• 21 Posts
  • 281 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 11th, 2023
  • vatlark@lemmy.worldMtoShowerthoughts@lemmy.world•Why the fuck does it cost money to get smarter??
    5·
    20 days ago

    I am a mod here and this comment was reported for Nazi rhetoric.

    While I’m certainly sorry to see anti-immigration sentiment I would rather show a realistic perspective of immigration. It’s easy to see that immigration is a positive for the host county and for the world, especially for refugees.

    Thankfully Sweden seems to have a generally healthy perspective on welfare and immigration.

    Here is an interesting meta study on research into the Swedish immigration debate.

    In the most direct measurement, the immigrant populations that take the longest time make net positive tax contribution are refugees.

    The low employment rate among refugees in their first years in the host country means that average incomes were low in these years. Although incomes grew steadily as the years passed, it took almost 20 years for the average refugee in Sweden to make a positive annual net contribution to public finances. The simple explanation for this is that a larger proportion of migrants have been active in sectors that are socially necessary but low paid, in service occupations such as healthcare, transport, restaurants, and so on (Frödin & Kjellberg, Citation2018).

    I hope Swedish people feel pride in the refugees they are able to host. It’s impressive that despite refugees working a lot of jobs that are needed for society to function (letting other high tax payers have nice lives) but are low pay, they are still able to become net contributors to public finances in 20 years.

    The paper points out how integrating immigrants into the workforce quickly is important but that can be challenging because refugees often come in influxes.

    And education is a big part of finding work:

    And in conclusion it says:

    With this as a central point of departure, an aging population is considered by far the most important motivation for increasing immigration. From this perspective, migration can be justified both from a short-term perspective, as its net contribution to the public finances can be crucial for the financing of welfare, and from a long-term perspective, as it can have clearly positive effects on the supply of labour. This is mainly for demographic reasons as the vast majority of migrants are of young working age. Among migrant groups, two categories are clearly favourable to government finances: highly educated migrants and labour migrants. Objections are often raised to the third category – refugee immigrants – who are argued to have high introduction costs, mainly in the initial years of residence.

    A one-sided focus on the average cost burden of refugee migrants that only compares their costs during the years of stay in Sweden with the costs of the native population during the same period is highly misleading. Such a comparison ignores the extensive costs to which comprehensive welfare systems are exposed. For the Swedish welfare system, with its generous benefits and welfare services, life cycle welfare expenditure includes a social safety net during childhood and adolescence. This provides a more comparable picture of migrants’ actual burden on welfare programmes in relation to citizens covered by social protection from ‘the cradle to the grave’. The significant number of refugees who migrate as adults imposes no costs at all on the public finances of the host country during these years. Thus, if their costs to the welfare system are related to their age, the average total cost burden on the welfare system will be significantly lower than that of the native population.

    In sum, and as Scocco and Andersson (Citation2015) and Ruist (Citation2019) note, the effects of immigration on the economy are exaggerated in the political debate. The growing opposition to immigration can be explained by the failure of the political establishment to implement the rapid inclusion of newly arrived migrants into the labour market. The literature on the impacts of migration does not find any trends that could seriously threaten the sustainability of welfare states. Modern welfare states do not experience any dramatic economic problems due to immigration. In economic terms, immigration can affect central government finances by a few percentage points, plus or minus, depending on the success of the employment policy and whether the labour market succeeds in quickly absorbing new migrants, but can by no means be considered a threat to financial stability.

  • vatlark@lemmy.worldtoCasual Conversation@piefed.social•I'm going to America in November what snacks should I prioritise trying?
    191·
    20 days ago

    It may depend where you are traveling from.

    Packaged food:

    • Toasty cheese-its.
    • Annie’s boxed mac & cheese.
    • Trader Joe’s peanut butter cups
    • a million variations on potato chips and hard pretzels, some of them quite regional.
    • birch beer

    Other food: On the west coast and other places: Taco trucks and Asian food.

    In the north east: subs or hoagies (buffalo chicken cheesesteak), good cheep pizza, Amish farm stands (homemade baked goods, cheese, rootbeer)

    On the east coast and the south: arguably there is somewhat of a gas station food culture (Wawa, Buc-ees, Sheetz, etc). Its not that interesting, but more novel than a McDonald’s.

Moderates