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Rafaela Dancygier, a political scientist at Princeton University, studies the politics of immigration and integration, including what fuels the rise of anti-immigrant far-right parties. She has found that many of the areas in Europe where anti-immigration politics are on the rise share certain characteristics: They have aging populations, fewer workers and fewer children.
“When people talk about the aging of populations in general, they refer to this as a nationwide phenomenon,” she said in an interview. “And that’s of course true. But then there are some areas in countries, often outside of cities, where that’s already just extremely pronounced. Because the young people are leaving, working-age people are leaving.”
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The process, she said, goes something like this: As areas depopulate, the state tends to pull back its services from the region. Schools close because there are fewer children. Trains and bus lines get canceled, or are less frequent. Hospitals shut down. It is a local version of the kind of strain that aging countries will face on a national level if there are fewer workers to support more retirees.
That makes life more difficult in practical ways, she said, but there is also a psychological effect: People feel neglected and undervalued by the political elite.
Far-right parties “are very good at detecting the problem and playing on the grievances of voters who live in these areas,” she said. But these parties don’t offer realistic solutions to the problems of demographic decline. Instead, they scapegoat immigrants, blaming asylum-seekers and other foreigners for the region’s problems.
If robots, AI and automation create the efficiencies everyone is breathlessly predicting will a reduction of the workforce size even matter? Would it be a bad thing?
That depends on public services and welfare programs being good. ATM, especially in the US a loss of jobs will result in more homelessness because the welfare programs are almost nonexistent.
So ATM in a lot of places it just increases the wealth gap and puts more people into poverty.
If that ever gets fixed then more automation could be a benefit by reducing hours and giving people more free time for leisure, but we are no where near that ideal.
I work with a lot of robots in my factory.
We still need a workforce. It’s just that your job has changed from operating a welding press directly to feeding a welding robot and then checking its work (and constantly tinkering with it to keep the piece of shit running)
That depopulation is also a way for rich countries to recruit cheap disposable labor and expand the skilled labor pool to lower both wages and costs at home (and thus lower inflation), as well as to continue underdevelopment in the global south so they can be continually superexploited for resources. Guerilla History had a good ep about it recently. Labor is the superior to capital, so at a national scale remittances can never make up for the loss of a worker. It’s win/win for the destination country and lose/lose for the home country.
Hopefully I get around to reading Migration as Economic Imperialism, but without an audiobook it might not happen lol
Not just cheap labour, but cheap education. Nurses trained in Australia have to have schooling, then university. Urges imported from the Phillipines go straight to work, paying taxes. It means the Phillipines is subsidising healthcare in a different country.
Yes, it’s another form of outsourcing. Externalize the cost of educating a child from birth to become a nurse, so instead they just appear in the country fully trained and ready to work.
