Another day, another Big Business grifter demanding to import another couple of hundred thousand cheap foreign workers. Back in the good, old days, these cronies would simply Blackbird a village of Kanakas, no worries. But modern society tends to frown on such activities, so the Top End of Town has had to resort to their second-favourite scam: begging favours off the government.
A government which is only too happy to oblige the crony capitalist whipcrackers: they get a pool of grateful new potential voters (or so the theory goes), and Treasury gets to fudge the growth figures. It’s a win-win.
Unless, of course, you’re one of the 27 million (and counting) inconsequential nobodies spending hours stuck in jammed traffic, trying to commute from ever-further-flung suburbs spreading like a cancer over what used to be virgin bush or productive farmland, just so you can attempt to pay off your skyrocketing mortgage or stratospheric rent.
Who cares if your kids’ classrooms are bursting at the seams and you have to wait three weeks to see a GP? Certainly, not the elites who are in love with mass immigration — they get all of the benefits of trendy ethnic restaurants and cheap labour, with none of the downsides. You won’t see many migrants in Double Bay or Docklands, and that’s just how they like it.
For the elite, it’s “mass migration for thee, not me”, all the way.
It’s worth returning to first principles when thinking about an optimal immigration policy. The first is to recognise that a higher migrant intake will make the economy bigger but will not necessarily result in higher per capita income. In other words, being bigger is no guarantee of being wealthier. There is no convincing evidence that migration has boosted productivity.
The second important principle is that there are winners and losers when it comes to immigration. The biggest winners are the migrants themselves, a point demonstrated by the Productivity Commission. But owners of capital and workers with skills that are complementary to migrants are also beneficiaries. Workers whose skills are substitutes with migrant workers will often lose out.
The Australian
The endlessly-touted claim that “migration boosts the economy” needs to be considered in perspective. On Treasury’s own, oft-boasted, figures, the economic boost of migration pans out to about $100 per Australian, per year. So, about $1.92 a week: if that was offered as a pay rise it would be insultingly laughable. As a payoff for the problems listed above, it doesn’t even begin to stack up.
Then there is the claim that mass migration is needed to ameliorate an ageing population. But there are two glaring problems with that argument: not only do migrants age as well, they invariably come with the baggage of elderly parents and dependent children to burden the already-stretched Australian system. While skilled migrants might chip in their $1.92 a week, their extended families suck away at the taxpayer teat.
As it does in so many ways, Sweden is a cautionary tale of the cost of mass migration colliding with a generous welfare state. Far from fixing the issues of the senescent Baby Boom population bubble, Swedes are being told to work ever longer in order to fund the lifestyle migrants have become accustomed to.
Swedish Socialist party Finance Minister Magdalena Andersson announced that the retirement age would likely be raised in the near future in order to offset increased welfare costs, Swedish newspaper Expressen reports.
“Looking at those who start working at 30, there should be opportunities to work longer than 65,” Andersson said.
The minister made her remarks following an economic report from the Local Authorities and County Council (SKL) released earlier this week. The report claimed that the welfare state would grow faster than revenue obtained through taxation due to the dramatic rise of Sweden’s population.
When I was little, my favourite storybook was The King, the Mice, and the Cheese. A cheese-loving king determined to control the mouse population, imports cats. When the cats overrun the palace, he imports dogs. And so on, until the palace is home to a herd of rampaging elephants.
Apparently, the Swedish government never read that book.
Due to the influx of migrants during the migrant crisis and Sweden’s growing birthrate, the population of the country has expanded faster than almost any other European country.
Some Swedish cities, like the southern city of Malmo, owe their population growth almost entirely to mass migration from predominantly Middle Eastern countries […]
While migrants are increasing the cost of the Swedish welfare state in terms of added infrastructure and cost for services, many are unemployed and directly on welfare. A recent report showed that while the native Swedish unemployment rate was around 3.9 percent, it stood at 21.8 percent for Swedish residents from foreign backgrounds.
Breitbart
The concomitant gap of 47 billion kronar between revenue and welfare costs will have to be made up by either tax increases, or upping the retirement age. So, it’s back to the herring factory for you, Morfar!
Ain’t mass migration wonderful?