Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
cradle-to-grave welfare system is only sustainable with more active workers
and fewer retirees. People who worked all their lives with the promise of the
cushy old-age benei ts their parents enjoyed won't docilely accept the harsh
reality as dictated by the new arithmetic. As in the USA, it's dii cult to take
away expected entitlements without a i ght. Europeans love to demonstrate.
And as courageous politicians try to make cuts to address the emerging crisis,
there will be plenty of angry marches clogging Europe's grand boulevards.
Interestingly, as Europe's native population declines, its population growth
may come largely from immigrants. And Europe's immigration challenges are
much like America's. Around the world, rich nations import poor immigrants to
do their dirty work. If a society doesn't want to pay for expensive apples picked
by rich kids at high wages, it
gets cheaper apples by hir-
ing people willing to work
for less. If you're wealthy
enough to hire an immigrant
to clean your house, you do
it—you get a clean house,
and the immigrant earns a
wage. h at's just the honest
reality of capitalism.
In Europe,
Gast-
arbeiter
—German for
“guest worker”—is the
generic term for this situa-
tion because Germans so famously imported Turkish people to do their scut
work a generation ago, when Germany's post-WWII economic boom i nally
kicked into gear. h ese days, virtually every country in Western Europe has
its own
Gastarbeiter
contingent. Berlin—with over 100,000 Turks—could
be considered a sizable “ Turkish city.” France's population includes millions
of poor North Africans. And even newly wealthy Ireland now has 100,000
Polish people taking out its trash. It's striking to hear my Irish friends speak
about their new Polish worker as if he or she were a new appliance.
But invariably, wealthy people begin to realize that their “cheap labor” is
not quite as cheap as they hoped. In Europe, the importation of labor creates
fast-growing immigrant communities that need help and incentives to assimi-
late, or society at large will pay a steep price (as we saw in 2005, when the
When European workers lose entitlements, they hit
the streets.
