Europe: The Cracks Are Beginning To Show

[Marcin + 519]

33 minutes ago, Rasmus Jorgensen said:

What is your take on North Korean slave labour working in Polish Shipyards? 

Didn't know about it, but if you mention it, it is in the media. If it is in the media I am sure it will not longer be possible.

No company would want to co-operate with firm hiring slave workers, a bad publicity for whole supply chain and the ultimate client for a few bucks.

It is good slave labour case was uncovered and thus eliminated.

[Tomasz + 1,608]

Before you start praising Polish emigration policy, let me inform you about the salary level in Poland

Median wage in Poland in 2016 was circa 2500 zlotys after taxes. Its less than 600 euros and although purchasing parity value is quite a lot higher thats simple most important reason we dont have such problems with refugees.

We are simply still a poor country in comparison with other countries in European Union and there is nothing to brag about.

They simply choose other countries in Europe for a living because of higher wages and generally higher standard of living apart from desperate Ukrainians that are not allowed to work in Western Europe.

 

And I will only add that the fight against the EU bureaucracy will continue on the Polish side until the countries of the old Union take the money - dotations. Poland is the biggest victim of the new EU smaller budget, losing billions of euros and that is the price of this policy.

In last 15 year Poland got more than 100 bilion euros and now dotations will flow in smaller quantities and only now will we see what the Polish economy really is worth.

Edited September 24, 2019 by Tomasz

[Marcin + 519]

12 hours ago, Tomasz said:

Before you start praising Polish emigration policy, let me inform you about the salary level in Poland

Median wage in Poland in 2016 was circa 2500 zlotys after taxes. Its less than 600 euros and although purchasing parity value is quite a lot higher thats simple most important reason we dont have such problems with refugees.

We are simply still a poor country in comparison with other countries in European Union and there is nothing to brag about.

They simply choose other countries in Europe for a living because of higher wages and generally higher standard of living apart from desperate Ukrainians that are not allowed to work in Western Europe.

 

And I will only add that the fight against the EU bureaucracy will continue on the Polish side until the countries of the old Union take the money - dotations. Poland is the biggest victim of the new EU smaller budget, losing billions of euros and that is the price of this policy.

In last 15 year Poland got more than 100 bilion euros and now dotations will flow in smaller quantities and only now will we see what the Polish economy really is worth.

Yes Tomasz you nailed it, they are not coming mainly because Poland is a poor country.

The fact that immigrants will not receive free room&board in Poland plus petty cash for fun (maybe 200EUR not 800EUR as in Western Europe) would be an important factor,  but as  "old Europe" takes immigrant with open hands it is lmostly mute argument.

Please do not take seriously stunts performed daily by our authoritarian-constitution-breakers government, they are shows for domestic audience, we are in election circus now. These government rednecks are a laughing stock, so actually not that dangerous for our EU interests, remember that at the end of the day majority of Poles are Pro-European.

You mentioned desperate Ukrainians, and yes desperate they are, war&misery in their country.

Somebody mentioned earlier that you Russian by ethnicity, what is your take on Ukraine-US-Russia situation ?

My take is poor Ukrainians were not smart enough to not become pawns in game (USvsRussia) too big for them and

are simply victims of somebody being at the bad time in the bad place. More mature society will not allow US

sponsored coup d'etat, which finished 20 years of relatively smart balancing act of Ukrainian West vs East policy.

And strategically Russia had no other option but to take Crimea for Black Sea control sake. And Ukrainians in their utter stupidity

made it much easier for Russia by passing laws against Russian minority right after the coup. Really poor, poor nation.

 

[Marcin + 519]

My take on Poland & immigration was mainly that we are not backward racists as is common narrative in EU,

but simply to poor to let to be busted like old EU rich countries.

[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

21 hours ago, Marcin said:

I do not see any problem with our culture because of immigrants,

media and internet are the main reasons nations loose their identity,

 

21 hours ago, Rasmus Jorgensen said:

^Bingo

@Tom Kirkman focus the anger where it needs to be focused. 

 

Um, wat?

[Rasmus Jorgensen + 1,169]

7 minutes ago, Tom Kirkman said:

 

 

Um, wat?

Social media, television etc are much worse than imigration. 

Was trying to witty - when I read it again I see it didn't make sense. 

[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

Ah, ok.  No worries.

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

1 hour ago, Rasmus Jorgensen said:

Social media, television etc are much worse than immigration. 

Was trying to witty - when I read it again I see it didn't make sense. 

Made sense to me.   I guess it is where you stand, that focuses the mind. 

Let's get back to the issues of relative poverty.  Poland is a long-time source of migrant workers for Western Europe, lots of Poles flow to Holland and England, where the wages are so much higher.  You see Poles working there in everything from farm jobs to carpentry to painting to city sanitation work, then sending the money back home to the family in Poland.  This phenomenon is known as "remittances," and remittance earnings are a major source of foreign exchange for poorer countries.  In the USA you see this with workers from both Mexico and the Philippines, for example Filipino nurses will migrate to Canada and USA and work there, share an apartment four to a unit, then send some of their earnings back to Momma and Poppa back home. 

A previous poster mentioned shipyards.  The wage differential is now so large that the integrated shipyard operations send their hull-building work to yards in Poland.  Damen Shipyards, of the Netherlands, does this, as wage rates run around 10% to 15% of Dutch shipyard wages.  Once the hull is constructed and painted in Poland, it is towed to a Damen yard in Holland and is finished there with the major systems and cabins, a process known as "fitting out."  Interestingly, Damen and other yards are also doing this with their famous billionaire yachts. 

The other country that is getting this rough-build work is Romania, where shipyard workers are averaging about 2,500 Euros a year. A yard in say Holland or Denmark will come in at well over ten times as much.  Now this is not all bad news.  The pricing differentials does push work to the lower-wage countries, and thus produces domestic income streams.  Eventually, as the Poles and Romanians develop advanced shipyard skill sets, you will see more sophisticated vessels completed in those yards and their prices come up. that is exactly what happened with Japanese autos shipped to the USA.  They started out with basic cars built and sold at lower prices due to exchange rates, and as the cars developed  consumer acceptance they became more elaborate with more features and the prices rose, making the Japanese a wealthy society. But it does require that the local workers are serious about the jobs. 

Now with the Ukrainians, the poverty-level wages will result in the depopulation of the country.  Currently a girl getting out of school faces the bleak future of a secretary job at $40 a week, if there is one open.  That will vary considerably across the country, with such work in say Lviv, the extreme far west along the Polish frontier  (Lviv was once part of Poland), the wages are higher.  IN the Eastern part, the city of Kharkiv has very low wages, perhaps $15 a week for semi-skilled secretary or shop-girl work.  So those young women migrate to the West if they can.  Or they try to marry a Westerner, which provides emigration papers through marriage.  The marriage industry is huge in Ukraine  (and Russia, for that matter). 

I anticipate that, in one generation, the population of Ukraine will fall by half.  The only stop to this is if Western capital flows in and the infrastructure, especially the rail system, is rebuilt to Western standards.  Readers my note that Ukraine rail gauge  (the distance between the track rails) is different by 4 inches from Europe, so the rail cars have to be jacked up at the Border and new wheel sets rolled underneath, for a train to transit.  That is totally ridiculous.  It is the reason that freight trains (a chum of mine from Yale owns a railroad company through the Baltic States)  ships out via the port of Trieste, sending trains through the mountains, instead of via Odessa, which is a run on the flat valley from Poland.  Selling the rail track to a Western country and having them rebuild to dual-gauge standards would bring a large amount of freight through Odessa, dramatically improving their earnings. 

Will Ukraine be able to expel the Russian Army from the Donbas  (the area along the Southeastern frontier)?  Probably not.  I predict a state of frozen war for decades, until after Putin is dead. Putin might even invade the city of Kharkiv, and take it over; he has parked two divisions, armor and infantry, right on the Border, which is less than 30 miles from the city.  Ukraine will continue to suffer until it is able to expel the Oligarchs, recapture the stolen wealth, and re-arm itself.  That is not going to happen in my lifetime. 

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

22 hours ago, Douglas Buckland said:

Furthermore, if you leave your country, who is left to right the wrongs which caused you to leave? Once someone else rights these wrongs, will you return?

You should be aware that roughly 1/3 of migrants to the USA end up leaving the USA and going back home.  That number has been remarkably fixed for two centuries, and includes the waves of migrants from the countries of Western Europe. 

Americans have this chauvinistic idea that everybody that arrives in the USA is just panting for American citizenship.  That is not accurate.  Lots of people arrive and do not attempt to, or even have any interest in, citizenship.  Although I have seen long-term residents eventually do that when they hit 70, both to avoid deportation and to avail themselves of benefits reserved for citizens only in old age, as the social security system excludes some 56 benefits no paid to non-citizens.  I had a chum take out US citizenship some 8 months before his impending death, specifically to provide for his American wife.  Douglas may note that fully 16% of people now in the USA were not born in the USA.  That is lower than the historical average, incidentally. 

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

On 9/22/2019 at 9:33 AM, DayTrader said:

Not very encouraging, and now the ECB is getting geared up for another round of QE, which means that the euro is going to be devalued. Of course, the Americans aren’t going to be best pleased with this turn of events.

That will make European goods, especially autos and industrial machinery, more competitive in the American market.  For example, I have been dissuaded from buying specialized German machinery for years now, due to the high Euro exchange rate.  Go back 20 years and the Euro was trading at 0.85 American.  No reason it does not slide back to that level. 

[Douglas Buckland + 6,308]

36 minutes ago, Jan van Eck said:

You should be aware that roughly 1/3 of migrants to the USA end up leaving the USA and going back home.  That number has been remarkably fixed for two centuries, and includes the waves of migrants from the countries of Western Europe. 

Americans have this chauvinistic idea that everybody that arrives in the USA is just panting for American citizenship.  That is not accurate.  Lots of people arrive and do not attempt to, or even have any interest in, citizenship.  Although I have seen long-term residents eventually do that when they hit 70, both to avoid deportation and to avail themselves of benefits reserved for citizens only in old age, as the social security system excludes some 56 benefits no paid to non-citizens.  I had a chum take out US citizenship some 8 months before his impending death, specifically to provide for his American wife.  Douglas may note that fully 16% of people now in the USA were not born in the USA.  That is lower than the historical average, incidentally. 

Are you talking about legal or illegal migrants? The last I heard there were about 15 million illegal immigrants in the country and I guarantee you that none of them will willingly return to their countries of origin.

If the immigrants you describe are not ‘panting for American citizenship’, then what are they here for? Education, business, what? I would also be curious as to how many actually overstay their visas. 

How do you become a long term resident without a green card? Why would you go through the hassle of getting one unless your intention was to stay?

Lastly, how is it chauvinistic to assume that those arriving on something more than a visitors, business or education visa are ‘panting’ for citizenship, permanent residence or a green card?

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

10 hours ago, Douglas Buckland said:

Are you talking about legal or illegal migrants? The last I heard there were about 15 million illegal immigrants in the country and I guarantee you that none of them will willingly return to their countries of origin.

I really would be hesitant to turn this discussion into a recitation of US migration policies, that was not what the thread was bout.  That said, I wold point out that it is not "illegal" for n alien to overstay a visa. That is strictly a civil matter, and the alien faces civil, that is to day administrative, proceedings. 

Aliens with visa overstays can be asked to leave.  If they decline to leave, then the alien can be placed in civil detention and brought before an administrative judge, and n Order of Deportation can be issued, forcing him to leave. All these are civil proceedings, and thus the Govt has no obligation to supply an attorney to the indigent being brought up in these civil proceedings. 

Where this goes off the rails is with aliens from countries with no visa requirement. For example, Canada is such  special case.  There re likely 25 million Canadians quietly living in the USA.  Most are retired; there are entire towns in Florida where the advertising flyers left under the windshield wipers of the parked cars are in French, for the Quebeckers living there.  My guess is that there are more Canadians than any other identifiable national group living without residency permits in the USA.  And nobody says anything.  

Does any of this make the alien "illegal"?   Nope.  The alien is not Illegal, and this is the major part of the big immigration debate that has gone on for decades in Washington. 

10 hours ago, Douglas Buckland said:

If the immigrants you describe are not ‘panting for American citizenship’, then what are they here for? Education, business, what? I would also be curious as to how many actually overstay their visas. 

Immigrants come to the US for lots of reasons.  For the Quebeckers, it is to get away from the bitter cold of Winter.  For Canadians generally, it is for reasons of marriage or work transfer.  For English and Irish youngsters, it is to work the hotels and restaurants on Cape Cod and the Islands for the summer.  For the Mexicans, it is to pick up Dollars to support the family back in Mexico. For the Baha'i, it is to avoid being murdered.  Lots of reasons.  Millions of migrants overstay their visas; it is very common. 

11 hours ago, Douglas Buckland said:

How do you become a long term resident without a green card? Why would you go through the hassle of getting one unless your intention was to stay?

You don't.  A "green card" is an I-551 residency permit (visa), and it is issued allowing the Holder to remain as a resident in the USA, and also to work inside the USA. It is not a hassle to get one as long as you fall into narrowly defined parameters.  And therein lies yet another immigration legislation problem. 

Trust this clarifies.  Cheers.

[Douglas Buckland + 6,308]

Knowingly overstaying is in itself a criminal offense: see Section 24 of the Immigration Act 1971. Overstayers who make an application within 14 days will still usually be committing a crininal offense. That said, prosecutions are almost unheard of.

It is legally a criminal offense to overstay your visa.

I was guilty of this in South Africa years ago and was given 24 hours to leave the country.

[James Regan + 1,776]

On 9/24/2019 at 10:30 AM, footeab@yahoo.com said:

English: 1/4 French, 1/4 German/Dutch, 1/4 Latin, and 1/4 cursing

English the ultimate bastard language.  We steal words wherever we can get them.  Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Native Americans, Russians, Romanians, Egyptians, and even.... GASP!  the French... yes. 

Good point, and we will leave the EU based on this finite point, the English never had a word for giving up in Battle (white flag stuff) the words surrender and capitulation are word taken from the French we never had these words in our language or blood, same will go for Brexit, we voted and we will leave, thank the lord for that little nine mile stretch of water that gives us some safety but gives us a mentality that only Islanders have,

From Old French surrendre, from sur- + rendre (“render”). Noun use is from Anglo-Norman.

From Middle French capitulation.

[Rasmus Jorgensen + 1,169]

21 hours ago, Jan van Eck said:

The other country that is getting this rough-build work is Romania, where shipyard workers are averaging about 2,500 Euros a year. A yard in say Holland or Denmark will come in at well over ten times as much. 

I would say atleast 15 times as much. 

[Rasmus Jorgensen + 1,169]

On 9/24/2019 at 4:07 PM, Marcin said:

Didn't know about it, but if you mention it, it is in the media. If it is in the media I am sure it will not longer be possible.

 

The expose I saw ended with documenting how the people behind these (slave)manning agencies had re-opened under different names. So, probably still going on. The funny thing is - in order for North Koreans to come work in Poland they need visas to get in, so there must be some government assitance. 

On 9/24/2019 at 4:07 PM, Marcin said:

No company would want to co-operate with firm hiring slave workers, a bad publicity for whole supply chain and the ultimate client for a few bucks.

Shipping has been it for decades and despite media attention continue to do it by scrapping ships in india and pakistan. 

 

On 9/25/2019 at 12:09 PM, Marcin said:

but simply to poor to let to be busted like old EU rich countries.

This is a very interesting comment. We went all the benefits of the union, but do not want to contribute. 

If this feeling is prevalent then it puts brexit in a different ligth to me.