Will the machines and robots that will replace humans in many roles in the near future also pay taxes? Will they make social security contributions? Immigrants contribute a lot.
The anti-immigration speeches spread across Europe and led by the voices of leaders of far-right parties, who understand more than anyone the power of social media, sell the idea that “ immigrants are stealing jobs from nationals”.
While social media is full of viral videos that feed these narratives, spread hate speech, fake news and stir up xenophobic anti-immigration sentiments, a growing phenomenon goes unnoticed, both by the angry and by those who defend immigration: the digitalization of the simplest aspects of our daily lives.
Last week, I was in Helsinki, the capital of Finland, to participate in an academic conference that brought together researchers from several countries and addressed the cultural and social transformation characterized by digital saturation. Today, I am not here to talk about death, but about the psychological stress and physical and mental fatigue of not being able to walk around without a smartphone connected to the internet, with enough memory and a cloud storage service. From the moment I left home, I was faced with a deeply stressful experience due to always having to have a cell phone on hand. During my journey, I noticed that practically my entire experience involved reading QR codes, making onliseguranca socialne payments, sending emails to confirm and receiving codes for transactions. From checking in with the airline and hotel to buying a public transport ticket.
We don't need to go to the wealthy and technological Finland to realize that it's not immigrants who are stealing jobs from locals, but machines. In several supermarkets in Lisbon, there are already automatic checkouts and few human cashiers. Just like in department stores like Zara, where you can hardly see any employees anymore and you can go to the automatic checkouts and pay for your purchases using a type of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. Just hope the machine reads all the items, ok! And check it out, because you'll certainly be embarrassed when the security alarm goes off when you leave a store or supermarket, even if everything is paid for and in order.
The feeling I've had in the last few days is that technology has been given a kind of power and control that leads us to a state of technological saturation where we can no longer relax and enjoy a trip. We need to be always alert, with enough battery and data for everything. There's nothing more distressing than the warning that you only have 5% battery left or that your data plan has reached its limit.
If what the European Union calls digital transformation is read as development, I can only say that we will reach a stage where we will increasingly be held hostage by a model of society that leads us to dependence and surveillance, to such an extent that we will not have the strength to challenge it. We passively accept the transfer of our data, the use of our features for facial recognition in hotels, stores, airports, we leave our fingerprints everywhere, and so on.
When I see the number of jobs that are being replaced by intelligent machines, I think that antiimmigration discourse, in addition to being fallacious and dishonest, incorporates a narrative that blames immigrants for the lack of jobs. This, in addition to the hate speech that has migrated from social media and is now on the streets, on the subway, on the bus, in the neighborhood bakery and in everyday life. But the data shows that the immigrant workforce is concentrated in areas such as restaurants, construction, cleaning, customer service, care, delivery and repair services. Therefore, these are sectors of the economy that make the wheels turn. These workers receive little more than the national minimum wage and contribute more than seven times to Social Security than they actually receive in benefits, as pointed out in the report by the Migration Observatory in 2023. And the question that begs to be asked: if immigrants steal jobs (in sectors in which many nationals refuse to work, which makes the immigrant workforce essential for the functioning of the country), will the machines and robots that, in the near future, replace humans in various roles, also pay taxes? Will they make deductions for Social Security?
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