Your numbers can't be faulted, but the risks might be overstated. Based on purely anecdotal evidence (several young Syrian men who ended up in Belgium) I can say that many of these guys do indeed have families they intend to bring over. Because of the danger and uncertainty of the journey, those who could stash their families somewhere relatively safe for a short while did so. They knew it would be easier for them to reach real safety on their own, and that there will be organisations to help them reunite with their families afterwards. Of course, a negative aspect to this is that the current refugee numbers are lower than they should be, as many of these people will soon account for several more.
The struggle for economic resources might not be as bad as you envision. Countries like Germany have excellent social welfare systems with the capacity of processing refugees as quickly as possible. (OK, "as quickly as possible" isn't very quick, but they'll handle it.) The biggest challenge at the moment is getting these people off welfare and into the job market. Sure, because of cultural and educational differences we're probably not going to see many engineers or neurosurgeons, but the people who collect our garbage and do our cleaning mostly aren't engineers or neurosurgeons either. And language barriers are more fuzzy in the EU than in most other places, we tend to get around them. The jobs won't be fancy, but they'll pay minimum wage and give the refugees a purpose and a sense of self-worth. Also, there's no path to integration as straight and speedy as hanging out with colleagues over breaks.
But you're right, it's not going to be easy. It's going to take pragmatic and inspired leadership within the EU, and we're in very short supply of that. On the other hand, these people and their children will pay the future taxes that fund my pension and socialised medicine, all I need to do is make sure they're safe and land on their feet now.
I was hoping that it wouldn't come down to that sort of thing - exploiting the refugees as a taxable resource. Because it seems kind of two-faced, to have Janus wear compassion/universalism on one side and to have taxing/demographic sustainability on the other side.
Truth is, most migrants end up benefiting their new country despite a general hostility towards them. It's always been like that, even in XIX century US. So there is no hypocrisy really: we are not letting them in "because they help with taxes", that's a secondary side-effect that we are forced to emphasize in modern debate only because we have to fight naturally-xenophobic elements in our societies.
Can we put (dubious in my opinion) benefits from migrants against girls (including teenage and children) raped by said migrants and weight it up? How much money does one child rape cost?
And this is not unique, in the UK they busted like a dozen of underage brothels any of which had dozens of underage girls abducted, beaten and made prostitute. Brothels of course run by muslim immigrants.
We're all someone's cattle in some greater scheme. The community funds education and healthcare, not because we're nice people, but because there's a net benefit to having a healthy and educated workforce. It's cynical and sad, but also realistic.
> Have some more goddamn kids.
Volunteers for the bordercases EU breeding programme eagerly awaited! :)
A demographic inverse pyramid occurs when parents decide to breed below replacement rate. I intend to have two or more children, preferably around four children, as a way of ensuring that my values exist more strongly over the coming decades. It's a form of game theoretic cooperation with my culture in what resembles a Commons problem.
I would say we had a population bubble. "Inverse pyramid" is a fallout from bubble.
It happened that many people were born and raised, setting all-time population records, and trying to keep this number increase forever and forever is unviable. One may argue that there's still a lot of land for people to live in, but truth is people skip villages and small towns for capitals because they're not needed where they used to live. There's land, but there's no demand.
The struggle for economic resources might not be as bad as you envision. Countries like Germany have excellent social welfare systems with the capacity of processing refugees as quickly as possible. (OK, "as quickly as possible" isn't very quick, but they'll handle it.) The biggest challenge at the moment is getting these people off welfare and into the job market. Sure, because of cultural and educational differences we're probably not going to see many engineers or neurosurgeons, but the people who collect our garbage and do our cleaning mostly aren't engineers or neurosurgeons either. And language barriers are more fuzzy in the EU than in most other places, we tend to get around them. The jobs won't be fancy, but they'll pay minimum wage and give the refugees a purpose and a sense of self-worth. Also, there's no path to integration as straight and speedy as hanging out with colleagues over breaks.
But you're right, it's not going to be easy. It's going to take pragmatic and inspired leadership within the EU, and we're in very short supply of that. On the other hand, these people and their children will pay the future taxes that fund my pension and socialised medicine, all I need to do is make sure they're safe and land on their feet now.