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So Georgia Meloni, the supposed far-right firebrand of Italy, is now planning to radically open up visa access for non-EU migrants. PiS in Poland are planning similar measures, even as they've let in record number of workers from moslem-majority countries since they've took power. Of course, the rhetoric from both the Italian and the Poles are all about asylum seekers and illegal migration. Sort of reminds me of GOP rhetoric about stopping people at the border even as they get jawboned by business lobbies to liberalise legal avenues for work visas.
It's the same thing here and it deserves to be pointed out that these fake populists in Europe are ultimately in thrall to the same power system as the old parties are. What's driving large-scale migration isn't some evil plot. It's not Soros or even the Kalergi plan. It's just capitalism. Both of those individuals may be colorful but ultimately the driving force is structural.
Of course, my explanation is boring, perhaps even banal, which is why it will never take off. Not enough drama. As for these developments, I think Europe should be a bit "pragmatically racist" in selecting groups from countries that have a track record of integrating well, e.g. I'd give preference for South-East Asia, but it appears that such a moderate policy is too racist even for the "far-right".
Incidentally, when reading about Max Weber's life in recent days, I found out that he was quite nationalistic as a young man and even campaigned against cheap foreign labour (principally from Eastern Europe). Quite ironic for someone who later became a liberal intellectual, but also amusing in that it shows that this thing has been going on for a lot longer than people realise and it likely won't end soon either.
Does your theory predict collapse in immigration once AI-powered automation makes this (already net budget negative over lifetime, in many cases) addition clearly counterproductive?
How's this for drama: the people supporting mass immigration are driven by basically moral considerations (though their morality may be different from what we believe), and would rather slow down productivity growth than allow their clients to be made patenly uneconomical for "capitalism".
I've been hearing about the automation makes work superflous for well over a decade now. It reached a crescendo in 2016-17 with Erik Brynjolfsson's book and subsequent forecasts by various institutions of a rapid job less. Never happened. Can AI be different? It could, but people are vastly overestimating AI progress. The key to productivity displacing jobs is when programmers themselves are no longer as needed and AI can self-improve. We're still a long away from that.
Alternatively, some capitalists prefer high immigration as a way to cheap out, reduce bargaining power for workers and saving on productivity-enhancing investments while pocketing the change in terms of dividends. To be clear, I think some on the left are driven by moralistic arguments but they aren't the ones driving policy. Capitalists are, but they are opportunistic enough to use the shield of leftist morality to bludgeon their political opponents. It has the added benefit of raising one's social status in the domestic arena and people care deeply about status, too.
It's not the key. If AI was inacapble of self-improvement but could learn complex work at midwit level (115-125) and drive humanoid robots, it could displace like 80% of workers at the minimum.
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