>>While not pretty, at least it is MUCH smarter than Merkel's do-gooding, allowing people without papers in with less processing

The party line seems to be that Merkel hopes to make up for low German birth rates by importing masses of young workers to keep the factories humming to perpetuate German wealth to cover Germans in their dotage.

Anecdotal: but I have quite a few buddies who visit factories in China regularly, and who also have decided to purchase overpowered German internal combustion automobiles as their last hurrah before the self driving electrics take over. Part of the deal is a visit to the factory in Germany,

In both locales, hordes of factory workers are replaced by machines, overseen by a handful of boffins. The BMW production line apparently is pristine with robotic arms swiftly assembling fine automobiles far more quickly and cheaper than humans ever could.

These machines do not care whether they are in China or Germany- or New Zealand. This is magnified by the likes of electric cars easily assembled with hardly any moving parts and minimal maintenance requirement.

Therefore cost of production now shifts towards proximity and the cost of transport. Very large items like cars and plant, should be cheaper to manufacture locally rather than shipped across the planet.

Consequences from the POV of classic capitalism:

a) The offshoring that build China's economy ends up changing very little long-term. In the US it mainly denied jobs to a generation of mostly black people.
b) Since that's going to happen anyway with the rise of the machines, government responsibility increasingly will involve housing and feeding the unproductive- and entertaining them so they don't riot.
c) Worrying about future factory jobs is a bad error: better to minimize the ranks of the imminently unproductive rather than importing more.
d) Here we go again with capital owners becoming an elite largely independent of national Socialist paradises whose masses are entirely dependent on the state and the entertainment it provides.

At this stage, minimizing the blue collar workforce might be smarter for society rather than importing millions more destined to need state support.

Far fetched? IMHO the barometer is cost of food production. If the citizenry sees elite-owned industry focusing on cheap extruded or vat-grown foodstuffs, then the citizenry needs to ask whether they're happy to sit back and watch that become their future, with the only alternatives being radical government now to nip it in the bud, revolt later, or clawing your way into the elite.