Do take a look at the age pyramid @Miaou posted. Germany needs a lot of young people to herd its old people. German ministers flying to the Phillipines and Kenya and Brazil to find care workers – that’s for a reason! And dropping the birth rate lower does not mean more high-paying jobs, it means more low-paying care jobs in relation to total number of jobs.
In addition there are a bunch of jobs that Germans don’t really do anymore (plucking asparagus, slaughtering hogs, cleaning office buildings, …) because they are badly paid hard labor which are however in some way useful to society.
Granted, preventing migrants from taking bad jobs may mean that high-paying automation jobs open up. But that’s the only silver lining. (Fwiw, Japan had a very strict immigration policy, because they figured that elderly care might be something easily accomplished with robot dogs and other gimmicks. It turns out though that that assumption was wrong. It also turns out that a lot of people from countries like Malaysia and the Phillipines would love to work in Japan, despite the racism. So Japan has adapted its policies on foreign labor somewhat now.)
This seems like a really bad take.
Do take a look at the age pyramid @Miaou posted. Germany needs a lot of young people to herd its old people. German ministers flying to the Phillipines and Kenya and Brazil to find care workers – that’s for a reason! And dropping the birth rate lower does not mean more high-paying jobs, it means more low-paying care jobs in relation to total number of jobs.
In addition there are a bunch of jobs that Germans don’t really do anymore (plucking asparagus, slaughtering hogs, cleaning office buildings, …) because they are badly paid hard labor which are however in some way useful to society.
Granted, preventing migrants from taking bad jobs may mean that high-paying automation jobs open up. But that’s the only silver lining. (Fwiw, Japan had a very strict immigration policy, because they figured that elderly care might be something easily accomplished with robot dogs and other gimmicks. It turns out though that that assumption was wrong. It also turns out that a lot of people from countries like Malaysia and the Phillipines would love to work in Japan, despite the racism. So Japan has adapted its policies on foreign labor somewhat now.)