The Immigrants Are Coming!

So what? To hear the Republicans talking, people might think they were all standing south of the Rio Grande, with bayonets fixed, ready to assault us. What they seem ready to do is validate America as the greatest country in the world, and they will work the menial labor and feed us their native delicacies just to stay here in the Land of Prosperity and Safety.

I think we ahve been bamboozled by our politicians (i.e. not just yours) about immigration after reading the review How Migration Really Works by Hein de Haas review – home truths: A powerful debunking of myths about global migration, and an indictment of the political dishonesty that generates them.

Depending on your political inclination, this might seem like typical Tory hypocrisy, but the distinguished migration scholar Hein de Haas says it’s a contradiction that runs through governments across the west, no matter who is in charge. Since the second world war, according to a long-term study of data from 45 countries by de Haas and colleagues, immigration policies have tended to become more liberal. At the same time, border defences – in the form of walls and surveillance, or crackdowns on people-smuggling – have gone up. Between 2012 and 2022, for instance, the budget of the EU border agency Frontex rose from €85m to €754m.

The paradox arises, argues de Haas, because governments in the west – committed, as they are, to forms of economic liberalism – are constantly trying to balance three competing demands. One is to remain open to global markets, which requires a degree of immigration to fill domestic skills shortages. Another is to protect the rights of those immigrants who do arrive to work, study or settle. A third is to respect the wishes of citizens who wish to see immigration limited or even reduced.

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Yet while migration was once largely a case of Europeans making their way to the New World – and of the old European empires moving indentured workers from one colony to another – today the direction of travel has changed. More people are moving to the west, from a wider range of countries, than before. It’s a shift, De Haas acknowledges, but neither unprecedented nor out of control. (In the US, for instance, immigrants constitute about 14% of the population – around the same as they did a century ago.) Nor is it the poorest leaving home: in general, emigration is a result of economic development, as populations gain the education and means to move for work.

Another, equally important part of De Haas’s argument is that we should stop thinking of migration in terms of costs and benefits. Yes, immigration helps fill labour shortages, but it has little overall impact on labour markets, and the profits mainly go to employers. Yes, remittances help sustain communities back home, but their benefits are mostly cancelled out by the costs of people leaving in the first place. Instead, De Haas suggests, it’s more useful to think of migration as a fact of life. The social and political questions it raises, therefore – over rights at work, or economic priorities, or national identity – are ones that concern us all. As de Haas puts it: “Any real debate on migration will therefore inevitably be a debate on the type of society we want to live in.”