Skallagrim
Well-known member
Impossible to predict. A lot of OTL's policy points depend on the economic model we've chosen (lots of Neo-Keynesian bullshit) and social-democratic welfate state realities. If one supposes that this might have turned out differently, the situation surrounding immigration would be different as well.Out of curiosity: What kind of immigration policy do you think that a surviving A-H would have? I know that some libertarians are in favor of a presumption in favor of open borders, so I'm wondering if they would actually like whatever immigration policy A-H would have actually had in recent decades.
Overall, I have a gut feeling that a surviving Austrian Empire might naturally evolve towards a "points system" for immigrants, where they welcome university students and economically valuable migrants, but refuse piss-poor fortune seekers who would most likely end up becoming a permanent underclass anyway.
Is that necessarily logical? It might be, but as I mentioned: there's more at play than economics.BTW, the most logical arrangement would be similar to what Europe has right now: A bunch of nation-states, but unified in a supranational union such as the EU. This would allow for free migration not only within A-H, but also throughout most of Europe while still fulfilling most Europeans' wish and desire for national self-determination.
And even when we purely discuss economics... too-close ties between countries with wildly different economies is recipe for disaster. You cite the EU, but the EU is a suicide pact for the Northern countries. It would have been a million times better to have a Northern European Union ("the Germanic countries") and a Southern European Union ("the Romance countries"). These two could have had free trade, but they should NEVER have had the same currency.