alt Hacker News> The social safety net has collapsed _today_.
It can always collapse more. Ask anyone who lived through an actual economic collapse. (As opposed to the kinds of minor corrections that the West has seen over the past few decades.)
Your imagination is very limited if you can't think of what the long-term consequence for a country with an average age of 41.6, a fertility rate of 1.25, and a huge political block of nativists who can't do basic arithmetic, are asking for something incredibly stupid, are getting exactly what they want, good and hard.
You solve a housing shortage by... Building more housing. Not by driving young people who want to do work out of your community.
Destroy your society today so it doesn't get potentially destroyed in 30 years is certainly a take.
>You solve a housing shortage by... Building more housing.
It's not housing. It's roads. Hospitals. Schools. Sewers. Power lines. Everything needs to be rebuilt. That means that the immigrants who are coming in must be engineers, doctors, teachers, tradies. Instead we get uber drivers and IT consultants. There aren't enough qualified people in the world to keep up with current immigration to the west. The only solution is to lower immigration until the ratio of qualified people coming in matches (or hopefully exceeds) the ratio of qualified people already here. Anything else lowers living standards and makes a right wing reaction inevitable.
Here's what happens when you build more housing: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-25/one-hour-delays-along...