In October 2023, 10 members of the German parliament (Bundestag) left Die Linke (the Left) and declared their intention to form their own party. With their departure, Die Linke’s parliamentary group fell to 28 out of the 736 members of the Bundestag, compared to the 78 members of the far-right Alliance for Germany (AfD). One of the reasons for the departure of these 10 MPs is that they believe that Die Linke has lost touch with its working-class base, whose decomposition over issues of war and inflation has moved many of them into the arms of the AfD.
I think last couple of years should have taught everyone not to treat immigration in a partisan way because it paves way to magical thinking on both sides of the argument.
Immigration has plenty of benefits but also costs. Does making labour market more competitive for lowest income class really sound like a leftist thing to do? If things like that are not addressed you get Putin worshipping whackos filling the niche.
But immigration needs to be treated in a partisan way as there are two ways to handle it: proper integration or far-right deportation fantasies.
Proper integration and deportation fantasies are precisely what I was talking about - magical thinking. It’s easier to think about this with three sides to the equation: left, right and market liberal. “Left” wants integration but has no answer to covering its cost. Right wants to somehow force people into having babies (outlawing abortion, coercing LGBT people to hide their identity) which is also dumb.
Market liberals will want workforce injection to drive wages down and to have an easy way of keeping pension system going. It rejects impact to the poor entirely. We’re all dealing with housing crisis and you want to make it even worse? Obviously this will result in a knee-jerk reaction and rise of far right.
It’s not like western societies can keep on going without addressing the issue of aging population but discussion about striking the balance should be open, honest and take as much time as we need.
You say this as if the housing market issue isn’t created by policies. And as if there was some magical massive influx of immigrants when it’s in fact still too low to (even in addition to existing birth rates) keep the population stable.
So it’s not exactly an unsolvable problem. In fact babies tend to be incredible expensive and bad at working, so any other population increase (or just stabilisation of numbers) would be even more expensive.
If your plan is however to not address any existing issues, then yes. In that scenario immigration will bring additional problems. But that’s not the point.
Placing blame for housing crisis is irrelevant, it’s here and needs addressing. Adding more people to the formula without major changes to how we deal with housing is just naive.
You say that massive migration waves ended. Just 2 years ago we took in 6 million refugees from Ukraine. This was mostly women and children who integrate easier and Ukrainians have stellar labour market participation. There’s no denying this had significant impact on rent prices though. But way more will be coming due to climate crisis and we don’t seem to be doing much to prepare.
I’m not sure why you say I propose we do nothing. I’m saying we should stop going all in on solutions that alienate lower classes and left, right and liberals seem to try to fuck them over in their own unique ways.
They’re being pretty clear (and not wrong) that immigration isn’t adding more people. It’s keeping the same amount of people.
If it was up to us that would be the idea but we have to take in people that are fleeing war torn areas. Population of Poland grew from 38 to 41M at one point due to second invasion of Ukraine. Thankfully there’s solid amount of a solidarity due to cultural proximity but even this is slowly fizzling out because of pressure this puts on low income class.
Sweden and Germany took similar amounts of people. Did they build adequate amount of housing?