The mobility discussion is interesting to me as someone who navigated US immigration.
Moving countries is hard. Not just paperwork hard, but restarting-your-life hard. Credit history, professional networks, understanding how things actually work versus how they officially work.
If the mobility framework makes it meaningfully easier for skilled workers to move between India and Europe, that's significant. Not because of labor economics, but because talented people having more options is generally good for everyone.
The H1B system in the US has created a lot of anxiety and frustration. Competition for that talent pool seems healthy.
The soft power is partly based on the belief that the systems it’s built will constrain the US into acting reasonably (at least from the west’s perspective). The Greenland thing was not shut down on the US side hard enough and that has shattered that. Now Europe has to contend with the fact that the US system won’t rein in a president that goes too far, and so it basically has to be treated like the absolute dictatorships with all the risks of a mad king that goes with that
Does not mean too much coming from Europe when the EU wants to militarize and the institution is closer to absolute dictatorship than democracy. Similar to Canada and Europe talking about colonizing the world with the US yet Greenland is an issue lol.
I should’ve also said that like the US, Europe, Canada, Australia, Israel are very very racist, chauvinist, exceptionalist. That benefits US hegemony.
Something also not brought up much is how many people have colonized minds around the world. Colonized minds don’t largely change because of a temporary brash leader.
I believe the damage is done and there will be no going back to the old ways.
This time around I'm sensing a real change in attitude. People in Europe are sick and tired of all the US bullshit that's been going on for far too long. It's not just the lunatic in the White House. It's the whole system that's being rejected. The endless greed. The bigotry. The war on everything.
Peaceful cooperation and coexistence, that's what we want. I'm for my part quite happy and optimistic about the deal with India and I hope more regions will follow soon.
Europe and the five eyes are far too racist and/or chauvinist for what you’re saying. HN is a great microcosm of liberal (which is western and white) ideals and thinking. You can’t really post about resistance to western hegemony here or in most situations around Americans, Canadians, Europeans.
Something not brought up much is how colonized minds works. Colonized minds don’t suddenly become uncolonized because of a brash leader. Eastern Europe since the fall of the Soviets is a great example of this.
The soft power stuff has been canned. That has not generated good will, but that act pales compared to kidnapping, threats to invade various places and the destabilising effects of chaos as a leadership strategy.
The US has done those stuff since world war 2 ended. Continuously. Trump has hurt things but if anything bringing up things the US has always done as if it is novel under Trump shows how well US hegemony works and will continue to work.
Another thing no one is bringing up is how colonized minds works. Colonized minds don’t suddenly become uncolonized because of a brash leader.
Trump might be gone but project 2025 will continue. They're now most of the party, his cabinet and they're replacing government employees with loyalists (hiring program was part of it). They're attacking the election system again, maybe it won't work but there's a pretty big chance it will.
But no, you can make 3-4x in the US. That’s not an exaggeration. And before someone says ‘free healthcare’, big-tech employers in the US provide pretty nice insurance for employees that caps maximum out of pocket expenses to about a week of your salary.
EU (except Zurich and London) tech salaries have sort of stagnated to a point that you make about the same in Bangalore, and spend significantly more.
Keep in mind the salary is 3-5x for big tech positions with 5+ years of experience. Check levels.fyi if you don’t believe me.
> Days that you can actually take without losing the chance for a promotion?
Europe wins hands down on this. I happen to have a great employer where I have taken 4-5 weeks off a year without issues, but that’s not the norm in the US.
In silicon valley, you can not afford to underpay good engineers, as they'll move across the street and get a job that pays double after a year.
In most other places, this ecosystem does not exist because it is ridiculously difficult to start and operate a company unless you are part of some conglomerate.
Actual formal engineering jobs in Switzerland come with benefits gold plating better than full federal government employees in the USA. And they’re almost as hard to sack.
Nobody gives out positions like that easily to non geniuses. And even for more ordinary very smart candidates, there are enough of them to have a few hoops to jump through.
> But no, you can make 3-4x in the US. That’s not an exaggeration
Eh, we'll see how long that lasts as the transition from financial capital to global pariah progresses. It's quite possible that our labor is extremely overvalued.
Right now it relies on silicon valley's ability to churn out unicorns again and again.
That part seems to be taking an ugly turn nowadays by a bunch of military AI/drone swarm/etc focused startups. I'm guessing that eventually after the Apple/Google model of making money is dead, you'll have to work for Skynet if you want to make money.
Those "decent salaries" have caused a lot of trouble in the US. They are probably not that good for the society, even if they attract foreign talent.
There is not much difference in labor share of GDP between the US and the EU. People who work for living get a similar share of the value they create in both blocks on the average (maybe a bit less in the US), but it's less evenly distributed in the US.
Top 10% earners are now responsible for ~50% of consumer spending. That doesn't mean billionaires and capitalists, but upper middle class professionals and other high earners. The economy is great on the average, but most people don't feel it.
I don't disagree, as in an abstract sense inequality is bad for society.
Try to understand why the US has high tech salaries though. It is because the last 40 years have made it pretty easy and convenient to start companies.
Hence, good employees always have great options or can just start their own companies.
> Try to understand why the US has high tech salaries though. It is because the last 40 years have made it pretty easy and convenient to start companies.
I thought this was because US trade and foreign policy coerced most of the world to open up their markets to high-margin American services via treaties. It's easy to pay high salaries when you're vacuuming money from around the world, and your product (software) has very low marginal cost of replication.
Free education and childcare doesn’t come close to shrinking a 300k USD gap in total compensation. Real number in my case, I looked into moving to Berlin last year.
> Not to mention the fascism problem of course.
Agreed.
The US is going in a terrible direction with this. I hope Europe has learned from history and won’t follow.
You're in the minority now in EU if you can afford to have those things now. The housing and CoL crunch is real and many industries suffered layoffs. Q3 2025 youth unemployment is around 20-25% in several EU countries including developed ones like Finland, it's no longer an issue just for the less developed southern ones.
>I am not sure if the extra money in the US would be worth it.
Since you already have a house and everything, then yeah it makes no sense for you. But I would do it in a heartbeat if I could.
> You're in the minority now in EU if you can afford to have those things now.
A quick search tells me that home ownership in the EU is Approximately 70%, ranging from around 95% in countries such as Romania and Slovakia, to around 50% in Germany. Non-EU citizens disproportionately owns less houses.
So, no. I am not at all in the minority.
Youth unemployment is an issue, being 15% in the EU as a whole, with some countries hovering on 30%. The US has 10% of youth unemployment (considering their labor laws are appallingly bad for workers, I am not sure if this is much of an improvement).
> Since you already have a house and everything, then yeah it makes no sense for you. But I would do it in a heartbeat if I could.
Good for you, may you achieve your goals.
I didn't own a house until a year ago. Refusing offers from the US and moving to EU was likely the best decision I ever made.
I had a life threatening illness not long ago. In the US I would likely be either bankrupt of dead. I appreciate the safety net and labor protections here, even with the higher taxes.
I don't get the obsession with the US here. That's a different country than the EU where I(and you to afaik) live and the target of the topic.
If I can't afford a house, it makes it no better to me if you tell me that some people in the US also can't afford one, like that's supposed to make me feel better or something.
And with 50% home ownership statistics, it seems I'm not alone. I'm glad the system worked for you but it failed me and so I will vote to those who put my interest first and not devalue my labor.
This conversation, that you replied to, was a consideration of whether it made sense to move to the US. You mentioned that if you could move there, you would.
I presumed it worked as a basis of comparison?
> And with 50% home ownership statistics, it seems I'm not alone. I'm glad the system worked for you but it failed me and so I will vote to those who put my interest first and not devalue my labor.
I presume you live in Germany? I know some engineers who live there, I used to work with a team based off on Germany years ago.
They are doing fine.
I don't really care who you vote for. Based on your stance, I presume you blame immigrants for "devaluing your labor".
Contrary to you, I believe that with more trade and movement of highly skilled people, economic progress follows.
I don't believe stagnation is a viable strategy. You are free to believe otherwise.
I may be wrong but my understanding is that it's not uncommon to find out someone in the USA is a private pilot, no matter what their job is (e.g., if your grocer or mechanic mentioned they have a license you'd not be shocked).
Apparently it's much rarer in the EU, but that might not only be a cost issue.
Cost is not a barrier. Entry-level kit aircraft are cheap in the US, as in cheaper than some of the fancier trucks. The very basic micro-lites are cheaper than any new car.
Conversely, Europeans workers get to enjoy some hobbies more than Americans - such as frequent travel - not because of how much they earn, but because of work culture and paid vacation time rules.
>A European tech salary would be about 2x of the median
Not even that if you're a worker in rich/developed EU country, unless we're talking FAANG/big-tech, since here SW dev wages are relatively close to national medians so an average SW dev worker doesn't take home 2x the the median.
Issue further compounded by the high taxes on higher wages and more generous government benefits and tax credits for those on lower wages, and suddenly the take home difference at the end of the fiscal year between a SW dev and average worker narrows down even further, to the point that it's not a career you get into for the money, like in the US.
BUt if you're in the less wealthy EU countries, with lower taxes and less welfare benefits, where the national average wages are lower in comparison to tech wages, like from Poland to Bulgaria then yeah sure, you can easily take home 2x-5x the national median in tech because the other industries are a lot less developed compared to SW products and service industry versus places like Germany or Norway with more diverse and developed industries raising the national average wages for everyone making tech workers feel underpaid.
You are however making sweeping generalizations that you extrapolate from your own personal experience, while making hard connections between quality of life and the ability to earn more than your peers.
Meanwhile the Nordics for example consistently rank much higher in health, happiness, and quality of life, despite having lower top wages.
My point was that if you have a senior level big tech job in the US, it makes zero sense to move to Europe unless you have family there or want to make a significant financial sacrifice.
Obviously Europe wins for workers in general, and if I wanted to work in a car factory’s yes I’d do my best to work in Europe.
I looked at your other posts in this thread. The lifestyle you describe is not the average US based developer lifestyle. You must live in a very selective circle. Because I only know one developer who owned his plane-that Canadian guy who literally coded the first version of S3, became irreplaceable so AWS let him move to Oregon and he was commuting by plane. And I only know one developer who owned horses-he actually made his money by buying a whole bunch of land in Kirkland in the 90s. These are the only two examples out of probably more than 100 developers I worked with.
I know developers who have motor bikes and a Porsche or BMW or, recently, Teslas that sometimes they take to the race track. But this lifestyle is common for EU devs as well.
I am not sure why everyone keeps bringing up the average though.
You have to decide whether it makes sense for you to be somewhere, based on how much you can expect to make and what your quality of life will be.
What the average person makes does not matter except in an abstract sense that equitable societies are better in general (which is absolutely true).
> You must live in a very selective circle.
> These are the only two examples out of probably more than 100 developers I worked with.
People can be very careful about keeping professional life separate. There is a boat owners club in a marina I frequent, the vast majority of the members (out of about 200) are techies, it's a common hobby.
I know several that have a pilot license but only one who bought a plane, it's somewhat convenient to just rent every few months.
What I meant to say is that the lifestyle of the average US dev is not that much better than the lifestyle of the average EU dev. From the examples you gave I only recognized the racing and boating lifestyles - both of which are accessible to EU devs. The planes and horses… not so much.
Now think of a more specific category - big tech employees with 5+ years of experience.
There are a bunch more expensive hobbies, about half of the developers I know (personally outside of work environments) have one or more.
Planes came up because I am getting started with the training for it, horses because my friend has a farm with horses twenty minutes from a major city.
It's an MoU to "discuss" mobility with no commitment to actually decide anything: "[a]dopted as a memorandum of understanding in parallel with the finalisation of the FTA, offers an excellent opportunity for us to cooperate on facilitating labour mobility, supporting skills development and capacity building, and working on skills and qualification frameworks" [0].
Immigration remains under the purview of individual EU member states. And immigration/mobility is out of scope of the actual EU-India FTA deal and the EU-India Defense Pact deal.
Notice how this entire thread got derailed by low karma and newish accounts dogwhistling immigration instead of discussing how the deal expanded European (and India) industrial and chemical exports to India (and Europe) by giving them a tariff rate under that which is Chinese transshipped products via ASEAN get thus making European (and Indian) capital goods cost effective and now includes India as part of ReArm Europe [1] - the EU's defense fund for European and Ukrainian rearmament [2].
Who needs Russian backed farmer disinfo networks [3] when you have anonymous "software engineer" and "OSINT" accounts stirring $hit to try and undermine the EU-India relationship [4]. That said, the deal will go through because the right businesses and unions were mollified over the past 2-3 years building up to this.
Where do you see the dogwhistling? Immigration is an actual concern to all working class people in EU who understand the basics of supply and demand of the labor market and housing, and I don't agree with trying to suppress such valid concerns by brooming it under dogwhistling, as blocking discourse on this topic just serves to radicalise people.
Especially in current economic times of mass layoffs of many European industries and high unemployment especially amongst the youth, CoL and housing crunch, it's normal the tax paying locals with voting rights don't want their leaders making them compete with immigrants for the shrinking pool of jobs and housing when they themselves are struggling.
And especially given how the typical government promoted immigration systems often marketed on "solving labor shortage in critical industries" and "bringing in the best and the brightest" have historically been abused by employers to drive down wages and reduce the bargaining power of the locals in working class jobs that had no actual shortage of workers, instead of being exclusive for the "best and the brightest" as they claimed.
So given such precedents, it's perfectly normal that such policies be open to public debate and scrutiny since the public will be the one mostly affected, while the business and asset owning elite is always the sole winner in these cases and the ones pushing for them the most.
The rub here is "skilled workers". Just after Brexit, the Boris Johnson Tory government adjusted immigration rules for "skilled" workers, and caused a civilisation-altering number of people (now known as the "Boriswave") to immigrate to the country, mostly from India, Africa, and other less developed areas. It's now known that almost every pay level and skill (or lack thereof) of job was eligible under the new rules, with some countries of origin, like Zimbabwe, having up to 10 dependents per worker on average IIRC. The same story has played out in the US with the "skilled" H1B visa scheme. People have lost all trust in governments to architect immigration laws in the interest of the natives, rather than giving big business carte blanche to import their own replacement workforce who will do any available job for the national minimum wage.
> like Zimbabwe, having up to 10 dependents per worker on average IIRC
Some developed countries have terrible demographics and need fresh kids.
I am expecting that sometime soon New Zealand will start accepting unskilled immigrants if they have >2 healthy kids under 10 years old. It wouldn't surprise me if the dept of internal affairs already has a soft rule to encourage that.
At some point many countries with shitty demographics are going to have to start competing to import kids.
"Skilled" sounds nice because it sounds like "doctors, educated" but the only real SAFE way to ensure it's actually skilled is make the dollar amounts so high that no company will want to use it to import cheap near-slave labor.
> talented people having more options is generally good for everyone
While I support free markets, that argument sounds a bit like the basis of the old 'trickle-down economics' and similar theories such as global free trade: Help the wealthy and the benefits will 'trickle down' to everyone else.
It turns out that if you help the wealthy, then the wealthy benefit. I know that doesn't sound like a surprising result when it's said that way, but the point is that the rest is a convenient fiction the wealthy tell themselves and politicians tell the public, in order to serve themselves.
In the US for example, those policies have led to historic increases in wealth for the few, and stagnated wages for the many. On the other hand, in less well off economies such as China and Brazil, the policies led to historic numbers lifted out of poverty - far more than anything in history. So that's a great result that we absolutely should not ignore or put a stop to. I support free trade.
But if the policy isn't specifically designed to benefit workers in the US, for example, if they are left to get theoretical second or third order theoretical benefits, it won't work for them. It's not 'generally good for everyone' unless it's made that way.
I don't understand what your point is when comparing how similar policies helped general population prosperity in less-well-off countries to the USA you say only benefiting the wealthy.
What should I be getting out of your argument? Asking in good faith.
For example, that there's more to it than that simple rule, or that once a certain level of general population prosperity is reached it stops working, or that impoverished populations have a culture that better benefits from such policies... ?
>I don't understand what your point is when comparing how similar policies helped general population prosperity in less-well-off countries to the USA you say only benefiting the wealthy.
Not him but I'd say it suppresses wage bargaining power in the USA or in this case Europe.
It's complex; there's no simple answer. Why did China's workers, for example, benefit enormously while US workers did not?
I don't know. It might have been good luck: outsourcing low-wage labor will of course benefit low-wage workers in other countries, and China's workers happened to be the beneficiaries. Maybe China's government, with a strong motivation to transform its economy from widespread and deep poverty (at the time, much poorer than anyone in wealthy nations), designed their trade policy to achieve that result. (People will also give simplistic answers that serve their ideologies, which I'm not addressing.)
The US's and China's policies were necessarily different: One country was outsourcing low-wage work (hopefully replacing it with higher-wage work) and the other was trying to get as much low-wage work as possible. One was exporting and the other importing.
My main, general point was that unless US policy is designed specifically to benefit X, it won't. Often leaders try to smooth over difficulties by claiming some second-order or third-order effect will benefit X, but that doesn't happen. In this case, X was US workers, and the policy was designed specifically to benefit corporations (afaik).
This is excellent, the duopoly discussions of the world mostly center around US and China and EU feels increasingly excluded while the rest of the world appears as footnote for good or bad reasons. I do hope this means there is enough dynamism in global trade.
The current challenge is that China has so much industrial overcapacity that it possibly can sell goods at near , sometimes even below mfg costs which makes it difficult if not impossible for India or other country made goods to even think of competing in the middle part of the value chain. Yet, it is the only hope for India to climb at least slightly even if they can never hope to get to the frontier of mfg. Chinese goals now are to amortize their existing mfg investments in any way possible but they still find it difficult to spur domestic consumption
Europe and the EU, Japan are vassal states curently occupied by the US. China, Russia, India are largely independent states. I am sure once Europe is not occupied, it will be talked about more.
I’m surprised, so it seems like most tariffs are falling towards zero on all products except agriculture and cars below 17,000$ in the coming few years.
Especially cars, India has had insane tariffs on luxury cars and motorcycles that will disappear, which is interesting. On the face this seems like a good deal for India as India can probably export much more than EU can to India except for a few sectors like Automobiles and Chips, but who knows, I assume EU officials seem to think the gains in a few high tech sectors are enough to offset the cheap goods on all other sectors.
It's all about German car makers wanting to sell more cars. The recent Mercosur deal was also about it. Of course, no one will buy them anyway since they are too expensive and low quality and Chinese cars are more accessible anyway.
I get the same feeling. German car manufacturers had most of their growth in the past two or so decades from the Chinese market. But now they lost the EV race and CHinese customers prefer Chinese EVs to German ones(Porsche alone lost 99% operating profits!), so they are desperate to offload those cars to new markets any way they can, even at the expense of poor trade deals that might damage other sectors of the EU economy long term.
It's not a coincidence that EU suddenly signs trade deals left and right with the utmost urgency, see the recent Mercosur deal. The coffers are going dry and they need to bring in every euro they can no matter the future societal cost.
I'm happy to be proven wrong, but personally I'm skeptical these trade deals will lead to an increase in purchasing power and QoL for the average EU working class citizen in many countries, who've seen a stagnation or even decrease in the last decade or so.
All automotive goods in India below the $17,800 pricepoint are essentially "Made in India", not China, and in a lot of cases exported abroad under Renault, Suzuki, Toyota, Hyundai, and Mitsubishi badges or directly sold by Mahindra (especially South America and South Africa) or Tata.
Chinese manufacturers got hounded out and as a result the PRC tried [0] and failed [1] to weaponize the WTO against India [0] for India trying to subsidize GreenTech driven industrialization.
Chinese manufacturers are allowed to enter India, but on terms similar to what the PRC used when Western, Japanese, and Korean players began entering the Chinese market - something which German policymakers even pointed out [2].
If you position an automotive product in India to be affordable, you lose aspirational consumers (India1).
Toyota is trying to position itself as a luxury brand in India in order to better defend revenue, as in NAM and JP the Toyota brand has a similar reputation as Maruti Suzuki does in India.
The high tariffs on imported luxury cars never made much sense from the revenue point of view.
Our bureaucracy and governments has finally learnt how to do a Pareto analysis and learnt the difference between high volume/low margin vs low volume/high margins.
Canada is embarking on a trade agreement with India and collectively our greatest fear is the immigration issue. Canada's immigration is already quite lop-sided.
Immigration is absolutely a part of this deal. Interestingly, EU official communications and western media barely mention this, but the Indian government's official communication tout a "new framework for mobility" that will "open up new opportunities in the European Union for Indian students, workers, and professionals." [1]
The quote is “Alongside this ambitious FTA, we are also creating a new framework for mobility. This will open up new opportunities in the European Union for Indian students, workers, and professionals.”
I read it as he is working on a separate deal besides the aforementioned FTA.
As the immigration is governed by the member states themselves and not by the EU, I don't see how it can be "a part of this deal". Which is probably why the media don't mention this. There is nothing to mention.
> look to send them abroad to prevent domestic unrest
Great, now other countries can import and share that domestic social unrest from the oversupply of frustrated reproductive age celibate males, all in the name of making GDP number go up. Lovely.
Surely using hindsight of documented history and well researched human behavior science, we can't already predict this will lead to a rise in political far right extremism, and everyone will be shocked as if it will suddenly come out of nowhere, and then the local males will exclusively be to blame for it, leading to further frustration, radicalisation and disenfranchisement. Surely this is not EXACTLY what's gonna happen.
India gets a metric fuckload of money back in remittances every year. Debatable if that's actually worth the brain drain, but then there's also the angle of having your young people learn from the rest of the world and return with new skills. I lean more towards the remittances though.
I have seen a lot of smart people in thrall of ideologies that could be used to manipulate them left and right at will. Meanwhile, true morons tend to be unpredictably chaotic.
Canada as a whole has been pro immigration for a long time, but our immigration system was broken in recent years, and the most visible consequence of that has been an enormous increase in low skill, low wage Indian workers. A lot of people who have never had issues with immigration policy before have become very anti Indian immigration as a result.
I think there's some particular niche immigration programs (ie. TFW) that have been broken because bad actors are aggressively defrauding the government, but I wouldn't say that Canada's system is broken beyond that.
I'm skeptical that an increase in so called "low skill" workers are even a problem considering that the country is experiencing labour shortages that have contributed to construction costs being so out of whack that building new buildings is unviable.
Now we've "solved" that problem by turning immigration down to zero but that is a kludge and not an actual long term solution to systemic problems.
It's pretty hard be critical of the need for supposed "low skill" immigration when pretty much all of our settler ancestors were penniless dirt farmers.
I agree for the most part. I said immigration is broken, but really the problems are almost exclusively to do with the TFW program and degree mills. One area the TFW program has hurt the country, is in the significant reduction in the number of jobs available to high school students. Anecdotally, I know of many high school students who have been unable to find any work for years, and a stop into any local fast food restaurant or superstore will back that up. These kids looking for part time jobs don't show up in unemployment numbers. They could help the labour shortage, but instead are silently being added to it, in favour of temporary foreign workers filling the positions.
We do need immigration long term for sure! Canada is and will always be an immigrant country. That said, I also don't think an appeal to the past (the fact that almost all of our ancestors came as penniless farmers) should enter into the conversation. To my view, this is a dispassionate conversation about politics. Concerns over hypocrisy are irrelevant.
>I'm skeptical that an increase in so called "low skill" workers are even a problem considering that the country is experiencing labour shortages that have contributed to construction costs being so out of whack that building new buildings is unviable.
I'm skeptical that those migrants helped add more to the housing pool than their own needs.
That's more related to the fact that housing policy in this country is more oriented to helping landlords stuff ever more renters into a basement suite than it is enabling people to create homes.
Construction is not really a low-skill profession anymore, and needs highly qualified workforce to thrive. Buildings of 2026 are de facto complicated industrial robots.
Questioning immigration policy is not racism. Anti-Indian sentiment in Canada is relatively recent and happened after a decade of mass immigration that is now widely agreed has contributed to a noticeable decline in the quality of life for all.
"Widely agreed" meaning the National Post and other foreign owned conservative press banged the drum on the issue endlessly for years and years and now people are thoughtlessly repeating the talking point.
This is undoubtedly happening (and we need to do something about foreign owned press in this country), but I think this is too convenient a story. I am a socialist and I have become extremely concerned about immigration in recent years. I want to talk about those concerns and work towards solutions that are amiable for our country, Canadians, and immigrants. Unfortunately, a lot of people who otherwise share my beliefs, don't seem willing to acknowledge that people like me (who strongly oppose the National Post propaganda organ) exist.
You don't understand, and your unwillingness to approach this issue with the nuance it deserves will only drive people towards right-wing extremists. These people are not racists! The federal government increased immigration (largely of TFWs and students) by far too much, and that has put an enormous strain on Canada's housing and job market. Canadians are turning against broken immigration policy, which has naturally become associated with its most visible aspect--the recently arrived, unskilled Indian worker. You must understand the negative sentiment is driven by association with bad government policy, not naive racism towards Indians. Of course, none of this is the fault of individual immigrants or TFWs, but they are part of the problem, because they are symptoms of it.
Racism is a serious allegation. Let's not cry wolf when there is a reasonable explanation here.
No one said "everyone from their country is a bad influence." Indians were viewed as model immigrants in Canada for decades. Again, their good name is being tarred due to bad government policy.
My point is is that if leftists cannot talk about immigration policy in a nuanced way, right-wing extremists (for there are no other kinds of right wingers these days) will be the only game in town, and people who want to talk about immigration policy will therefore be drawn towards them.
Humans see patterns in everything, that's how we work. You can be a naive idealist all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that people will inevitably associate the effects of a bad policy with the policy itself.
> My point is is that if leftists cannot talk about immigration policy in a nuanced way
Does nuance mean agreeing to your framing of a situation? If so, I guess not. That's not what it means to me.
> a naive idealist
Insults aren't helping your case.
> associate the effects of a bad policy with the policy itself.
What are the effects you're referring to here?
> Humans see patterns in everything, that's how we work.
Here's a pattern I see: American-owned propaganda networks take over Canadian news and trying to drum up racist sentiment and lots of people falling for it.
It sucks that you started with them then by calling people who disagree with you racist.
>What are the effects you're referring to here?
Drastically reduced wage bargaining power in various sectors and also for general unskilled labour typically done by students and the like.
Straight up displacement in some areas.
More strain on a housing supply that's already incredibly overvalued.
Hell I'd argue that the migration was incentivized by the canadian local governments tax dependence on housing prices going up.
US immigration policy was explicitly racist from its founding up until the Hart Cellar act of 1965. Assuming that the 2016 election of Donald Trump is your benchmark for when immigration policy became determined by racists again, then the US's immigration policy was non-racist for 51 of the last 251 (and counting) years, or 20% of its history.
Safe to say that the 1990s "End of History" theory has been proven wrong. It may be that the ~1960s-2010s "post-national" political consensus was actually just a historical aberration that is still in the process of being unwound.
Leaving aside the fact that this is a single picture of a chart with no source provided (or sample size, or methodology)... that's eighth on that chart, not fifth, and just says "immigration" with no further detail.
Canadians don't seem to have their priorities straight if they are more concerned about having a few more Indian neighbors than the US threatening to invade.
Ironically, the chart you've pointed out doesn't indicate the raw numbers, just proportions. 30% of immigrants being from India sounds perfectly reasonable. What's the problem?
It is worth adding here that in the years after Covid began, the raw number of immigrants reached record highs, in some years more than doubling the previous (steady) intake rate.
The Netherlands is preventing is trying to prevent hyperscale data centers from being built because they require as much energy is a year as a small city. I can't imagine dismissing the import of a small city's worth of Indians quarterly as trivial.
> Canada's immigration is already quite lop-sided.
I don't even understand what "lop-sided" means here.
Would you say that Canada's oil and softwood businesses are lop-sided because we produce and export a lot of it? Or that the groceries' market is lop-sided because we don't produce a lot of it and therefore have to import?
Canada is an importer of people (not only from India) because it can't produce a lot of people. It is not different from groceries.
Is India lacking in variety? It has more languages than Europe.
Variety isn't a bad idea in and of itself. But you're making the mistake of assuming all the people who live inside a particular nation's boundaries are the same.
India as a whole is diverse. Canada is NOT getting immigrants from all of India but rather from 2 states (mostly one). Please learn about the issue first.
The majority of Indian immigrants to Canada are coming from one state, Punjab, so the benefits of diversity within India is not necessarily reflected in the Indians coming to Canada.
Because there are so many Indians around, newly arrived Indians tend to spend most of their time with other Indians, and as a result don't integrate with the rest of society as much as previously waves of immigrants did. Canada is a cultural mosaic, but a certain degree of intermixing and assimilation is necessary, in my opinion, to preserve social and national bonds.
What countries would you consider to not be racist? Canada is a functional pluralistic society. Yes there are racists here, but far fewer than elsewhere in my view.
Honestly so is the USA. Yes there is racism, more than I used to think, but it’s below average.
Not being racist is really a pretty modern idea that didn’t become popular anywhere until the last 50 years. For most of human history it was conventional wisdom that (whatever I am) is the obviously superior form of human. Statistically this is probably still what most living people think.
I mean of course whatever you are is the master race. Isn’t it obvious?
Do you appreciate that, in the wider historical context, this position is an exceptionally radical one? You seem to not understand how there could even exist a difference of opinion on this, but I'm confident that this outlook of humans as being completely fungible, transactional economic units would appear unthinkable to anyone throughout 99% of human history. Just the suggestion that a nation's population should be restocked by swapping it out with another nation's population would be tantamount to treason any time prior to the revolution of the 1960s.
Do you believe Trudeau could have made a speech like Carney did at Davos? Or that he would have been so active in signing new trade deals and international agreements, or on dismantling internal trade barriers? I think there is a world of difference between them.
Switzerland has a free trade deal with India already and has a huge trade surplus (~25B). Free trade with china too and also a big trade surplus of around $20B.
> Delhi and Brussels have also agreed on a mobility framework that eases restrictions for professionals to travel between India and the EU in the short term.
This is great news for professionals wishing to move to the EU, and I hope many will use this opportunity.
How are people mistaking what is clearly easier business visas to facilitate short term visits for migration? The EU can't commit to changes on migration because individual countries decide that.
Those words used in the quote are intentionally vague to not cause political backlash from Europeans who won't be happy to hear about getting even more immigration and competition for labor and housing.
Like if the framework would explicitly say "EU to allow in 20 million Indian workers every year" the political backlash would have been devastating, but since the framework only talks in vague phrases like "facilitate labour mobility" and "Enable mobility for skilled workers, young professionals" which are obvious migration policies but disguised in super vague terms to obfuscate the real intent.
That's why they're politicians, that's their job, they need to gaslight you on how policies that only benefit the business/asset owning class is gonna benefit you, the working class, even if that's not true. Their job is to get the voters to buy into and accept the policies their lobbyists push for.
Way to fall-off from being the one source of news everyone in "Anglo" countries in the Third-World used to turn to (and love and respect... however biased the news may have been).
Edit: am trying to access from US, I see a paywall. Good to hear from comments that other countries don't see a paywall.
Huh, viewing from India here - no paywall. BBC can be biased, but it is very useful to know what the British state media thinks. This article is neutral reporting with barely any "analyst opinion" flavor.
Just for clarity: the BBC is not "state media," it's a public broadcaster. This is an important distinction as the UK Government cannot determine its agenda or directly influence its funding.
The BBC will regularly criticise the government, especially when it's a Labour government.
> UK Government cannot determine its agenda or directly influence its funding.
> The BBC will regularly criticise the government
The funding is set for a 10 year cycle, beyond the scope of any individual government specifically to protect the BBC from editorial interference by the government. That’s why it’s a publicly funded broadcaster, not “state media.”
The onus is now on you and the OP to prove your claim that the BBC is state media.
When I say state media I mean media that exists as a part of the state. Like when it's funded by the state or the state has some other kind of influence over it.
Your definition conflicts with UNESCO’s definition. By your reasoning, private US media outlets would have qualify as “State Media” because they kowtow to the Trump government - “some other kind of influence”. This is patently nonsense, so your definition is incorrect.
UNESCO using a definition that doesn't account for fascist corporatism and other means vy which nominally private entities can serve as arms of the state doesn't make that definition universally correct, it just makes it UNESCO’s definition.
> US-based visitors to BBC.com will now have to pay $49.99 (£36) a year or $8.99 (£6.50) a month for access to most BBC News stories and features, and to stream the BBC News channel.
Only the US traffic has a paywall, there's none if you visit it from somewhere else. Understandable to charge people who don't pay for it with their taxes in my opinion, especially if you delivery videos and other expensive content for free without ads.
Most of these cuts happened under the previous government, including where they restricted how revenue from BBC World Service can be recycled into its local broadcasting. You'd almost think the Conservatives were trying to get rid of it.
There are another two hundred-odd countries who also do not pay for it with their taxes. The BBC has apparently not seen fit to paywall them. This is a very confusing and inconsistent move.
The other countries most likely don't make up such a big chunk of visits / costs.
FWIW: There's many news sources in the US (Usually regional news papers etc.) that just throw a forbidden or 402 status code right away at anyone not using a US IP.
This will have no adverse affects on wages, there is definitely skill shortages in IT and nursing in the EU, anyone mentioning immigration is a racist xenophobe, there is no comparison to the UK nor Canada, do not talk about the huge amount of outsourcing to India already happening, your personal experiences are racism, is it cold in Russia?
I always thought of Brussels as the city where decisions go to die; that the EU discusses everything, poses for pictures and solves nothing. Then, in less than a month we have the trade deal EU-Mercosur and this one with India.
Maybe the Europeans can actually solve problems, after all.
1.) These trade deals were discussed for 20 years.
2.) Politics always needs discussion of loosy "all people that matter"
3.) EU by definition has a broad definition of "everyone matters". That's why it is lame but that is why it is interesting for countries outside of the EU becoming a member.
4.) EU does get things done. Maybe you don't read the news (where do you live?)
It is funny that it took less time for South Americans to create the Mercosur and for the Pacific countries to create the trans-Pacific partnership than to negotiate any trade deals with the EU.
Of course that's probably not including things that aren't progressing for whatever reason. Otherwise, a lot of this isn't of much interest to someone on another continent.
my first points are about slowiness which is different to "nothing done". The EU has a wide array of free trade agreements.
"Latin American living in Canada."
Probably thats why you dont read about EU laws. Today Commission investigate into Google for breaking the DMA. The DMA itself is a very important piece of law.
You know it's a good deal for the EU and India given that China has been attempting a diplomacy blitz against the deal [0] for [1] years [2] now [3].
Indian DefenseTech and Dual Use technologies vendors can also now participate in ReArm Europe/Readiness2030 [4] (the EU's Defense Modernization fund) as part of the India-EU Defense Pact [5] that was also signed, especially after the French Government identified [6] a Chinese-led disinformation operation against French and Indian DefenseTech which the DGSE reported on with AP [7].
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Edit: Notice how even on HN new accounts are suddenly popping up trying to make a wedge about this deal by dog whistling immigration even though mobility is not mentioned in the draft seen by Reuters and is a power that falls under individual state's sovereignity in the EU.
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Edit 2: Note the subsequent whataboutism that has arisen. A nation trying to conduct disinformation ops against another nation is an offensive action. It's the tip of the iceberg of attempts of foreign interference within France [8]
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Edit 3: Replying here
> I still don't know what 'diplomacy blitz' are you talking about.
The GT is the de facto voice of China's foreign policy, and has consistently viewed the EU-India deal as an attempt to isolate China. Additonally, Table Media (Germany's equivalent of Axios) noted He Lifeng's statements against the EU-India deal dueing Davos 2026, as the EU and India are investigating a compromise on CBAM for Indian exports.
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Edit 4: Unsurprisingly, the entire HN thread has been derailed by immigration.
Funny how he can confidently push misinformation like that with a straight face when even the sources he cited disprove what he's saying, and then having the audacity to accuse everyone else contradicting him as being a russian troll/bot.
And a VC. VCs are famously known for supporting unions, railing against wage suppression, directly supporting higher wages, advocating protective policies etc. /s
As to your point [7], no need for China to "spread doubts about the performance of French-made Rafale ", I have at this very moment this book on my desk: Le Pouvoir sans visage: Le complexe militaro-industriel [1], written by a Pierre Marion [2], former head of the SDECE/DGSE in the early '80s, where said Pierre Marion does the same thing, i.e. he heavily criticises the Rafale programme and Dassault (the company and the man himself, Serge Dassault)
My favorite part of this timeline is watching (union) leftists celebrate free trade and gun ownership.
The sad part is that as soon as someone wearing a blue shirt enters office, they will get right in line with whatever the blue shirt says. I saw this with Obama's drone strikes in Syria...
Moderates have always appreciated free trade, including Obama and Clinton, and to a lesser extent Biden. Heck, Republicans going anti-free trade is a relatively recent thing, it used to be moderates liked free trade, and so did the far right, now its just moderates liking on free trade and the far left and right not.
> I saw this with Obama's drone strikes in Syria...
Again, you are mistaking Obama for a far-left liberal when he was basically a moderate with no qualms on intervention. Now that we can compare Obama to a populist who claims to be but is not really a conservative either, I don't think we can claim much.
I'm not talking about the politician, but rather the base of supporters who quickly supported things that would have been trashed if the other team did it.
You are charactituring their supporters just like you are the politicians. There is a wide swatch of opposition to Trump: moderates like me, and far lefties that I don't normally agree with on much. Most of the opposition to Trump are from moderates (most Americans are in the middle somewhere), although the most visible opposition is are the far left activist types (because...well...they specialize in visibility). They weren't protesting tariffs, they are protesting ICE, so really they are pretty ideological consistent.
Party loyalists are moderates, the far left is the one that doesn't turn out to vote when Democrats aren't pursuing their agenda, they were the ones to get on the Bernie train, etc...
If you want to bring facts into this, I have bad news about metaphysical truth.
>The Problem of Priors ruins basically all of science
>Particulars vs Universals
>Your senses are organic chemical reactions that lose reality, then you use different chemical reactions that turn it into logical thought, further simplifying and allowing mistakes.
>Deflationary Theory of Truth is probably the correct one.
I don't need to know about gravity to know the sun will rise tomorrow, I can use my intuition. However, my intuition also says the earth is flat. So take what you will.
> Delhi and Brussels have also agreed on a mobility framework that eases restrictions for professionals to travel between India and the EU in the short term.
That should hopefully help increasing the much needed immigration.
The much needed immigration should rather come from countries with similar society and culture to us Europeans, rather than India. Europe couldn't be more different to India and should remain as it was pre-~2014.
Culturally more similar would be South-America I'd say. Them I wouldn't mind at all.
>The much needed immigration should rather come from countries with similar society and culture to us Europeans, rather than India.
The mass emigration from India is a direct consequence of India's poor wages and living standards. If that was not the case, most people I know (and I myself) wouldn't have emigrated. From what I see[1], the average South American is much better off than the average Indian. Maybe that (and India's huge population) explains why South Americans do not emigrate as much[2] as Indians?
In other words, people from "countries with similar society and culture to us Europeans" may not want to move to Europe. It's all supply and demand at the end of the day
The mobility discussion is interesting to me as someone who navigated US immigration.
Moving countries is hard. Not just paperwork hard, but restarting-your-life hard. Credit history, professional networks, understanding how things actually work versus how they officially work.
If the mobility framework makes it meaningfully easier for skilled workers to move between India and Europe, that's significant. Not because of labor economics, but because talented people having more options is generally good for everyone.
The H1B system in the US has created a lot of anxiety and frustration. Competition for that talent pool seems healthy.
The US is no longer in competition for that talent pool by its own deliberate actions.
Might we see a European flowering as the US chokes itself into a regional power?
That isn't at all what I'm seeing. I still have people from Europe asking me to sponsor their H1B.
That’s not true. Trump will be gone in a few years. Soft power and destabilizing many countries has done wonders for US hegemony.
The soft power is partly based on the belief that the systems it’s built will constrain the US into acting reasonably (at least from the west’s perspective). The Greenland thing was not shut down on the US side hard enough and that has shattered that. Now Europe has to contend with the fact that the US system won’t rein in a president that goes too far, and so it basically has to be treated like the absolute dictatorships with all the risks of a mad king that goes with that
Does not mean too much coming from Europe when the EU wants to militarize and the institution is closer to absolute dictatorship than democracy. Similar to Canada and Europe talking about colonizing the world with the US yet Greenland is an issue lol.
I should’ve also said that like the US, Europe, Canada, Australia, Israel are very very racist, chauvinist, exceptionalist. That benefits US hegemony.
Something also not brought up much is how many people have colonized minds around the world. Colonized minds don’t largely change because of a temporary brash leader.
I believe the damage is done and there will be no going back to the old ways. This time around I'm sensing a real change in attitude. People in Europe are sick and tired of all the US bullshit that's been going on for far too long. It's not just the lunatic in the White House. It's the whole system that's being rejected. The endless greed. The bigotry. The war on everything. Peaceful cooperation and coexistence, that's what we want. I'm for my part quite happy and optimistic about the deal with India and I hope more regions will follow soon.
Europe and the five eyes are far too racist and/or chauvinist for what you’re saying. HN is a great microcosm of liberal (which is western and white) ideals and thinking. You can’t really post about resistance to western hegemony here or in most situations around Americans, Canadians, Europeans.
Something not brought up much is how colonized minds works. Colonized minds don’t suddenly become uncolonized because of a brash leader. Eastern Europe since the fall of the Soviets is a great example of this.
Agreed. See also Mark Carney saying "this is a rupture, not a transition" at Davos. We aren't going back.
Well said.
The soft power stuff has been canned. That has not generated good will, but that act pales compared to kidnapping, threats to invade various places and the destabilising effects of chaos as a leadership strategy.
The US has done those stuff since world war 2 ended. Continuously. Trump has hurt things but if anything bringing up things the US has always done as if it is novel under Trump shows how well US hegemony works and will continue to work.
Another thing no one is bringing up is how colonized minds works. Colonized minds don’t suddenly become uncolonized because of a brash leader.
Trump might be gone but project 2025 will continue. They're now most of the party, his cabinet and they're replacing government employees with loyalists (hiring program was part of it). They're attacking the election system again, maybe it won't work but there's a pretty big chance it will.
Yep. Future leaders aren’t going to be as outwardly crass as Trump and that’s all that matters to racist/chauvinists like Europeans and many liberals.
Something not brought up much/yet is how colonized minds works. Colonized minds don’t suddenly become uncolonized because of a brash leader.
Sure, if they want to pay decent salaries.
But no, you can make 3-4x in the US. That’s not an exaggeration. And before someone says ‘free healthcare’, big-tech employers in the US provide pretty nice insurance for employees that caps maximum out of pocket expenses to about a week of your salary.
EU (except Zurich and London) tech salaries have sort of stagnated to a point that you make about the same in Bangalore, and spend significantly more.
Losing a week of salary is still pretty bad. How many days off do you get? Days that you can actually take without losing the chance for a promotion?
> Losing a week of salary is still pretty bad
Keep in mind the salary is 3-5x for big tech positions with 5+ years of experience. Check levels.fyi if you don’t believe me.
> Days that you can actually take without losing the chance for a promotion?
Europe wins hands down on this. I happen to have a great employer where I have taken 4-5 weeks off a year without issues, but that’s not the norm in the US.
Conveniently enough, neither Zurich nor London are in the EU anyways!
You’re right, I meant Europe.
But makes me wonder if EU policies are contributing to wage stagnation.
There had been several high profile cases in the US about wage stagnation, so much that tech companies are a bit wary of this topic.
Surely you mean wage suppression (as in e.g. the unlawful agreement between Apple and Google).
They are the same thing.
In silicon valley, you can not afford to underpay good engineers, as they'll move across the street and get a job that pays double after a year.
In most other places, this ecosystem does not exist because it is ridiculously difficult to start and operate a company unless you are part of some conglomerate.
Wage stagnation can happen without any kind of deliberate conspiracy.
True, a bad economy will stagnate wages by definition.
And it's really hard to land a job in Switzerland simply because there is a small market with tendency to offshore everything except high management.
Swissre, UBS and many others all have open positions in Spain/Poland/India, not actually in Switzerland
Actual formal engineering jobs in Switzerland come with benefits gold plating better than full federal government employees in the USA. And they’re almost as hard to sack.
Nobody gives out positions like that easily to non geniuses. And even for more ordinary very smart candidates, there are enough of them to have a few hoops to jump through.
> But no, you can make 3-4x in the US. That’s not an exaggeration
Eh, we'll see how long that lasts as the transition from financial capital to global pariah progresses. It's quite possible that our labor is extremely overvalued.
Right now it relies on silicon valley's ability to churn out unicorns again and again.
That part seems to be taking an ugly turn nowadays by a bunch of military AI/drone swarm/etc focused startups. I'm guessing that eventually after the Apple/Google model of making money is dead, you'll have to work for Skynet if you want to make money.
Those "decent salaries" have caused a lot of trouble in the US. They are probably not that good for the society, even if they attract foreign talent.
There is not much difference in labor share of GDP between the US and the EU. People who work for living get a similar share of the value they create in both blocks on the average (maybe a bit less in the US), but it's less evenly distributed in the US.
Top 10% earners are now responsible for ~50% of consumer spending. That doesn't mean billionaires and capitalists, but upper middle class professionals and other high earners. The economy is great on the average, but most people don't feel it.
> They are probably not that good for the society
I don't disagree, as in an abstract sense inequality is bad for society.
Try to understand why the US has high tech salaries though. It is because the last 40 years have made it pretty easy and convenient to start companies.
Hence, good employees always have great options or can just start their own companies.
> Try to understand why the US has high tech salaries though. It is because the last 40 years have made it pretty easy and convenient to start companies.
I thought this was because US trade and foreign policy coerced most of the world to open up their markets to high-margin American services via treaties. It's easy to pay high salaries when you're vacuuming money from around the world, and your product (software) has very low marginal cost of replication.
Add free education and childcare to the mix and the difference shrinks quite a bit.
Not to mention the fascism problem of course.
Free education and childcare doesn’t come close to shrinking a 300k USD gap in total compensation. Real number in my case, I looked into moving to Berlin last year.
> Not to mention the fascism problem of course.
Agreed.
The US is going in a terrible direction with this. I hope Europe has learned from history and won’t follow.
> I hope Europe has learned from history and won’t follow.
France was recently an absolute inspiration in this regard.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgrlxn4ngdgo
I could make 2x-3x if I moved to the US.
Turns out I can live a pretty comfortable life with EU salary. I could afford a house, car, family. Quality of Life is pretty great.
I am not sure if the extra money in the US would be worth it.
>I could afford a house, car, family.
You're in the minority now in EU if you can afford to have those things now. The housing and CoL crunch is real and many industries suffered layoffs. Q3 2025 youth unemployment is around 20-25% in several EU countries including developed ones like Finland, it's no longer an issue just for the less developed southern ones.
>I am not sure if the extra money in the US would be worth it.
Since you already have a house and everything, then yeah it makes no sense for you. But I would do it in a heartbeat if I could.
> You're in the minority now in EU if you can afford to have those things now.
A quick search tells me that home ownership in the EU is Approximately 70%, ranging from around 95% in countries such as Romania and Slovakia, to around 50% in Germany. Non-EU citizens disproportionately owns less houses.
So, no. I am not at all in the minority.
Youth unemployment is an issue, being 15% in the EU as a whole, with some countries hovering on 30%. The US has 10% of youth unemployment (considering their labor laws are appallingly bad for workers, I am not sure if this is much of an improvement).
> Since you already have a house and everything, then yeah it makes no sense for you. But I would do it in a heartbeat if I could.
Good for you, may you achieve your goals.
I didn't own a house until a year ago. Refusing offers from the US and moving to EU was likely the best decision I ever made.
I had a life threatening illness not long ago. In the US I would likely be either bankrupt of dead. I appreciate the safety net and labor protections here, even with the higher taxes.
> to around 50% in Germany.[...] Non-EU citizens disproportionately owns less houses.[...] So, no. I am not at all in the minority.
Do you see the issue here?
No?
Home ownership in the US is about 65%, but I presume that may vary a bit by state.
I also expect non-US citizens to disproportionately own less houses.
I don't get the obsession with the US here. That's a different country than the EU where I(and you to afaik) live and the target of the topic.
If I can't afford a house, it makes it no better to me if you tell me that some people in the US also can't afford one, like that's supposed to make me feel better or something.
And with 50% home ownership statistics, it seems I'm not alone. I'm glad the system worked for you but it failed me and so I will vote to those who put my interest first and not devalue my labor.
> I don't get the obsession with the US here.
This conversation, that you replied to, was a consideration of whether it made sense to move to the US. You mentioned that if you could move there, you would.
I presumed it worked as a basis of comparison?
> And with 50% home ownership statistics, it seems I'm not alone. I'm glad the system worked for you but it failed me and so I will vote to those who put my interest first and not devalue my labor.
I presume you live in Germany? I know some engineers who live there, I used to work with a team based off on Germany years ago.
They are doing fine.
I don't really care who you vote for. Based on your stance, I presume you blame immigrants for "devaluing your labor".
Contrary to you, I believe that with more trade and movement of highly skilled people, economic progress follows.
I don't believe stagnation is a viable strategy. You are free to believe otherwise.
Have a wonderful afternoon.
You are right, going the other way can be tough though.
There are hobbies and interests you can pursue with a tech salary in the US that are somewhat out of reach in Europe without generational wealth.
Curious: What hobbies etc are out of reach on an EU tech salary?
I may be wrong but my understanding is that it's not uncommon to find out someone in the USA is a private pilot, no matter what their job is (e.g., if your grocer or mechanic mentioned they have a license you'd not be shocked).
Apparently it's much rarer in the EU, but that might not only be a cost issue.
Cost is not a barrier. Entry-level kit aircraft are cheap in the US, as in cheaper than some of the fancier trucks. The very basic micro-lites are cheaper than any new car.
Conversely, Europeans workers get to enjoy some hobbies more than Americans - such as frequent travel - not because of how much they earn, but because of work culture and paid vacation time rules.
Planes, boats, racing, horses.
The rule of thumb is that expensive hobbies cost in a year what the median yearly income in your area is.
A European tech salary would be about 2x of the median while a US tech salary can be 5-6x.
>A European tech salary would be about 2x of the median
Not even that if you're a worker in rich/developed EU country, unless we're talking FAANG/big-tech, since here SW dev wages are relatively close to national medians so an average SW dev worker doesn't take home 2x the the median.
Issue further compounded by the high taxes on higher wages and more generous government benefits and tax credits for those on lower wages, and suddenly the take home difference at the end of the fiscal year between a SW dev and average worker narrows down even further, to the point that it's not a career you get into for the money, like in the US.
BUt if you're in the less wealthy EU countries, with lower taxes and less welfare benefits, where the national average wages are lower in comparison to tech wages, like from Poland to Bulgaria then yeah sure, you can easily take home 2x-5x the national median in tech because the other industries are a lot less developed compared to SW products and service industry versus places like Germany or Norway with more diverse and developed industries raising the national average wages for everyone making tech workers feel underpaid.
Big tech is about 2x of median, yes.
Even that is embarrassingly low compared to literally anywhere else with offices.
Most people in the US don't earn SV top salaries, and for most people the difference is not that big (was my point).
Right.
I not talking about average wages, as that has no bearing on whether I would want to live somewhere.
I'll primarily look at what I can make and what my quality of life would be like.
You are however making sweeping generalizations that you extrapolate from your own personal experience, while making hard connections between quality of life and the ability to earn more than your peers.
Meanwhile the Nordics for example consistently rank much higher in health, happiness, and quality of life, despite having lower top wages.
I agree, not sure what the generalization was.
My point was that if you have a senior level big tech job in the US, it makes zero sense to move to Europe unless you have family there or want to make a significant financial sacrifice.
Obviously Europe wins for workers in general, and if I wanted to work in a car factory’s yes I’d do my best to work in Europe.
I looked at your other posts in this thread. The lifestyle you describe is not the average US based developer lifestyle. You must live in a very selective circle. Because I only know one developer who owned his plane-that Canadian guy who literally coded the first version of S3, became irreplaceable so AWS let him move to Oregon and he was commuting by plane. And I only know one developer who owned horses-he actually made his money by buying a whole bunch of land in Kirkland in the 90s. These are the only two examples out of probably more than 100 developers I worked with.
I know developers who have motor bikes and a Porsche or BMW or, recently, Teslas that sometimes they take to the race track. But this lifestyle is common for EU devs as well.
Yes, you are right.
I am not sure why everyone keeps bringing up the average though.
You have to decide whether it makes sense for you to be somewhere, based on how much you can expect to make and what your quality of life will be.
What the average person makes does not matter except in an abstract sense that equitable societies are better in general (which is absolutely true).
> You must live in a very selective circle. > These are the only two examples out of probably more than 100 developers I worked with.
People can be very careful about keeping professional life separate. There is a boat owners club in a marina I frequent, the vast majority of the members (out of about 200) are techies, it's a common hobby.
I know several that have a pilot license but only one who bought a plane, it's somewhat convenient to just rent every few months.
What I meant to say is that the lifestyle of the average US dev is not that much better than the lifestyle of the average EU dev. From the examples you gave I only recognized the racing and boating lifestyles - both of which are accessible to EU devs. The planes and horses… not so much.
Now think of a more specific category - big tech employees with 5+ years of experience.
There are a bunch more expensive hobbies, about half of the developers I know (personally outside of work environments) have one or more.
Planes came up because I am getting started with the training for it, horses because my friend has a farm with horses twenty minutes from a major city.
Does anyone have a detailed explainer on the mobility changes, or is it just not finalized yet?
It's an MoU to "discuss" mobility with no commitment to actually decide anything: "[a]dopted as a memorandum of understanding in parallel with the finalisation of the FTA, offers an excellent opportunity for us to cooperate on facilitating labour mobility, supporting skills development and capacity building, and working on skills and qualification frameworks" [0].
Immigration remains under the purview of individual EU member states. And immigration/mobility is out of scope of the actual EU-India FTA deal and the EU-India Defense Pact deal.
Notice how this entire thread got derailed by low karma and newish accounts dogwhistling immigration instead of discussing how the deal expanded European (and India) industrial and chemical exports to India (and Europe) by giving them a tariff rate under that which is Chinese transshipped products via ASEAN get thus making European (and Indian) capital goods cost effective and now includes India as part of ReArm Europe [1] - the EU's defense fund for European and Ukrainian rearmament [2].
Who needs Russian backed farmer disinfo networks [3] when you have anonymous "software engineer" and "OSINT" accounts stirring $hit to try and undermine the EU-India relationship [4]. That said, the deal will go through because the right businesses and unions were mollified over the past 2-3 years building up to this.
[0] - https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_...
[1] - https://theprint.in/diplomacy/india-eu-sign-security-defence...
[2] - https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2025/7695...
[3] - https://councilonstrategicrisks.org/2025/12/01/putin-permafr...
[4] - https://www.defense.gouv.fr/desinformation/nos-analyses-froi...
> dogwhistling immigration
Where do you see the dogwhistling? Immigration is an actual concern to all working class people in EU who understand the basics of supply and demand of the labor market and housing, and I don't agree with trying to suppress such valid concerns by brooming it under dogwhistling, as blocking discourse on this topic just serves to radicalise people.
Especially in current economic times of mass layoffs of many European industries and high unemployment especially amongst the youth, CoL and housing crunch, it's normal the tax paying locals with voting rights don't want their leaders making them compete with immigrants for the shrinking pool of jobs and housing when they themselves are struggling.
And especially given how the typical government promoted immigration systems often marketed on "solving labor shortage in critical industries" and "bringing in the best and the brightest" have historically been abused by employers to drive down wages and reduce the bargaining power of the locals in working class jobs that had no actual shortage of workers, instead of being exclusive for the "best and the brightest" as they claimed.
So given such precedents, it's perfectly normal that such policies be open to public debate and scrutiny since the public will be the one mostly affected, while the business and asset owning elite is always the sole winner in these cases and the ones pushing for them the most.
The rub here is "skilled workers". Just after Brexit, the Boris Johnson Tory government adjusted immigration rules for "skilled" workers, and caused a civilisation-altering number of people (now known as the "Boriswave") to immigrate to the country, mostly from India, Africa, and other less developed areas. It's now known that almost every pay level and skill (or lack thereof) of job was eligible under the new rules, with some countries of origin, like Zimbabwe, having up to 10 dependents per worker on average IIRC. The same story has played out in the US with the "skilled" H1B visa scheme. People have lost all trust in governments to architect immigration laws in the interest of the natives, rather than giving big business carte blanche to import their own replacement workforce who will do any available job for the national minimum wage.
> like Zimbabwe, having up to 10 dependents per worker on average IIRC
Some developed countries have terrible demographics and need fresh kids.
I am expecting that sometime soon New Zealand will start accepting unskilled immigrants if they have >2 healthy kids under 10 years old. It wouldn't surprise me if the dept of internal affairs already has a soft rule to encourage that.
At some point many countries with shitty demographics are going to have to start competing to import kids.
"Skilled" sounds nice because it sounds like "doctors, educated" but the only real SAFE way to ensure it's actually skilled is make the dollar amounts so high that no company will want to use it to import cheap near-slave labor.
The other thing I've noticed about many immigrants is that they are highly motivated and effective. Gritty doers.
The immigration process filters for particular traits, not just what's on a resume.
> talented people having more options is generally good for everyone
While I support free markets, that argument sounds a bit like the basis of the old 'trickle-down economics' and similar theories such as global free trade: Help the wealthy and the benefits will 'trickle down' to everyone else.
It turns out that if you help the wealthy, then the wealthy benefit. I know that doesn't sound like a surprising result when it's said that way, but the point is that the rest is a convenient fiction the wealthy tell themselves and politicians tell the public, in order to serve themselves.
In the US for example, those policies have led to historic increases in wealth for the few, and stagnated wages for the many. On the other hand, in less well off economies such as China and Brazil, the policies led to historic numbers lifted out of poverty - far more than anything in history. So that's a great result that we absolutely should not ignore or put a stop to. I support free trade.
But if the policy isn't specifically designed to benefit workers in the US, for example, if they are left to get theoretical second or third order theoretical benefits, it won't work for them. It's not 'generally good for everyone' unless it's made that way.
I don't understand what your point is when comparing how similar policies helped general population prosperity in less-well-off countries to the USA you say only benefiting the wealthy.
What should I be getting out of your argument? Asking in good faith.
For example, that there's more to it than that simple rule, or that once a certain level of general population prosperity is reached it stops working, or that impoverished populations have a culture that better benefits from such policies... ?
>I don't understand what your point is when comparing how similar policies helped general population prosperity in less-well-off countries to the USA you say only benefiting the wealthy.
Not him but I'd say it suppresses wage bargaining power in the USA or in this case Europe.
It's complex; there's no simple answer. Why did China's workers, for example, benefit enormously while US workers did not?
I don't know. It might have been good luck: outsourcing low-wage labor will of course benefit low-wage workers in other countries, and China's workers happened to be the beneficiaries. Maybe China's government, with a strong motivation to transform its economy from widespread and deep poverty (at the time, much poorer than anyone in wealthy nations), designed their trade policy to achieve that result. (People will also give simplistic answers that serve their ideologies, which I'm not addressing.)
The US's and China's policies were necessarily different: One country was outsourcing low-wage work (hopefully replacing it with higher-wage work) and the other was trying to get as much low-wage work as possible. One was exporting and the other importing.
My main, general point was that unless US policy is designed specifically to benefit X, it won't. Often leaders try to smooth over difficulties by claiming some second-order or third-order effect will benefit X, but that doesn't happen. In this case, X was US workers, and the policy was designed specifically to benefit corporations (afaik).
This is excellent, the duopoly discussions of the world mostly center around US and China and EU feels increasingly excluded while the rest of the world appears as footnote for good or bad reasons. I do hope this means there is enough dynamism in global trade.
The current challenge is that China has so much industrial overcapacity that it possibly can sell goods at near , sometimes even below mfg costs which makes it difficult if not impossible for India or other country made goods to even think of competing in the middle part of the value chain. Yet, it is the only hope for India to climb at least slightly even if they can never hope to get to the frontier of mfg. Chinese goals now are to amortize their existing mfg investments in any way possible but they still find it difficult to spur domestic consumption
Europe and the EU, Japan are vassal states curently occupied by the US. China, Russia, India are largely independent states. I am sure once Europe is not occupied, it will be talked about more.
I’m surprised, so it seems like most tariffs are falling towards zero on all products except agriculture and cars below 17,000$ in the coming few years.
Especially cars, India has had insane tariffs on luxury cars and motorcycles that will disappear, which is interesting. On the face this seems like a good deal for India as India can probably export much more than EU can to India except for a few sectors like Automobiles and Chips, but who knows, I assume EU officials seem to think the gains in a few high tech sectors are enough to offset the cheap goods on all other sectors.
It's all about German car makers wanting to sell more cars. The recent Mercosur deal was also about it. Of course, no one will buy them anyway since they are too expensive and low quality and Chinese cars are more accessible anyway.
I get the same feeling. German car manufacturers had most of their growth in the past two or so decades from the Chinese market. But now they lost the EV race and CHinese customers prefer Chinese EVs to German ones(Porsche alone lost 99% operating profits!), so they are desperate to offload those cars to new markets any way they can, even at the expense of poor trade deals that might damage other sectors of the EU economy long term.
It's not a coincidence that EU suddenly signs trade deals left and right with the utmost urgency, see the recent Mercosur deal. The coffers are going dry and they need to bring in every euro they can no matter the future societal cost.
I'm happy to be proven wrong, but personally I'm skeptical these trade deals will lead to an increase in purchasing power and QoL for the average EU working class citizen in many countries, who've seen a stagnation or even decrease in the last decade or so.
The cheap goods are already coming from China, so having more of it from India doesn't hurt them at all.
All automotive goods in India below the $17,800 pricepoint are essentially "Made in India", not China, and in a lot of cases exported abroad under Renault, Suzuki, Toyota, Hyundai, and Mitsubishi badges or directly sold by Mahindra (especially South America and South Africa) or Tata.
Chinese manufacturers got hounded out and as a result the PRC tried [0] and failed [1] to weaponize the WTO against India [0] for India trying to subsidize GreenTech driven industrialization.
Chinese manufacturers are allowed to enter India, but on terms similar to what the PRC used when Western, Japanese, and Korean players began entering the Chinese market - something which German policymakers even pointed out [2].
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-files-wto-case-aga...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/india-stops-chinas-reque...
[2] - https://table.media/china/thema-des-tages/indien-weshalb-chi...
Toyota Hycross is easily 2x the price and is made in India AFAIK.
That's due to brand positioning.
If you position an automotive product in India to be affordable, you lose aspirational consumers (India1).
Toyota is trying to position itself as a luxury brand in India in order to better defend revenue, as in NAM and JP the Toyota brand has a similar reputation as Maruti Suzuki does in India.
> cheap goods
In a cost of living crisis, maybe this is seen as a helpful import?
The high tariffs on imported luxury cars never made much sense from the revenue point of view.
Our bureaucracy and governments has finally learnt how to do a Pareto analysis and learnt the difference between high volume/low margin vs low volume/high margins.
Canada is embarking on a trade agreement with India and collectively our greatest fear is the immigration issue. Canada's immigration is already quite lop-sided.
Trade != Immigration
Immigration is absolutely a part of this deal. Interestingly, EU official communications and western media barely mention this, but the Indian government's official communication tout a "new framework for mobility" that will "open up new opportunities in the European Union for Indian students, workers, and professionals." [1]
[1] https://www.mea.gov.in/Speeches-Statements.htm?dtl%2F40615%2...
The quote is “Alongside this ambitious FTA, we are also creating a new framework for mobility. This will open up new opportunities in the European Union for Indian students, workers, and professionals.”
I read it as he is working on a separate deal besides the aforementioned FTA.
As the immigration is governed by the member states themselves and not by the EU, I don't see how it can be "a part of this deal". Which is probably why the media don't mention this. There is nothing to mention.
Right but if you want a favorable trade deal then you gotta throw in some immigration sweeteners.
Particularly with India, that's normally one of their top requests.
Why is it a top request from India? What does the Indian government get out of letting their kids overpay for education abroad?
1. ~4% of their GDP is from remittances, compared to <1% a few decades ago[0]
2. India has a massive male surplus[1] and they actively look to send them abroad to prevent domestic unrest
[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BX.TRF.PWKR.DT.GD.ZS?lo...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India
> look to send them abroad to prevent domestic unrest
Great, now other countries can import and share that domestic social unrest from the oversupply of frustrated reproductive age celibate males, all in the name of making GDP number go up. Lovely.
Surely using hindsight of documented history and well researched human behavior science, we can't already predict this will lead to a rise in political far right extremism, and everyone will be shocked as if it will suddenly come out of nowhere, and then the local males will exclusively be to blame for it, leading to further frustration, radicalisation and disenfranchisement. Surely this is not EXACTLY what's gonna happen.
India gets a metric fuckload of money back in remittances every year. Debatable if that's actually worth the brain drain, but then there's also the angle of having your young people learn from the rest of the world and return with new skills. I lean more towards the remittances though.
Governments don’t want smart people. They want dumb people because they are easier to control.
This explains why governments never subsidize universities
Most do enough to keep their people from revolting.
Are dumb people, in fact, easier to control?
I have seen a lot of smart people in thrall of ideologies that could be used to manipulate them left and right at will. Meanwhile, true morons tend to be unpredictably chaotic.
Yea. Dumb people are lower class and uneducated. Give them a few bonuses and they’ll happily shut up.
They can then reserve even more seats in education for the "oppressed."
Mark Carney should know that it would be an _extremely_ unpopular move right now to allow India more access to immigrate here.
"Should know" and expecting a logical outcome is wishful.
> collectively our greatest fear
Citation very much needed. This sounds like _your_ concern that you're trying to launder through projecting onto the rest of the country.
Canada as a whole has been pro immigration for a long time, but our immigration system was broken in recent years, and the most visible consequence of that has been an enormous increase in low skill, low wage Indian workers. A lot of people who have never had issues with immigration policy before have become very anti Indian immigration as a result.
I think there's some particular niche immigration programs (ie. TFW) that have been broken because bad actors are aggressively defrauding the government, but I wouldn't say that Canada's system is broken beyond that.
I'm skeptical that an increase in so called "low skill" workers are even a problem considering that the country is experiencing labour shortages that have contributed to construction costs being so out of whack that building new buildings is unviable.
Now we've "solved" that problem by turning immigration down to zero but that is a kludge and not an actual long term solution to systemic problems.
It's pretty hard be critical of the need for supposed "low skill" immigration when pretty much all of our settler ancestors were penniless dirt farmers.
I agree for the most part. I said immigration is broken, but really the problems are almost exclusively to do with the TFW program and degree mills. One area the TFW program has hurt the country, is in the significant reduction in the number of jobs available to high school students. Anecdotally, I know of many high school students who have been unable to find any work for years, and a stop into any local fast food restaurant or superstore will back that up. These kids looking for part time jobs don't show up in unemployment numbers. They could help the labour shortage, but instead are silently being added to it, in favour of temporary foreign workers filling the positions.
We do need immigration long term for sure! Canada is and will always be an immigrant country. That said, I also don't think an appeal to the past (the fact that almost all of our ancestors came as penniless farmers) should enter into the conversation. To my view, this is a dispassionate conversation about politics. Concerns over hypocrisy are irrelevant.
Don't take it as an appeal to the past but rather the notion that even people with "low skills" are enormously valuable to building a country.
Fair enough!
>I'm skeptical that an increase in so called "low skill" workers are even a problem considering that the country is experiencing labour shortages that have contributed to construction costs being so out of whack that building new buildings is unviable.
I'm skeptical that those migrants helped add more to the housing pool than their own needs.
That's more related to the fact that housing policy in this country is more oriented to helping landlords stuff ever more renters into a basement suite than it is enabling people to create homes.
Construction is not really a low-skill profession anymore, and needs highly qualified workforce to thrive. Buildings of 2026 are de facto complicated industrial robots.
> A lot of people who have never had issues with immigration policy before have become very anti Indian immigration as a result.
So we just let racists determine national policy now? I wonder how that's working out in the US.
Questioning immigration policy is not racism. Anti-Indian sentiment in Canada is relatively recent and happened after a decade of mass immigration that is now widely agreed has contributed to a noticeable decline in the quality of life for all.
"Widely agreed" meaning the National Post and other foreign owned conservative press banged the drum on the issue endlessly for years and years and now people are thoughtlessly repeating the talking point.
This is undoubtedly happening (and we need to do something about foreign owned press in this country), but I think this is too convenient a story. I am a socialist and I have become extremely concerned about immigration in recent years. I want to talk about those concerns and work towards solutions that are amiable for our country, Canadians, and immigrants. Unfortunately, a lot of people who otherwise share my beliefs, don't seem willing to acknowledge that people like me (who strongly oppose the National Post propaganda organ) exist.
> Questioning immigration policy is not racism. Anti-Indian sentiment [ justification for said sentiment ]
Wild sequence of sentences.
> is now widely agreed has contributed to a noticeable decline in the quality of life for all.
Citation very much needed.
If you can't agree that questioning immigration policy is not racism, there is nothing to discuss here.
Is that what I said?
You don't understand, and your unwillingness to approach this issue with the nuance it deserves will only drive people towards right-wing extremists. These people are not racists! The federal government increased immigration (largely of TFWs and students) by far too much, and that has put an enormous strain on Canada's housing and job market. Canadians are turning against broken immigration policy, which has naturally become associated with its most visible aspect--the recently arrived, unskilled Indian worker. You must understand the negative sentiment is driven by association with bad government policy, not naive racism towards Indians. Of course, none of this is the fault of individual immigrants or TFWs, but they are part of the problem, because they are symptoms of it.
Racism is a serious allegation. Let's not cry wolf when there is a reasonable explanation here.
How else am I to interpret someone seeing a group of people working low wage jobs and concluding that everyone from their country is a bad influence?
> will only drive people towards right-wing extremists
The right talks a big game about personal responsibility, but somehow their worst beliefs are always someone else's fault. Funny, that.
> naturally become associated
Now see, that's exactly what I'm talking about. It's _not_ natural or inevitable.
No one said "everyone from their country is a bad influence." Indians were viewed as model immigrants in Canada for decades. Again, their good name is being tarred due to bad government policy.
My point is is that if leftists cannot talk about immigration policy in a nuanced way, right-wing extremists (for there are no other kinds of right wingers these days) will be the only game in town, and people who want to talk about immigration policy will therefore be drawn towards them.
Humans see patterns in everything, that's how we work. You can be a naive idealist all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that people will inevitably associate the effects of a bad policy with the policy itself.
> My point is is that if leftists cannot talk about immigration policy in a nuanced way
Does nuance mean agreeing to your framing of a situation? If so, I guess not. That's not what it means to me.
> a naive idealist
Insults aren't helping your case.
> associate the effects of a bad policy with the policy itself.
What are the effects you're referring to here?
> Humans see patterns in everything, that's how we work.
Here's a pattern I see: American-owned propaganda networks take over Canadian news and trying to drum up racist sentiment and lots of people falling for it.
>Insults aren't helping your case.
It sucks that you started with them then by calling people who disagree with you racist.
>What are the effects you're referring to here?
Drastically reduced wage bargaining power in various sectors and also for general unskilled labour typically done by students and the like. Straight up displacement in some areas. More strain on a housing supply that's already incredibly overvalued. Hell I'd argue that the migration was incentivized by the canadian local governments tax dependence on housing prices going up.
US immigration policy was explicitly racist from its founding up until the Hart Cellar act of 1965. Assuming that the 2016 election of Donald Trump is your benchmark for when immigration policy became determined by racists again, then the US's immigration policy was non-racist for 51 of the last 251 (and counting) years, or 20% of its history.
Safe to say that the 1990s "End of History" theory has been proven wrong. It may be that the ~1960s-2010s "post-national" political consensus was actually just a historical aberration that is still in the process of being unwound.
Here ya go bud: https://abacusdata.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Slide6-1.pn...
It is one of the top 5 issues for ALL Canadians.
Leaving aside the fact that this is a single picture of a chart with no source provided (or sample size, or methodology)... that's eighth on that chart, not fifth, and just says "immigration" with no further detail.
Number 8 on the list?
Canadians don't seem to have their priorities straight if they are more concerned about having a few more Indian neighbors than the US threatening to invade.
What's a "few more" to you?
Look at this chart for example: https://preview.redd.it/in-the-first-three-months-of-2025-ca...
Ironically, the chart you've pointed out doesn't indicate the raw numbers, just proportions. 30% of immigrants being from India sounds perfectly reasonable. What's the problem?
It is worth adding here that in the years after Covid began, the raw number of immigrants reached record highs, in some years more than doubling the previous (steady) intake rate.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/71-607-x2025008...
That’s about 30k people? So a 0.075% increase in your population with people from India (Not accounting for any departures back to India)
The Netherlands is preventing is trying to prevent hyperscale data centers from being built because they require as much energy is a year as a small city. I can't imagine dismissing the import of a small city's worth of Indians quarterly as trivial.
That's 30%, not 30K
30% of 100k = 30k.
That 100K is just in 3 months. We are growing rapidly.
> We are growing rapidly
I remember reading recently that Canada's population actually decreased last year. A quick Google confirms it: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/251217/dq251...
ugh...I guess I have to bring out the crayons to explain this
The reduction came from international students and temporary workers' permits expiring. We keep increasing permanent residents.
Whatever the case may be "We are growing rapidly" is inaccurate.
Welcome to the world by population that speaks English
> Canada's immigration is already quite lop-sided.
I don't even understand what "lop-sided" means here.
Would you say that Canada's oil and softwood businesses are lop-sided because we produce and export a lot of it? Or that the groceries' market is lop-sided because we don't produce a lot of it and therefore have to import?
Canada is an importer of people (not only from India) because it can't produce a lot of people. It is not different from groceries.
Why not import from a variety of countries to preserve the social fabric? https://preview.redd.it/in-the-first-three-months-of-2025-ca...
Is India lacking in variety? It has more languages than Europe.
Variety isn't a bad idea in and of itself. But you're making the mistake of assuming all the people who live inside a particular nation's boundaries are the same.
India as a whole is diverse. Canada is NOT getting immigrants from all of India but rather from 2 states (mostly one). Please learn about the issue first.
The majority of Indian immigrants to Canada are coming from one state, Punjab, so the benefits of diversity within India is not necessarily reflected in the Indians coming to Canada.
Source?
What does "preserve the social fabric" mean?
Because there are so many Indians around, newly arrived Indians tend to spend most of their time with other Indians, and as a result don't integrate with the rest of society as much as previously waves of immigrants did. Canada is a cultural mosaic, but a certain degree of intermixing and assimilation is necessary, in my opinion, to preserve social and national bonds.
It's what the Irish said to us Italians when we were immigrating to Canada in droves.
It's a much larger drove this time around, to be fair.
It's a dog whistle for 'keeping Canada white'. There are a lot of racists in Canada.
This doesn’t work anymore.
Canada is one of the least racist countries in the world. Please travel.
I've lived there. Bullshit.
What countries would you consider to not be racist? Canada is a functional pluralistic society. Yes there are racists here, but far fewer than elsewhere in my view.
Honestly so is the USA. Yes there is racism, more than I used to think, but it’s below average.
Not being racist is really a pretty modern idea that didn’t become popular anywhere until the last 50 years. For most of human history it was conventional wisdom that (whatever I am) is the obviously superior form of human. Statistically this is probably still what most living people think.
I mean of course whatever you are is the master race. Isn’t it obvious?
>because it can't produce a lot of people.
So does every country that can't grow it's population indefinitely need to import a ton of people? What is the endgame there?
And I thought trade in people as some kind of fungible economic token was out of vogue.
>I don't even understand [...]
>It is not different from groceries.
Do you appreciate that, in the wider historical context, this position is an exceptionally radical one? You seem to not understand how there could even exist a difference of opinion on this, but I'm confident that this outlook of humans as being completely fungible, transactional economic units would appear unthinkable to anyone throughout 99% of human history. Just the suggestion that a nation's population should be restocked by swapping it out with another nation's population would be tantamount to treason any time prior to the revolution of the 1960s.
Is it typical to consider immigration as a trade similar to apples and oranges?
To politicians and economists humans are fungible.
Do you feel like your govt represents you?
The current Carney govt? Maybe. Too soon to tell, but things are heading in the right direction.
The previous Trudeau govt? Absolutely not. He was the prime minister of everyone except Canadians.
Carney is a new face with the same cabinet. Nothing has fundamentally changed or will change.
Do you believe Trudeau could have made a speech like Carney did at Davos? Or that he would have been so active in signing new trade deals and international agreements, or on dismantling internal trade barriers? I think there is a world of difference between them.
Using different words and acting in the same way.
Switzerland has a free trade deal with India already and has a huge trade surplus (~25B). Free trade with china too and also a big trade surplus of around $20B.
I might be wrong, but isn't it due to them being a finance hub and/or Veblen goods?
These are a bit of a legacy thing that countries can't just develop.
CH to india key sectors include pharmaceutical products, electrical/electronic equipment, and organic chemicals.
India to CH, gold, jewelry, equipment, textiles.
> Delhi and Brussels have also agreed on a mobility framework that eases restrictions for professionals to travel between India and the EU in the short term.
This is great news for professionals wishing to move to the EU, and I hope many will use this opportunity.
How are people mistaking what is clearly easier business visas to facilitate short term visits for migration? The EU can't commit to changes on migration because individual countries decide that.
>The EU can't commit to changes on migration because individual countries decide that.
Does it not commit the member states to for example uncap student visas which are a common route for migration?
The quote uses the words mobility and travel and short term. It doesn’t mention residency or work permit. Am I missing something?
Those words used in the quote are intentionally vague to not cause political backlash from Europeans who won't be happy to hear about getting even more immigration and competition for labor and housing.
Like if the framework would explicitly say "EU to allow in 20 million Indian workers every year" the political backlash would have been devastating, but since the framework only talks in vague phrases like "facilitate labour mobility" and "Enable mobility for skilled workers, young professionals" which are obvious migration policies but disguised in super vague terms to obfuscate the real intent.
That's why they're politicians, that's their job, they need to gaslight you on how policies that only benefit the business/asset owning class is gonna benefit you, the working class, even if that's not true. Their job is to get the voters to buy into and accept the policies their lobbyists push for.
I wonder if UK will also get a deal soon.
UK-India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%E2%80%93United_Kingdom_C...
UK-EU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU%E2%80%93UK_Trade_and_Cooper...
It's insane to me that BBC now has a paywall.
Way to fall-off from being the one source of news everyone in "Anglo" countries in the Third-World used to turn to (and love and respect... however biased the news may have been).
Edit: am trying to access from US, I see a paywall. Good to hear from comments that other countries don't see a paywall.
Huh, viewing from India here - no paywall. BBC can be biased, but it is very useful to know what the British state media thinks. This article is neutral reporting with barely any "analyst opinion" flavor.
Just for clarity: the BBC is not "state media," it's a public broadcaster. This is an important distinction as the UK Government cannot determine its agenda or directly influence its funding.
The BBC will regularly criticise the government, especially when it's a Labour government.
How is the license fee set, and what happens if you don't pay it?
It's set every 10 years as part of the charter renewal process agreed with the government and Parliament.
Not paying the Licence Fee is a criminal offence.
None of these make the BBC "state media."
Those are all indicators of state media.
Did you miss this:
> UK Government cannot determine its agenda or directly influence its funding.
> The BBC will regularly criticise the government
The funding is set for a 10 year cycle, beyond the scope of any individual government specifically to protect the BBC from editorial interference by the government. That’s why it’s a publicly funded broadcaster, not “state media.”
The onus is now on you and the OP to prove your claim that the BBC is state media.
When I say state media I mean media that exists as a part of the state. Like when it's funded by the state or the state has some other kind of influence over it.
Your definition conflicts with UNESCO’s definition. By your reasoning, private US media outlets would have qualify as “State Media” because they kowtow to the Trump government - “some other kind of influence”. This is patently nonsense, so your definition is incorrect.
UNESCO using a definition that doesn't account for fascist corporatism and other means vy which nominally private entities can serve as arms of the state doesn't make that definition universally correct, it just makes it UNESCO’s definition.
Definition:
> State media are typically understood as media outlets that are owned, operated, or significantly influenced by the government.
Which part of this definition is lacking, in your opinion? Which part of the UNESCO report do you think is incorrect? My source: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000380618.locale=en
CBS is owned by an oligarch carrying favor. This isn't state media. Oligarchs act in their own interests and sometimes make alliances.
You didn’t rebut my point at all. Try again.
This isn't reddit. Try again.
And yet here you are, desperately trying to soothe your bruised ego by proclaiming you aren’t bothered.
> US-based visitors to BBC.com will now have to pay $49.99 (£36) a year or $8.99 (£6.50) a month for access to most BBC News stories and features, and to stream the BBC News channel.
Only the US traffic has a paywall, there's none if you visit it from somewhere else. Understandable to charge people who don't pay for it with their taxes in my opinion, especially if you delivery videos and other expensive content for free without ads.
It should be funded as part of spreading the British viewpoint, promoting British values, culture and so on — i.e. maintaining "soft power".
I would have expected Britain to realize this and continue funding it.
The US is suing the BBC for $10bn. It is only fair for Americans to pay the cost of that.
Most of these cuts happened under the previous government, including where they restricted how revenue from BBC World Service can be recycled into its local broadcasting. You'd almost think the Conservatives were trying to get rid of it.
There are another two hundred-odd countries who also do not pay for it with their taxes. The BBC has apparently not seen fit to paywall them. This is a very confusing and inconsistent move.
> BBC.com reaches 139 million visitors globally, including almost 60 million in the US, the corporation said.
From: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2vgkn7w10o
The other countries most likely don't make up such a big chunk of visits / costs.
FWIW: There's many news sources in the US (Usually regional news papers etc.) that just throw a forbidden or 402 status code right away at anyone not using a US IP.
The BBC puts ads on visitors from outside Britain. The NPV for them of having a foreigner visit the site is probably very weakly positive.
I don't see the paywall. EU-bound.
This will have no adverse affects on wages, there is definitely skill shortages in IT and nursing in the EU, anyone mentioning immigration is a racist xenophobe, there is no comparison to the UK nor Canada, do not talk about the huge amount of outsourcing to India already happening, your personal experiences are racism, is it cold in Russia?
Did I miss anything?
Edit: can't parse sarcasm.
They're missing an /s.
This sounds like a terrible deal, especially if it involves a flood of immigration from India
More indian IT imports that get to enjoy Europe...
EU will scuttle the trade deal to protect the niche interests of French onion farmers. See Mercosur.
I am pleasantly surprised.
I always thought of Brussels as the city where decisions go to die; that the EU discusses everything, poses for pictures and solves nothing. Then, in less than a month we have the trade deal EU-Mercosur and this one with India.
Maybe the Europeans can actually solve problems, after all.
Wait EU-Meecosur is currently on ice, because France is against it and they brought it up to the highest EU court to decide.
I expect something similar with the India Deal, there is always some form of Veto in the EU that makes it very hard to act as a unit.
1.) These trade deals were discussed for 20 years. 2.) Politics always needs discussion of loosy "all people that matter" 3.) EU by definition has a broad definition of "everyone matters". That's why it is lame but that is why it is interesting for countries outside of the EU becoming a member.
4.) EU does get things done. Maybe you don't read the news (where do you live?)
Well, I take 1-3 as evidence for my point.
It is funny that it took less time for South Americans to create the Mercosur and for the Pacific countries to create the trans-Pacific partnership than to negotiate any trade deals with the EU.
> where do you live?
Latin American living in Canada.
You can see the news the EU reports here, in case you are interested: https://european-union.europa.eu/news-and-events/news-and-st...
Of course that's probably not including things that aren't progressing for whatever reason. Otherwise, a lot of this isn't of much interest to someone on another continent.
my first points are about slowiness which is different to "nothing done". The EU has a wide array of free trade agreements.
"Latin American living in Canada." Probably thats why you dont read about EU laws. Today Commission investigate into Google for breaking the DMA. The DMA itself is a very important piece of law.
Honestly I think this is amazing news.
This is fantastic, just another step of trade moving away from being US-centric.
Everyone is just going to move on and ignore the silly tariffs.
Reuters has the draft terms - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/details-eu-india-trade-d.... Mobility is not mentioned.
You know it's a good deal for the EU and India given that China has been attempting a diplomacy blitz against the deal [0] for [1] years [2] now [3].
Indian DefenseTech and Dual Use technologies vendors can also now participate in ReArm Europe/Readiness2030 [4] (the EU's Defense Modernization fund) as part of the India-EU Defense Pact [5] that was also signed, especially after the French Government identified [6] a Chinese-led disinformation operation against French and Indian DefenseTech which the DGSE reported on with AP [7].
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Edit: Notice how even on HN new accounts are suddenly popping up trying to make a wedge about this deal by dog whistling immigration even though mobility is not mentioned in the draft seen by Reuters and is a power that falls under individual state's sovereignity in the EU.
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Edit 2: Note the subsequent whataboutism that has arisen. A nation trying to conduct disinformation ops against another nation is an offensive action. It's the tip of the iceberg of attempts of foreign interference within France [8]
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Edit 3: Replying here
> I still don't know what 'diplomacy blitz' are you talking about.
The GT is the de facto voice of China's foreign policy, and has consistently viewed the EU-India deal as an attempt to isolate China. Additonally, Table Media (Germany's equivalent of Axios) noted He Lifeng's statements against the EU-India deal dueing Davos 2026, as the EU and India are investigating a compromise on CBAM for Indian exports.
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Edit 4: Unsurprisingly, the entire HN thread has been derailed by immigration.
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[0] - https://table.media/china/thema-des-tages/indien-weshalb-chi...
[1] - https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202105/1222983.shtml
[2] - https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202105/1222993.shtml
[3] - https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202010/1205230.shtml
[4] - https://theprint.in/diplomacy/india-eu-sign-security-defence...
[5] - https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/security-and-defence-eu-and-...
[6] - https://www.defense.gouv.fr/desinformation/nos-analyses-froi...
[7] - https://apnews.com/article/france-china-pakistan-india-defen...
[8] - https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2024/07/02/deux-espio...
>Mobility is not mentioned.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_...
Funny how he can confidently push misinformation like that with a straight face when even the sources he cited disprove what he's saying, and then having the audacity to accuse everyone else contradicting him as being a russian troll/bot.
For people who don't know who alephnerd is, check their past comments on geopolitics. They're one of the more well informed commenters on HN.
And a VC. VCs are famously known for supporting unions, railing against wage suppression, directly supporting higher wages, advocating protective policies etc. /s
Yep, VCs like alephnerd totally represent the views of the average EU working class.
I read the three articles that you mention [0][1] and [2] and I still don't know what 'diplomacy blitz' are you talking about.
As to your point [7], no need for China to "spread doubts about the performance of French-made Rafale ", I have at this very moment this book on my desk: Le Pouvoir sans visage: Le complexe militaro-industriel [1], written by a Pierre Marion [2], former head of the SDECE/DGSE in the early '80s, where said Pierre Marion does the same thing, i.e. he heavily criticises the Rafale programme and Dassault (the company and the man himself, Serge Dassault)
[1] https://www.amazon.fr/Pouvoir-sans-visage-complexe-militaro-...)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Marion
To your edit, its one newish account quoting the article and being pro immigration. Its a completely fine comment. You should calm down.
> its one newish account quoting the article and being pro immigration
The comment is so absurdly out of step that it's clearly just trying to stir the issue.
This will strengthen relationship and stabilize the economy a lot in the face of Trumps tariff shenanigans.
My favorite part of this timeline is watching (union) leftists celebrate free trade and gun ownership.
The sad part is that as soon as someone wearing a blue shirt enters office, they will get right in line with whatever the blue shirt says. I saw this with Obama's drone strikes in Syria...
Moderates have always appreciated free trade, including Obama and Clinton, and to a lesser extent Biden. Heck, Republicans going anti-free trade is a relatively recent thing, it used to be moderates liked free trade, and so did the far right, now its just moderates liking on free trade and the far left and right not.
> I saw this with Obama's drone strikes in Syria...
Again, you are mistaking Obama for a far-left liberal when he was basically a moderate with no qualms on intervention. Now that we can compare Obama to a populist who claims to be but is not really a conservative either, I don't think we can claim much.
I'm not talking about the politician, but rather the base of supporters who quickly supported things that would have been trashed if the other team did it.
You are charactituring their supporters just like you are the politicians. There is a wide swatch of opposition to Trump: moderates like me, and far lefties that I don't normally agree with on much. Most of the opposition to Trump are from moderates (most Americans are in the middle somewhere), although the most visible opposition is are the far left activist types (because...well...they specialize in visibility). They weren't protesting tariffs, they are protesting ICE, so really they are pretty ideological consistent.
Again, I'm not talking about moderates. I'm talking about party loyalists.
I admittedly am part of a trade organization, so I am quite friendly to both teams. Call what I see intuition. I usually place these numbers at:
>Total Loyalists: 30-40%
>Ideological Believers: 30-40%
>Ambitious Opportunists: 30%
> I'm talking about party loyalists.
Party loyalists are moderates, the far left is the one that doesn't turn out to vote when Democrats aren't pursuing their agenda, they were the ones to get on the Bernie train, etc...
> Call what I see intuition.
Sure, it is obviously not fact driven.
If you want to bring facts into this, I have bad news about metaphysical truth.
>The Problem of Priors ruins basically all of science
>Particulars vs Universals
>Your senses are organic chemical reactions that lose reality, then you use different chemical reactions that turn it into logical thought, further simplifying and allowing mistakes.
>Deflationary Theory of Truth is probably the correct one.
I don't need to know about gravity to know the sun will rise tomorrow, I can use my intuition. However, my intuition also says the earth is flat. So take what you will.
> Delhi and Brussels have also agreed on a mobility framework that eases restrictions for professionals to travel between India and the EU in the short term.
That should hopefully help increasing the much needed immigration.
The much needed immigration should rather come from countries with similar society and culture to us Europeans, rather than India. Europe couldn't be more different to India and should remain as it was pre-~2014.
Culturally more similar would be South-America I'd say. Them I wouldn't mind at all.
>The much needed immigration should rather come from countries with similar society and culture to us Europeans, rather than India.
The mass emigration from India is a direct consequence of India's poor wages and living standards. If that was not the case, most people I know (and I myself) wouldn't have emigrated. From what I see[1], the average South American is much better off than the average Indian. Maybe that (and India's huge population) explains why South Americans do not emigrate as much[2] as Indians?
In other words, people from "countries with similar society and culture to us Europeans" may not want to move to Europe. It's all supply and demand at the end of the day
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_migra...
EU would be stupid to miss the opportunity after US crackdown on H1B.
GOOD LUCK
I hope for our (India's) sake, it doesn't. We need to keep as much talent here as we can.
It's cheapest for the employer to keep it in India itself.
Notice how new accounts are suddenly popping up trying to make a wedge about this deal by using immigration as a wedge issue.
Edit: The BBC article is wrong, as can be seen by the draft reported by Reuters [0]
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/details-eu-india-trade-d...
It's in the BBC's article.
Wedge issue? EU youth unemployment is 15%.
More entrepreneurs will help with youth unemployment
Somehow these 'entrepreneurs' only ever end up replacing employment with gig work.
What is the BBC article wrong about?
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