finding is in answer to the question: "If Russia got into a serious military conflict with one of its neighbouring countries which is a Nato ally, should our country use force to defend it?"

This relates to a core principle of Nato's founding treaty of 1949, the "Article Five" which states that: "An armed attack on one… shall be considered an attack against them all".

On average in Europe, only 48% of those polled - less than half - backed the idea of their country using force to come to the aid of another Nato country attacked by Russia.

Among the countries surveyed Germany is the most reluctant: 58% of those polled said they did not think their country should use military force to defend a Nato ally against Russia.

France too was unenthusiastic - 53% of those polled were opposed.

Even in Britain - often seen as a staunch Nato member - less than 50% supported the idea of using force to help another member of the alliance under attack.

Although maybe the complete disconnect between public attitudes towards Russia and support for military action helps explain why so many fail to understand how fundamentally dangerous the expansion of NATO is and was.

Just What the Hell Do You Idiots Think a Military Alliance is for, People ?  It's not a social club !

An Attack On One is an Attack On All.  Which is why we (should) very carefully consider membership.  There is no right to membership in a military alliance.  There is no fundamental obligation to extend membership in a military alliance.  This is Life & Death here.  Quite possibly the survival or not of the entire Human Fucking Race at stake if we get it wrong.

And lest we forget, the entanglement of military alliances is how we started the Great War (aka World War I) just over a century ago.  Will we ever learn ?...

War Is Peace, Freedom is Slavery

These two sentences piqued my interest in this piece about Jeb Bush.


Bush advisers say Poland is an economic success story, a home to outsourced labor of German manufacturers that's warily watching Russia's aggression toward former Eastern bloc states. 

&

"Both the United States and the European Union are confronted by legitimate security concerns and middle-class concerns, including lack of wage growth," said Kristen Silverberg, a Bush adviser and former ambassador to the European Union during President George W. Bush's second term. 


Yes, the United States and the European Union are very concerned about 'middle-class concerns' such as 'lack of wage growth.'  So much so that they consistently pursue policies that will inevitably keep wages low.

Such as new mass trade-deals.  Such as the United States looking the other way during the first decade of the new century, whilst millions and millions of illegal immigrants flooded across the southern border, providing cheap and compliant labour on the low-end of the labour-market (and whilst also using visas and outsourcing agreements on the higher end).  And such, as the European Union expanding ever further eastwards in the pursuit of amongst other things, cheap labour.

Those Polish workers can work for less than the Germans they displaced, in part because of a lower cost of living.  But inevitably they are going to want a higher standard of living, are going to be more choosy in what work they do and under what conditions.  And as their standard of living equalises with the likes of Deutschland, there's inevitably pressure for new frontiers in cheap labour.

And there, right to the east of Poland is Ukraine.  What is the Western interest in Ukraine ?  Well, four things really*:

1. Containment of Russia (all ridiculous claims to the contrary aside)
2. New markets for Western goods
3. Natural resources, and...
4. Cheap labour.

For the West, Ukraine must join the EU.  Turkey must join the EU.  Georgia, which doesn't even have a foothold on the European sub-continent, must join the EU.  Why ?  Because, profit.  Even more so than the desire to contain Russia, profit.  Always profit über alles.

And one of the biggest drags on profits is always those pesky workers with their whining about wanting living wages, whining about wanting time off because they had babies, then wanting time off to spend with their children, wanting healthcare for their families, education for their children, wanting to be able to one day retire without having to live in a freezing apartment in winter subsiding on catfood.  Damn greedy workers !

And so the European Union is seemingly willing to risk everything, even possibly nuclear war, over adding the largest possible prize in the subcontinent into its mix.  A union that was created in the aftermath of the Second World War explicitly as an attempt to prevent further war.  But...profit.


* You may note that there is no mention on this list of Ukrainian aspirations for freedom, for more democracy, for a better life.  That is because the West frankly does not give a shit.

Terrorgruppe: Mein Skateboard ist wichtiger als Deutschland

I don't think ones like or dislike for Germany is a predicate for liking this song -- And as for the overall sentiment...  (And...gratuitously I could always throw Greece into the mix...)