Person A: I support high levels of immigration.
Person B: Weren't you complaining about wages being too low? High levels of immigration directly impact wage growth in a negative way.
Person A: Yeah, but we don't have enough people to care for and replace baby boomers, so we need those immigrants.
Besides telling boomers to get rekt, what's your initial response?
Obviously, it's hypocritical to dissuade citizens from having children, and then turning around and saying we don't have enough people so we need more immigrants.
But I feel like I'm missing something here and can't quite put my finger on it.
He is right, in many countries we need immigrants, but this an artificially created problem. The destruction of family values has led to this situation, it is not normal that instead of being taken care of by your family it is a stranger who takes care of old folk, in addition, those immigrants send their money back to their country and undercut local wages, they reduce the number of people earning a living wage, which in turn makes kids less affordable for locals which in turn means we need immigrants. It all comes out of the greed of corporations refusing to pay a living wage to locals, importing immigrants that are ok getting paid half because they can multiply the value of their misery wages sending it back to their country something locals can´t do.
But back to the original problem, I would tell Person A that although that solves his problem in the short term, in the long term new generations will be screwed and that statistics already show how the rich are richer and the poor are poorer, and I would remember him how in prosperous economies like Japan or South Korea they have no need for immigrants, so how is it that some countries have need for mass migration and others don´t? Because the system is broken in one of the countries.