New EU members

[Datajack Franit]

Sandman, I admit you're right on that. Still, radical families living alienated in a foreign society tend to, er, have more babies!


VetLegion- the situation of Italy is a tragedy. Not inventing anything, there are major problems with immigrants here. Myself, I am very ashamed of reading something about Romanians every single day.(my family migrated from there 24 years ago).

It is virtually impossible to open a newspaper without bumping into:

http://www.corriere.it/Primo_Piano/Cronache/2006/09_Settembre/22/stupro.shtml

- young couple assaulted at a park at noon, girl gang raped by Moroccan teenagers (this happened in Bologna last summer, we still have some occasional rapes of tourists, as local girls are frightened)

http://www.corriere.it/Primo_Piano/Cronache/2006/08_Agosto/14/blitz.shtml

- families held hostage at home by thieves, beated and tortured (every month in any industrial town in the North), 150 arrests, 74 are illegal immigrants

http://www.corriere.it/Primo_Piano/Cronache/2006/08_Agosto/26/violenza.shtml

- serial rapist strikes Milan, Egyptian man arrested at last

http://www.corriere.it/Primo_Piano/Cronache/2006/12_Dicembre/11/erba.shtml

- young woman and her child assaulted at home, both had their throats cut with a knife, their home was set on fire. A couple of neighbours came for help hearing the noise, she was stabbed, her husband woke up from coma yesterday.

[Impaler[WrG]]

The birth rates among new imigrants shifts to more closly reflect the new country, for the forign born the shift is usualy not sufficient to match the native rate but among their children who grow up the the new country their birth rates are almost identical to the native rate. Or atleast this is the pattern in the US ware integration is a way of life, Europe seems paranoid about its inability to culturaly assimilate imigrants so I could easily see the process taking say an additional generation to equalize but no more then that. Your muslim take over statistics are probably based on wildly over estimations of birthrate among imigrants due to equilizatin being ignored (aka every muslim imigrant has 5 children and each child has 5 children who have 5 more children each etc etc)

[Drogue]

Originally posted by Datajack Franit
Maybe you will find this other graph more helpful

Wait, that's not that bad at all. Look at the dependency ratio, in 1950 it was roughly 60:40, in 2005 it's decreased to 65:35 and it 2050 it'll be around 54:46. It's not *that* much of a change. Indeed, that change would be eliminated by raising the retirement age slightly. As we live longer, it's only right we should work a little longer, or accept that we'll be less well off over the course of our lives.

What I can tell you is that immigration has jack all, in the long run, to do with lifetime consumption. It's all down to savings and expenditure - how much do I earn over my working life, and how many extra non-working years do I need to spread that over. Simple.

[Heresson]

The CIA Factbook is your friend

If You like your friends to give you info they make up, true.

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by VetLegion
The thing about labour shortages is that most of the time the second part of the sentence is dropped. "There is a shortage of health workers" should actually be phrased "there is a shortage of health workers at current health-worker wages".

My girlfriend worked for years as a nurse, and got about as far as she could in that career. She'd also had enough of nursing and sought and made a new career elsewhere, using her clinical experience as a bridge. Many others have also left nursing, and such nursing skills can't always be replaced overnight, hence there was a market demand to import experienced nurses. You might argue that more nurses should always be trained to replace the leavers, but that's not always the way it works out.

There is no natural right to cheap health or plumbing services. The prices are the result of supply and demand working their thing (there are some qualifications to that statement because there are often cartels fixing prices, regulations and other obstructions, however it is generally true). As such, the prices are fair.

People requiring plumbing work are finding prices and availability a lot fairer now, than when a limited number of plumbers were able to operate an informal cartel. Surely cross-border labour movement should be a natural part of a truly free market.

I find complaints about labour shortages pretty snobbish in most cases.

In some cases I would agree with you - including personal experience at times, but from a market perspective the supply of any commodity (including labour) would be expected to adjust to meet demand. If it is considered free and natural for capital to move across borders, then why not labour?

I'll hazard disagreeing here too. I don't really know anything about British educational system. But what seems far more logical to me (than it being dysfunctional) is that the system simply maxed out and now can't come to terms with the fact that human abilities aren't evenly distributed. I doubt that those who have the abilities to advance are hampered by the system. It seems far more likely that the system is struggling with those less endowned.

The problem is down to a government obsession with targets and league tables, where educational establishments are dependent for funding on results, and not quality. This leads to a situation where any establishment with higher standards (and lower pass-rates) will suffer. The tragic result is, to be frank, cheating, and the handing out of paper qualifications that don't reflect achievement and ability.

------

Let me put it to you this way. If Croatia was in the EU today, and I was a Capitalist running a software / technology outfit looking for the best person for the job, someone like yourself with excellent English (better than most English people), doubtless strong IT skills and high intelligence would be an attractive candidate for the right role - particularly if I wanted to sell the product in Croatia and Serbia. This is exactly what happened in a place where I used to work where candidates from countries with markets they wished to sell to would be sought after and valued.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by Datajack Franit
10% of population in France - 6,000,000

Where does this figure come from?

[Colon™]

Originally posted by Sandman


Not universally they don't. Some Muslim countries even have a fertility rate below 2.1.

The CIA Factbook is your friend

Afghanistan: 6.69
Pakistan: 4
Saudi Arabia: 4
Egypt: 2.83
Indonesia: 2.4
Algeria: 1.89
Turkey: 1.92

CIA Factbook is crap. (though I agree people underestimate the fall in birthrates a lot of muslim countries - and has it ever occured to anyone that a some Arab countries have been experiencing an influx of non-muslims that goes way beyond migrations to Europe?)

[VetLegion]

Originally posted by Cort Haus
In some cases I would agree with you - including personal experience at times, but from a market perspective the supply of any commodity (including labour) would be expected to adjust to meet demand.

If the demand for nurses is high, we should see nurse wages rise to lower the demand until it is in balance with supply again.

What I'm trying to say is that statements like the often used "immigrants do the jobs natives won't do" are not really true. Natives are willing to do every job, if the price is right.

If it is considered free and natural for capital to move across borders, then why not labour?

I'm not really opposed to movement of labour. It's economically beneficial, or at least not harmful in most cases and the overall economy (some groups can be very hard hit though). Countries just have to be careful where they import from, since multiculturalism has been shown to not work.

Let me put it to you this way. If Croatia was in the EU today, and I was a Capitalist running a software / technology outfit looking for the best person for the job, someone like yourself with excellent English (better than most English people), doubtless strong IT skills and high intelligence

thanks

would be an attractive candidate for the right role - particularly if I wanted to sell the product in Croatia and Serbia. This is exactly what happened in a place where I used to work where candidates from countries with markets they wished to sell to would be sought after and valued.

One of the reasons I support my country's EU application is because it should make these cross-border cooperations easier and offer new opportunities. I am feeling underpaid

[Heresson]

Originally posted by Colon™


CIA Factbook is crap. (though I agree people underestimate the fall in birthrates a lot of muslim countries - and has it ever occured to anyone that a some Arab countries have been experiencing an influx of non-muslims that goes way beyond migrations to Europe?)

But they have no citizenship and often no rights at all

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by VetLegion
If the demand for nurses is high, we should see nurse wages rise to lower the demand until it is in balance with supply again.

Which would put up taxes and see the government voted out, which they are obviously reluctant to do.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by VetLegion
What I'm trying to say is that statements like the often used "immigrants do the jobs natives won't do" are not really true. Natives are willing to do every job, if the price is right.

No.

In France, there are some hard manual jobs whose wage has largely increased in the past years. It's now above many employees' wages. Yet, it remained staffed almost exclusively by immigrants, or by children of immigrants. I'm thinking especially of construction work and trash-picking. Among my friends who studied, such jobs aren't even on the radar despite them paying fairly well.

[VetLegion]

Well, higher wages for manual labour would attract blue collar or other service workers before attracting university educated folk. But if high enough, they would attract them too.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by VetLegion
Well, higher wages for manual labour would attract blue collar or other service workers before attracting university educated folk. But if high enough, they would attract them too.

this statement is really at odds with my experience. As a native, when I worked on construction, I was almost immediately asked what the heck I was doing there (not in a hostile fashion, but with complete curiosity: I was an aberration)

[VetLegion]

I have an uncle who came to France in the 70s. Even then the French weren't interested in working in construction at the wages offered, so my uncle became a mason.

The practice of hiring immigrants in construction is longer than you are old, which explains the curiosity you were greeted with.

But I have no doubt that if it payed well enough, many Frenchmen would be working in construction. We would also see more automation and maybe better planning.

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by Heresson
Poland proposed a preventive war against Germany after Hitler came to power. France denied.
I am sure if Hitler was treated with less tolerance, he would not be so sure his next steps will be successful as well. West didn't even TRY to stop him.

Yeah, and if the Catholic church hadn't helped Hitler to power in the first place no war would have been necessary. I know you don't accept this argument, as you've denied it before, despite the evidence I posted, but that's my opinion.

Or we could blame France for insisting on the punitive measures of Versailles, or all the Great Powers collectively for allowing WW1 to happen in the first place, or the whole history of Imperialism that gave rise to the Great Power rivalries and alliances, or the Capitalism which gave rise to that form of Imperialism. Judging by your posting history, I expect you blame the Joos for crippling Germany and creating Bolshevism blah blah.

A pre-emptive attack on Germany would, of course, have been as illegal in itself as the Nazi expansionism, and a crime against peace - however the retrospective morality looks. The concept of pre-emptive war is a dangerous one - as Iraq has demonstrated. Only a war launched in response to a violation of sovereignty would have been legal.

As we all know from playing Civ, the best way to prevent a war is to be prepared to fight one - with genuine strength rather than rhetoric, and the West was not prepared for this - even though we know now that it should have been.

Anyway, I expect we'll get told off for going off-topic now, and I'm sure that alternatives to appeasement have been discussed many times before here.