Topping the list is immigration, an issue that will play a critical role in the US presidential election and in the evolving politics of most European nations. The influx of foreigners, especially from the Southern Hemisphere, is widely perceived as posing an unacceptable threat to the traditional makeup — the ethnic composition — of American and European societies.
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Donald Trump represents the incomers as parasites, wastrels, freeloaders and even criminals. He recently declared that immigrants “are poisoning the blood of our country.” His followers agree. They believe that America’s cultural identity stands imperiled.
In Europe, Italy received 150,000 unauthorized immigrants last year, an increase of more than 50% over 2022. Nearly 2.3 million migrants have arrived in Britain over the past two years, and 1.3 million have stayed.
Some Irish parliamentarians are demanding a national referendum on the government’s relatively open migration policy, whereby one-fifth of Ireland’s 5.1 million-person population was born elsewhere. They demand a cap on entries after a series of high-profile crimes committed by migrants. An asylum seekers’ hotel was recently the object of an arson attack.
The surge of right-wing parties on both sides of the Atlantic suggests that hundreds of millions of voters are furiously angry about this. Politicians who appear incapable of checking migration, or worse still, are unwilling to do so are being punished at the ballot box, a fate that could befall Joe Biden in 2024. The cash incentives for people to move North from the South are huge. In Morocco, an unskilled worker makes around €8 ($9) a day, while in Spain they could earn five or six times that amount. Manual workers’ salaries in France and the Netherlands are 10 times higher than in North Africa. In Mexico, the average farm worker earns $196 a month, while in California he or she could pull in nearer $2,500, albeit with much higher living costs. An estimated 11 million undocumented illegal immigrants currently live in the US, and it’s possible for them to secure employment without tough questions being asked or labor regulations enforced. If they are deported, as Trump promises will happen if he is elected, the US economy will feel pain.
Economic benefit is one of the arguments advanced by those who say that mass migration shouldn’t frighten us. One such is the Dutch academic Hein de Haas, author of the new book How Migration Really Works, to which I referred briefly in a November column. He claims that the historic statistics show that there is today no global “crisis”; that the main driver for population movement is our chronic need for cheap labor to perform jobs we are too rich and spoiled to do ourselves; and that attempts to seal our borders will fail.
International migrants amount to about 3% of the world population, which means 97% stay at home: “There is no evidence that global migration is accelerating,” de Haas writes. In the US, immigrants constitute about the same proportion of the total population, 14%, as they did a century ago.
He admits, however, that there is a historic change in the nature of mass movement, which for centuries was dominated by Europeans going west, to North America. Today Europe has instead become a key destination for arrivals from the Southern Hemisphere.
Moreover, de Haas’s book ignores the huge reality that whereas in the 19th century much of the US was relatively empty, today people are fighting for space, albeit amid a density much lower than that prevailing in, for instance, Britain.
The US population of 340 million has increased faster than that of most European nations, more than doubling from 1950’s 148 million. During the Christmas period, an estimated 10,000 illegal migrants a day were arriving at the Mexican border.
De Haas seems on stronger ground, however, when he asserts that in Britain, right-wing rage is mistaken to focus upon illegal entrants — people crossing the Channel in rubber boats. Their numbers are tiny compared with those who arrive with visas.
Since 2018, roughly 100,000 so-called small-boat crossers have entered Britain, almost one-third of them in 2023. The right-wing immigration minister, Robert Jenrick, resigned in protest at his own government’s failure to check this movement, declaring it “a national emergency that is doing untold damage to our country.” Sacked Home Secretary Suella Braverman used even more extreme language.
But during the same period our population has increased by more than 1 million, around 0.34% a year. The British Brexit government has authorized most of these arrivals because the economy and health and welfare services need them. I was thinking of such people as Braverman and Jenrick, very poor people’s Trumps, when I suggested at the outset that our societies might fare better if our leaders told us even a little of the truth, and abandoned fallacious rhetoric.
It’s a towering irony of Brexit that exiting the European Union was supposed to reduce migration. Yet, as many anti-Brexiters, including me, predicted at the time, quitting Europe did nothing to halt the inflow of migrants from the South. It merely stopped Poles, Romanians and the like coming and going freely, much to our cost, and made it more difficult for British people and goods to move freely to and from our biggest trading partners.
The overwhelming majority of new entrants into Britain since 2021 have been authorized by the anti-Europe governments of Boris Johnson and his successors, because they’ve been found indispensable to perform farm work and staff the health service and elder-care facilities — jobs which British people increasingly spurn. Each new worker can bring at least one dependent and further family members often follow.
Between 2017 and 2022, the share of non-UK born nurses in the health service rose to 45% from 20%, half from India or the Philippines. Almost one-third of UK general-practice doctors earned their degrees abroad — 54% of foreign qualified in Asia, 28% in Africa.
Throughout the developed world, female migrant workers — especially from the Philippines, Indonesia, Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador — play an important role as domestic servants. An Italian study found that almost 2 million migrants are working in private households. In Germany, a quarter of a million such people help to care for the elderly. A further factor in British migrant numbers is the huge influx of foreign students: Education revenue is critical to the British economy.
A common cry of the right in many countries is that border controls must be toughened. Yet in an age of cheap travel and vast international movement, it’s hard to make these stick, even if political will exists. Neither Mexican border walls nor Mediterranean and cross-Channel naval patrols are likely to achieve their purposes.
There is even evidence that allowing free movement makes people more willing to return to their homelands after studying or working. A researcher on migration issues, Simona Vezzoli, has made a case study of three Caribbean communities: Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana. The first gained independence from Britain in 1960 and the second was set free by the Dutch in 1975, while the third remains a department of France — part of the EU in South America. Although all three started from roughly the same place in terms of history, location and economics, their 21st century experiences are very different.
French Guiana today has very low emigration because its people enjoy free movement to and from the EU, which many of them visit to work. Meanwhile a staggering 50% of the populations of Guyana and Suriname have permanently migrated abroad, most of the Guyanans to the US and the Surinamese to the Netherlands. Researchers who have studied their rival experiences suggest that these mass exoduses have been accelerated by fear of being trapped in their own impoverished societies by ever-more stringent entry restrictions imposed by richer nations.
Between 1986 and 2008, the underground migrant population in the US rose to 12 million from 3 million despite a fivefold increase in number of patrol officers and a 20-fold increase in funding for border enforcement. Hein de Haas argues from the US example: “Border enforcement drove migration underground.”
Many of the same American and European nationalists who are haunted by the threat posed by migration are also fierce opponents of foreign aid. This seems bizarre. The only credible long-term response to the prospect of ever-larger movements from the Southern Hemisphere — which Hein de Haas doesn’t believe will happen, but many of us are convinced pose a huge challenge — is to assist people to stay where they are.
Remittances sent home by workers abroad are an especially effective form of aid, because they reach the people for whom they are intended. In 2022, half a trillion dollars was dispatched back to developing countries by migrants.
The difficulties of preventing state aid from being stolen by the kleptocrats of Africa and Latin America remain formidable. But even greater hazards will face us if the world’s impoverished peoples, threatened by war, persecution and climate change, continue to quit their homelands. On present projections, this peril is real, and very large. I can’t share the complacency with which some liberals, including de Haas, view this prospect.
Most of us who adhere to the center of politics in our respective nations adopt a middle view about immigration. Our societies need some of it to support our economies. But uncontrolled population movements pose a huge political and social threat, fueling right-wing extremism.
It’s striking that autocrats, notably including Russian President Vladimir Putin, incite immigration to the West, because they perceive it as a disruptive force that aids their relentlessly hostile foreign-policy agenda. Putin applauds, for instance, the flight into Western Europe of 5 million Ukrainians who have escaped his assault on their homeland.
China’s President Xi Jinping is probably delighted that 150,000 of his critics and foes in Hong Kong have moved to Britain, the former colonial power. A further 5 million — 5 million — have a right, granted by Boris Johnson, to follow these if they choose, which is expected to be exercised by about 300,000.
Amid popular fury about the scale of migration, both the US and Europe are threatened with a resurgence of what we must call fascism. I can never forget the words of my old hero, British history Professor Michael Howard. He said to me, a year or two before his death in 2019: “Communism has been always an ideology of elites. But we should never forget that fascism was popular.”
A century ago, the German variation — Nazism — branded Jews as the source of the world’s perceived woes. Today, demagogues on both sides of the Atlantic focus their anger more widely upon foreigners, newcomers, outsiders of all hues.
In the years ahead, our rulers must convince voters that they understand their fears, and discover how to manage and limit immigration. The difficulties remain very great. If democratic governments fail, however, fascism much influenced by this perceived threat poses a real menace to our societies.