You have to feed and house the people. The people currently living in those countries may have a shortage of housing already.
I think the “baby boom” from years past has shown that there are too many people around. It’s too costly to raise their own kids. People are xenophobic and don’t want many immigrants changing their cultures.
The issue becomes caring for the boom population and maintaining a stable economy at the same time. Immigration is a natural support to the pressure of worker shortages, and countries that don’t accept this will learn long, hard lessons in capitalism, and pay a premium for end of life care to compete with other jobs in demand that are much more desirable.
Xenophobia propped up by political groups. Many official immigration programs existed in the 19th century that, when allowed to, had immigrants integrated into society.
I talked to Japanese colleagues about this a lot. The issue isn’t just plain old xenophobia. In a lot of cultures, when someone gets married, there are considerations about marrying ‘the right kind’ for the family. As silly as that might sound to U.S. ‘melting pot’ ears, these could be tribal, economic, linguistic, geographic, class, education, age, gender, and yes, race.
In traditional settings, the elders have to bless that marriage, welcome the person, and ideally have the families mesh together and be on the same page.
Inviting foreigners with vastly different backgrounds on almost all those axes, it’s a pretty tall order to ask everyone to change those attitudes. And saying one family should close their eyes and do it for the sake of the country while their neighbors hold out for a ‘suitable’ match is going to be tough. The demographic ‘time bomb’ has been a known issue since the 80s and people are still resistant to change.
At some point, though, realities catch up.
My bet would be it would take a generational turnover and a few years of popular sitcoms normalizing it.
It’s bigotry. Whether it be racism, or classism, or political, or religious, or whatever. People have endless reasons for wanting to consider others as outsiders or lesser or different.
Similar to high turnover rate at major corporations is the justified fear that the current residents will be abandoned by their own government in an attempt to drive economic incentives
Unless the system is built correctly, you could accidentally drive people away because you didn’t build with your citizens best interests in consideration
For example Japan and South Korean (my heritage) has this exact problem still at large as they encourage people to have children yet systems like high working hours in combination with low wages means that people just can’t afford to have children
The wealthy win when there’s more workers than work.
Historically the greatest gains in workers rights and the times we make the most gains against wealth inequality is when there isn’t a surplus of workers.
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