@mynameistillian I opened this article and the page refused to do anything other than load a "something went wrong" error.

Which I think is appropriate.

@emma_cogdev Yep! I also just find it interesting that he doesn't even bring that up, especially as he's inside Fortress Europe. As much as people love holding up this "continent" as being a good place to go, they have a lot of the worst systems for immigrants that they've implemented.

Like, I think it's interesting that he doesn't even engage with how we pay for things like unemployment or sick leave and often can't access either service and ignores the whole visa system and how that prohibits workers from accessing things (work-related visa holders can't really be unemployed for a length of time because they need a sponsor; freelance visas and the like mean that we... have no employer, so no one is responsible to pay for us when we're sick or if we can't work for a period of time, even if it was our employer who put us on those visas to skirt the law in the first place).

And I know not all of Europe is identical, but a lot of us complain about the same things. (Also, here's another fun one: As a third-country national who has a long-term residence, I can't transfer that to another EU country. Even though EU citizens get to move, I'm effectively stuck here unless I want to do the whole immigration thing all over again for a long-term/permanent residency. This is just one of those things that makes me want to scream when people say the EU has open borders within itself. They're still closed!)

@emma_cogdev As an immigrant to where I live who is forced to pay for (but cannot always or even mostly access) the services we're being used to hold up as a "productive and fiscal base," this kind of framing always makes me gag a lot. Even on positive framing (like receiving countries should make migrants more welcome), it always feels like they're focusing on how we can be used... even when we can't access the things we help support (through coercion, if I'm honest—I wouldn't pay for either the "public" health insurance at the private company here or the social insurance if I could get away with it, since both are effectively useless to me due to access barriers).

(Tangentially, I also do have to roll my eyes at the whole we "have gained 40 years of life." I really wish people would have to learn life expectancy statistics and what actually made the historical averages lower, which is that... children were dying more frequently. And now they're not, which is a good thing. But if we factored out child death, the age of life expectancy for people who managed to get through being a child and into adulthood is higher. Yes, we are living longer... but not 40 years longer... Also, we might need to factor out people who were forced to die for powers who sent them elsewhere as fodder... Because that doesn't help us in understanding life expectancy related to the more 'natural' causes of death, but I fear that'd make things even harder for statisticians.)