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.

No Surrender: Donald Trump Wants the Republicans to Go Fuck Themselves...Slowly

Never got to this earlier, and could save it for the inevitable link-dump, but I do quite love this picture of Donald Trump having signed one of the bullshit pledges to the RNC (was the extra copy in case he didn't like the way his signature looked on the first try ?).  The make-me-look-smarter reading-glasses à la Rick Perry...the appropriate distance down his nose...The green tint that may or may not be an accident of white-balance...The unreadable savage blur of a signature coinciding with the almost Comic Sans. of his 'print' writing...The insane, 'I'm-not-balding' dead-animal-on-my-head comb-forward...And then...that look...

This is not the look of capitulation, Rand.  (Here, I'll sign ya shitty little piece o' paper...if, it'll make y'feel better...)  This is the look of a privileged and pampered sixty-nine-year-old teahadist maniac getting to live out a childhood fantasy at the expense of probably the entire world as his aging brain melts.  And we, in the media, the blogosphere, and social media, celebrate this lunacy at the possible expense of the survival of our own species

<Checks name of this blog>  Oh yeah...we're all fucked anyway !  Go for it Donnie ! Wha'the'hell ?!!

New Statesman: The retreat of social democracy

Leader: The retreat of social democracy

Throughout Europe, the populist right is becoming more acceptable to many. Meanwhile, social democrats are failing to adapt to globalisation.

...in Europe and throughout the west, social democracy is in crisis or retreat. The centre left is locked out of power in parliamentary systems in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and, of course, the United Kingdom. On the Continent, the experience is the same for the centre left in Germany, the Netherlands, Portu­gal, Spain, Hungary and now also Denmark, following the defeat of the centre-left bloc, which had been led by Helle Thorning-Schmidt.

The British left once looked to Scandinavia for inspiration and guidance. “If you want the American dream – go to Finland,” Ed Miliband observed. Yet Finland turfed out its centre-left coalition two months ago; three of the four Nordic countries now face being run by governments of the right. Only in Sweden is the centre left in power.

When Mr Miliband was elected as Labour leader in 2010, he was convinced that the world would turn left after the financial crisis. He gambled his entire leadership on this belief (and it was no more than that) – and he lost. Voters were certainly disturbed by widening inequality but just as important were desires for fiscal rectitude, balanced budgets and tighter controls on immigration.

The mainstream centre left has also produced an anaemic response to the rise of identity politics. It is true that parties of the radical left – such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain – have capitalised on a general mood of disenchantment but, significantly, both are Eurosceptic. More frequently, nationalism has been channelled by the mainstream centre right as well as populist insurgencies. Indeed, it was the rise of the right-wing Danish People’s Party – a Scandinavian version of the UK Independence Party – that contributed significantly to the defeat of the centre-left bloc in Denmark.

Throughout Europe, the populist right is becoming more acceptable to many. Meanwhile, social democrats are suffer­ing from what the political scientist Peter Mair termed “indifference on the part of both the citizenry and the ­political class: they are withdrawing and disengaging from one another”. To many voters, the feeling of solidarity between fellow citizens so crucial to social democracy has become increasingly meaningless in an age of globalised mass migration: parties of the centre left have failed to adapt to globalisation and the collapse in trade union membership. Most fundamentally, they have not convincingly answered the existential question of what the left is for when parties of both left and right are committed to cutting public spending.

Yah.  Which speaks to both the more left-leaning parties' failings on questions of immigration, and the perennial threat of nationalistic appeals against the vaguely defined 'other' undermining more progressive appeals to unite the have-nots against the haves.  Increasingly, Europe, if not the Western world generally, seems poised to re-live the 1930's.  And if you're not scared, you're probably not paying attention.