Tuesday, February 12, 2019

The 260,000 A Year Story

I essay a good bit over the declining birth-rate of Germany, and what it really 'means'.  Today, Deutsche Welle picked up the topic and talked to a new study done by the Bertelsmann Foundation.  They've been around for forty years and tend to be recognized as a pretty decent think-tank operation.

So the numbers got crunched.  Germany would have to go out and actively recruit 260,000 migrant-workers every single year for at least forty years, to meet the decline. 

In pure numbers, if Germany does nothing....they'd easily find themselves missing 16-million workers by 2060.  It's a situation that industry and finance cannot allow to happen.

Harsh reality?  More or less.  But here's the thing....when they say 260,000 migrant workers....they aren't talking about family members....they are talking about 260,000 actual workers.  So the real math here would mean at least 400,000 a year (wives, husbands, kids) need to be on some entry path. 

Added to this, they aren't saying they want 260,000 burger-flippers, or cleaning ladies.  The hype here should be individuals with work skills, university time, and craftsmanship talents....that can easily fit into the workplace within a year or two.

A real plan to 'recruit'?  No.  There is no such plan.  That's the humorous part of the German 'open-door' policy.....you could easily end up with fifty-percent of the incoming crowd having no more than basic skills to run a apple-cart, or stocking shelves, or flipping burgers.  So you end up with 'problem-children' who trigger increased public safety concerns, more policing actions, and welfare supplements going on for years for an individual without real work talents.

But there is this other odd part to the idea of 260,000 folks coming in each year.....they'd mostly center around the top fifty metropolitan areas of the country (where jobs lie), while rural areas would be depopulated even more.  It's a curious scenario, with no real solution. 

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