>You are exactly not answering the question though.WHich question did I not answer?
>weren't caused by recent decision in my view
No, but they could admit it was a fuckup of the political class, and tell us how they're planning to fix it, instead of gaslighting us for complaining about it and doing more mistake that further damage our economy. We can't stop the music chair song from playing just yet. Just one more round I promise.
How about the recent EU Mercosur trade deal? They're fuckign EU farmers and makign us dependet on foreign food imports. This is a totally new strategic blunder, they can't keep blaming the past anymore.
>Hard cutting immigration, Japan style, would probably have led to comparable economic stagnation from insufficient workforce (see post 1990 Japan).
This is disproven and untrue but has been repeated so many time it became the poster child argument of pro-illegal immigration EU propaganda. That open borders will magically save our economy. It didn't. Case in point, Poland's economy has been growing like crazy so IT IS doable to grow your economy without importing illegal migration and associated issues.
Regarding Japan's economy, is not fucked due to not importing millions of uneducated third worlders to live on welfare like Europe did, it got fucked starting from 1985 when the US forced them to sign the Plaza Accord in order to counter their massive trade deficit US had with Japan(and other powerful export economies), which increased the value of the Yen making Japanese imports suddenly expensive and uncompetitive. Then to combat this, the Japan central bank fucked up themselves by printing money like crazy with ultra low interest rates which instead of stabilizing the exports, caused a massive speculative real estate and golf membership(yes that's true) bubble which imploded in 1990, dealing the final blow to their economic growth since they ran out of levers to pull other than suppressing their labor into a losing race to the bottom with other low wage manufacturing economies of Asia. I recommend you read more on the Plaza Accord, it's pretty eye opening.
Depressing economic situations is what leads people to stop having kids, not the other way around.
Ever since the 1980s, Germany and other European models already knew population trends were gonna be fucked in the future, all the way back then. Did they take any measures and do anything to help the European population have more kids and prevent this? No. But they have the nerve to blame us for not having kids in a stagnating economy with crazy real-estate prices then gaslight us that salvation lies in illegal immigration instead of fixing the local issues preventing the locals from having kids, then introduce speech control laws for anyone who criticizes this.
>It is unclear to me if averting demographic change would've even been feasible at all, and even if it was, it would have come with a plethora of undesirable side-effects (e.g. insanely high youth unemployment).
Good point. If you already have high youth unemployment, why do you need to import illegal migrants? Just to lower their bargaining power further?
>I personally think that environmental policies are the absolute bare minimum. If you want to prevent worst-case global climate effects (say, +4°C global average temperature rise within the century) then what we are doing right now is not even enough.
yeah, the environment is important, but all economic sacrifices EU has made to combat climate change, are being absorbed by US, CHina and India to grow their economies, so the planet is still getting more fucked like before except now we made ourselves poorer for it. Great success. And even Europeans will stop caring about the environment when they won't be able to have a job, or afford to pay rent or heating anymore.