..welfare policies do lure immigrants. Immigration and welfare are a bad mix in other ways, too. Comprehensive welfare systems (transfers, pensions, healthcare) tend not to arise in societies of mass immigration, such as the United States...
Welfare states require consensus and society may now be too multicultural to provide it.
Immigrants can be good for an economy, but their contributions tend to go to the private sector through cheap labour. As for the public sector,
almost everywhere, immigrants and their dependants take more out than they put in. Native Germans between the ages of 20 and 65 pay out more in taxes than they collect in services, but Turks in Germany do that only between the ages of 28 and 57. These figures worsen over time. The number of foreign residents in Germany rose steadily between 1971 and 2000 – from 3m to about 7.5m – but the number of employed foreigners in work held steady at roughly 2m people.
Until recently politicians suggested that immigrants might actually save European welfare states, replenishing the ratio of workers per retiree which has declined rapidly because of low European birth rates. It won’t work. Immigrants, too, age and retire and the system must take care of them and their large families when they do.
But the amount of wishful thinking invested in this idea is impressive. “In the long term, migrants themselves will age and contribute to the increasing dependency ratio,” a Home Office report admitted in late 2007, “but only assuming that they remain in the UK during retirement.” What other assumption can be made? Are we to imagine that migrants will work to fund cushy retirements for Europeans, then slink obligingly back to the Third World to pass their own retirements in poverty?
Immigration also weakens welfare states by making native taxpayers less willing to fund them. Five years ago David Goodhart of Prospect magazine warned that social programmes arise out of a sense of obligation to fellow citizens, which gets harder to maintain when fellow citizens have a different culture...<article continues with more examples of how immigration hurts welfare states>
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Originally Posted by toxic avenger
