[Tietäjä]

Originally Posted by Mzyxptlk

I am intrigued.

You say we're "used to political and war refugees". I disagree.

Fair. But least say, inside the Union. In terms of say post world war two Finnish migration to Sweden, about half never returned. Low cost labour from places like Estonia hasn't been a wonder to begin with, but say here, Estonians don't really have the intent of immigrating - they're more like a mobile work force (Estonia isn't in a financial grief anyways). Just that, a leak of tax payers under heavy tax burden could be very harsh on a country in the situation of say, Greece, Italy, or Spain.

So while I agree that mass emigration of the paying generation will put the Greek government in a bit of a pickle, I don't think that will necessarily lead to a collapse of society, because even the most selfish emigrant will not let their family starve back home while they're comfortable in a Nordic heaven.

The thing is, a typical immigrant family will try relocate it's members to the new host country if it's possible - as you say, some time later. About bonds: I don't suspect the bonds to family, I'd suspect the bonds to a nation. Nationalism is becoming a hollow concept: if you look at an average immigrant family, they're not as likely to return home after going to "hard integration", however, they are sending money out. There's in fact a small scale business in simply arranging local Africans to wire money home to Africa, ran by Africans (of course, they trust each other) here.

Money moved in this fashion doesn't really provide that much to the state. You'd have to raise value added taxes and such to get anything off it, and value added tax is a slap on the face to the poor people anyways.

Wonder if there's reliable easily accessible data somewhere on mobility inside the union. Surely Eurostat/ECB would have such.

On a slightly related side note, making future generations pay for your present comfort is hardly a new notion. In fact, that is the whole reason d'être of pension funds.

No, it's not a new notion (in terms of fifty years of so of pension funds' actual history) - however, it's sustainability hasn't been really questioned as heavily as it is now. The wide presumtion up until lately was that things like profit rates on the pension fund investments would be sufficient, which probably never was realistic if you looked at the trends of the stock market in an "objective-pessimistic" -view (in that, it's fairly stationary, and expecting an above-stationary level profits might be overdoing it).

Of course, it's possible that sooner or later, likely sooner, the present upcoming generation will inform the previous that their pension schemes are over-shooting, and nobody's paying their shit. The situation in a Nordic state is probably slightly different, since we have a wide state pension system together. They're not too happy to ship out data on the individual level accumulations though.