[ChuckNorris89]

Most immigration to Europe is incredibly low-bar unskilled economic chancers interested in exploiting the welfare state, not skilled workers, doctors and engineers like you get in US and Canada which have stricter immigration policies.

[tsimionescu]

That is patently false. Especially the Western and Northern EU countries have a massive influx of high-skill workers (doctors, programmers, engineers) from both Eastern EU countries (which will dry up sooner rather than later, to be fair, with terrible population growth already happening for more than a decade in places like Romania), but also from neighboring countries - Turkey being the largest source.

Even the so hated "refugee crisis" from Syria saw mostly middle-class Syrians moving to Europe (putting it in fear quotes since the whole of the EU had fewer refugees than Turkey alone to accept).

[ChuckNorris89]

>Especially the Western and Northern EU countries have a massive influx of high-skill workers (doctors, programmers, engineers) from both Eastern EU countries

That's mostly false. I haven't met a single programmer from Romania in Austria or any dev from turkey who wishes to emigrate here. Non-EU skilled people I met all want to move to low tax high salary places like Switzerland, UK, Netherlands. Having an open borders immigration policy is discouraging for those with skills who can afford to shop around for the better option vs economic refugees who shop around for the country with the most welfare.

If I look at the immigration statistics here, most immigrants are refugees from Africa, Middle East, and East Asia, not doctors and engineers with visas, those are only a tiny minority of the total immigration.

[tsimionescu]

You may not have met them, and Austria may not be very attractive for this type of immigration, but there are significant populations of them. Remember that BioNTech (who created the European Corona vaccine) was in fact founded and is operated by Turkish immigrants to Germany.

> Non-EU skilled people I met all want to move to low tax high salary places like Switzerland, UK, Netherlands.

The Netherlands at least is still part of the EU. You'll also find plenty of high-skilled migrants in Ireland as well, and France and Germany also attract quite a few.

Note that language concerns and attitudes towards foreigners, especially foreign workers, are a huge part of how many people come to work in a particular country. Ireland and the UK have a huge advantage here purely by virtue of speaking English, as does France for the populations in North Africa. The Netherlands are very open to using English in business, even though their own language is quite obscure. German is less internationally spoke than English or French, but it is not that obscure either.

[Gareth321]

I am generally in favour of tightening migration laws in general around Europe, but even I can admit that this isn't accurate. Many European countries are wonderful places to live and raise families. Canada and the U.S. absolutely compete with the U.K., Nordic countries, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and even France and Germany, on skilled workers. The U.S. offers the best wages, and people motivated primarily by wages will try the U.S. first. But there are lots of people who either don't make the H1B cut, don't want to be beholden to political whims during the arduous trek to citizenship (which can take a decade or more, with multiple gates), or (and this one is a big one), are turned off by U.S. education, violence, crime, health outcomes, lack of social safety nets, and politics.

All that said, Europe is going to have to become much tougher on refugees in the coming decades. I foresee a re-negotiation of the various refugee conventions written at a very different time in history.

[ChuckNorris89]

Why isn't this accurate? I never said Europe is not a great place. I said that the statistical majority of immigrants moving here are mostly low skilled refugees in the tens of thousands a month, rather than the much needed doctors, nurses, teachers and various workers and engineers wich are very few of the total immigration population.

[ethbr0]

While that may be true today, that's where future doctors, nurses, teachers, and various workers and engineers come from.

Young people + a functioning and accessible education system is what produces highly skilled workers.

[ChuckNorris89]

In an ideal world maybe. In the real word, what you hope for was definitely not the result of Europe's uncontrolled immigration policies. If you want future doctors, nurses, etc, you need to to select for those through a points based immigration system like the US, Canada, Australia, etc. are doing instead of letting all the chancers in who are willing to pay smugglers and cheat the asylum system and hope they'll then want to play by the rules and become doctors and nurses.

Last week I saw a report with Middle Eastern migrants stuck in Serbia wanting to cross into the EU (Germany and Austria specifically). They interviewed one migrant from Iraq with his wife and five small kids, let's call him "Bob", and the reporter asked Bob why he's trying to get to the EU. He said it's because there's no future in Iraq. Well Bob, let me ask you this, if you knew there's no future in Iraq, why did you decided to have five kids then? Surely if you live in poverty, then birth control is a better idea no? Or oral/anal/pulling out, if that's not available. But instead, the EU(German/Austrian) taxpayer will have to pay to house a man with no knowledge of birth control or sense of personal responsibility, who's only professional skill is busting nuts, and his numerous family.

A mixed-race friend of mine volunteers in a refugee center here since he speaks several languages and he's pissed that migrants just laugh at us, saying "Europeans are so stupid they pay us for everything then give us more money which we just send back home".

This kind of immigration does not breed the results you're hoping for since it mostly encourages the ones willing to cheat to get free stuff rather that to contribute to the host nation.

The rich countries with restrictive immigration policies and high barrier of entry (US, Canada, Australia, New-Zeeland, Switzerland), attract the highly skilled and most productive immigrants that will add the most amount of value back into the economy. EU mostly attracts welfare shoppers.

[ethbr0]

You seem very angry about welfare and immigration of people without skills. We have very different opinions about what makes a country strong.

I'd point out that in all your replies in this subtree, you're essentially making the same point.

And if you're making the same point, you're not really thinking about what you're replying to: you could be replying to a wall for all intents and purposes.

[dougmwne]

In my city we have medical students coming to study from all over Asia and Africa. They will become doctors, surgeons and other specialists. Many will use this as a stepping stone to stay in the EU. What you said is flat out false.

[ChuckNorris89]

I know that, I know some of them myself, but I never said that no doctors from outside the EU ever immigrate here. What was your point?

And how big is the % of medical professionals or medical students among all the total (legal and illegal) immigration into the EU? 0,000001%?

[tsimionescu]

The more important stat is what the distirbution of immigrants vs natives working as doctors or nurses in the EU is compared to the distribution of migrants vs natives in the total population. I believe you will see that migrants are generally over-represented in Healthcare compared to their percentage of the total population, and similarly in certain other industries.

I have not been able to find very recent data, but here is a paper from 2007 [0], showing that the percentage of physicians working in the country at that time who were migrants either from inside or outside Europe was well over 5%, with significant outliers such as the UK (30%), Ireland (30%), Norway (15%). In Austria it was 5%, though most migrants were from other rich EU countries.

[0] https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/...