Immigration Roiling Politics Globally
Those seeking to escape the global south are facing resistance from DC to London to Paris.
AP (“Jungle between Colombia and Panama becomes highway for migrants from around the world“):
Once nearly impenetrable for migrants heading north from Latin America, the jungle between Colombia and Panama this year became a speedy but still treacherous highway for hundreds of thousands of people from around the world.
Driven by economic crises, government repression and violence, migrants from China to Haiti decided to risk three days of deep mud, rushing rivers and bandits. Enterprising locals offered guides and porters, set up campsites and sold supplies to migrants, using color-coded wristbands to track who had paid for what.
Enabled by social media and Colombian organized crime, more than 506,000 migrants — nearly two-thirds Venezuelans — had crossed the Darien jungle by mid-December, double the 248,000 who set a record the previous year. Before last year, the record was barely 30,000 in 2016.
Dana Graber Ladek, the Mexico chief for the United Nation’s International Organization for Migration, said migration flows through the region this year were “historic numbers that we have never seen.”
None of this is particularly surprising. The flow of illegal migrants from Latin America seeking to escape poverty for a better life in the United States has been a controversial political issue for as long as I can remember—well over four decades now.
But the AP headline belies the larger context of the report:
It wasn’t only in Latin America.
The number of migrants crossing the Mediterranean or the Atlantic on small boats to reach Europe this year has surged. More than 250,000 irregular arrivals were registered in 2023, according to the European Commission.
A significant increase from recent years, the number remains well below levels seen in the 2015 refugee crisis, when more than 1 million people landed in Europe, most fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. Still, the rise has fed anti-migrant sentiment and laid the groundwork for tougher legislation.
That refugee flow, of course, helped lead to the rise of right-wing parties across Europe and certainly contributed to the Brexit disaster.
Earlier this month, the British government announced tough new immigration rules aimed at reducing the number of people able to move to the U.K. each year by hundreds of thousands. Authorized immigration to the U.K. set a record in 2022 with nearly 750,000.
A week later, French opposition lawmakers rejected an immigration bill from President Emmanuel Macron without even debating it. It had been intended to make it easier for France to expel foreigners considered undesirable. Far-right politicians alleged the bill would have increased the number of migrants coming to the country, while migrant advocates said it threatened the rights of asylum-seekers.
In Washington, the debate has shifted from efforts early in the year to open new legal pathways largely toward measures to keep migrants out as Republicans try to take advantage of the Biden administration’s push for more aid to Ukraine to tighten the U.S. southern border.
The U.S. started the year opening limited spaces to Venezuelans — as well as Cubans, Nicaraguans and Haitians — in January to enter legally for two years with a sponsor, while expelling those who didn’t qualify to Mexico. Their numbers dropped somewhat for a time before climbing again with renewed vigor.
While I generally support expanding the number of legal slots for entry into the United States, I’m always amused when they come with expiration dates that we have shown time and again we can’t or won’t enforce. And “expelling those who didn’t qualify to Mexico” is a sad joke; they’ll simply return as many times as necessary.
After some personal anecdotes, we get this:
In October, Panama and Costa Rica announced a deal to speed migrants across their countries. Panama bused migrants to a center in Costa Rica where they were held until they could buy a bus ticket to Nicaragua.
Nicaragua also seemed to opt for speeding migrants through its territory.
So, essentially, these countries are facilitating illegal immigration to the United States. Indeed, on a global basis:
After discovering that Nicaragua had lax visa requirements, Cubans and Haitians poured into Nicaragua on charter flights, purchasing roundtrip tickets they never intended. Citizens of African nations made circuitous series of connecting flights through Africa, Europe and Latin America to arrive in Managua to start travelling overland toward the United States, avoiding the Darien.
[…]
Adam Isacson, an analyst tracking migration at the Washington Office on Latin America, said that Panama, Costa Rica and Honduras grant migrants legal status while they’re transiting the countries, which have limited resources, and by letting migrants pass legally the countries make them less vulnerable to extortion from authorities and smugglers.
Meanwhile:
Then there are Guatemala and Mexico, which Isacson called the “we’re-going-to-make-a-show-of-blocking-you countries” attempting to score points with the U.S. government.
For many that has meant spending money to hire smugglers to cross Guatemala and Mexico, or exposing themselves to repeated extortion attempts.
[…]
Unable to detain many migrants, Mexico instead circulated them around the country, using brief, repeat detentions, each an opportunity for extortion, said Gretchen Kuhner, director of IMUMI, a nongovernmental legal services organization. Advocates called it the “politica de desgaste” or wearing down policy.
But, of course, while there’s both the show-making and potential for exploitation, the US-Mexico border is huge and porous. It’s certainly not in Mexico’s interest to expend huge resources to stop the outflow—especially not when the folks in question aren’t even Mexican to begin with.
On the US side, the options are terrible. Border enforcement is wildly expensive, yet ineffective. Enforcement much beyond the border is expensive, ineffective, and almost always results in racist profiling.
The vast majority of the migrants in question are economic, not qualifying for refugee status or asylum under international law. But that doesn’t stop them from claiming asylum status and overwhelming the system. Successive administrations have used extraordinary—and arguably illegal and inhumane—practices to get around the problem of simply not being able to resource the administration of this system.
The seemingly obvious solution is to stop the flow on the demand side, making it incredibly difficult for American companies to hire workers without legal status. But we’ve shown very limited appetite for doing that and there is, of course, a massive black market for fake documents.
The waves of immigration to the US in the 1800s was driven by massive population growth in Europe. Just looking at my family history, there were many families with easily 5-10 children. Today, in 3rd world countries, there is massive population growth also driving the need to emigrate. At the root of the problem is the need to control population growth and the resulting poverty it generates.
In this case the the flow is both demand driven and supply driven caused by both the wild imbalance of wealth and the political repression and instability of the countries of origin.
In a lot cases its nearly impossible to separate “economic refugee” from “political refugee”.
@Chip Daniels: There’s just very little evidence that more than a tiny fraction of these people “have been persecuted or fear they will be persecuted on account of race, religion, nationality, and/or membership in a particular social group or political opinion.” They’re just poor.
Beyond that, even those entitled to asylum aren’t necessarily entitled to it in the United States. Rather, they’re required to seek it in the first safe country. That they continue here is de facto evidence that they’re economic migrants and ineligible.
As you state, this is easily controlled on the demand side.
Arrest and imprison business owners and managers who hire undocumented workers. Donald Trump, for example.
Problem solved.
Except, they don’t want to solve the problem, they want to complain about it and pretend it’s the Democrats who don’t want to solve the problem.
@James Joyner:
In Republican Imaginary Law, maybe, but in the real world, not only is there no such provision in US law, but any such provision would violate our obligations under the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees
Unless and until the US Government, whether Dem or R, is willing use legal pressure on US businesses to crush the demand side, the migration will continue. Looking at the numbers, except for during Covid and the invocation of Rule 42, trump wasn’t particularly more successful in stemming the refugee flow than Biden or Obama were, Biden has actually been more successful than trump in returning rejected migrants to their country of origin.
Like homelessness, there is a tendency for observers to paint all migrants with the same brush, when the reason they are moving can vary greatly from country to country. Migrants from Afgan and the Middle East are fleeing chaos in political oppression. Africans, population pressure and economic opportunity. Venezuelans, chaos, economic opportunity and political oppression, etc, etc.
Frankly, an aging Europe, Japan, So. Korea and North America can use a large influx of migrants.
Then we get into the whole political issue around immigration, with R’s not willing to compromise, because they view it as a winning issue and Dems,¯\_(ツ)_/¯ who knows.
The poverty endemic due to Marxist socialism and the culture imposed by Spanish colonists. Even the countries that did have some economic success, Argentina and Venezuela, fell to the socialism promoted so aggressively by the professors at US universities.
Of course, the Biden Administration is going after companies that try avoid employing illegal immigrants instead of those who do
All the while, the DOJ does nothing to interdict the fake document market.
@Stormy Dragon: 8 U.S. Code § 1158 has a safe third country provision and the doctrine of “first safe country” is widely applied in practice precisely to distinguish legitimate asylum seekers from those simply seeking to improve their economic status. Even UNHCR recognizes “it has some basis in the phraseology of the Convention, where the Convention requires direct arrival from territories where life/freedom is threatened before a particular provision can apply (Article 31 (1)).”
So we just give them all bus tickets to Canada – problem solved!
You have to be pretty dumb even for a bigot to be upset about people taking to great risks to come to America and work terrible jobs. Basically, a lot of these problems are a means to reduce people to their stupidest most insensitive selves and then to keep them there. This is happening in America, even though I’m willing to bet that it you strip away the ideology of stupidity and resentment against ‘elites’ most Americans are sympathetic to people who are hard workers. But Americans are happy to be played and terrified of showing empathy towards others in politics.
In 1970 I put together my high school’s first Earth Day celebration. The big topic was overpopulation. Not the last time environmentalists got it wrong. (See also: nuclear power, GMO foods, time-wasting nonsense about grocery bags.) But today China’s population is dropping like a rock, along with Europe, Russia, Korea and Japan. The US is stable only because of immigration. Immigration has always been our secret weapon, with a seemingly endless supply of workers conveniently located right across the Rio Grande.
For the health of their economies, Europeans, Koreans, Chinese, need more young people. The opposing force is cultural and racial panic. Europe’s immigrants tend to be Muslim, often Black and Muslim, and the Italians, the French, etc… are not okay with that. The Chinese, Japanese and Koreans are really bad at ingesting immigrants. And no one wants to move to Russia.
American cultural panic is odd in that the immigrants we get are mostly White (nominally) and almost entirely Christian, or at least culturally Christian. The cultural gap between a Sudanese and a Frenchman is miles wider than the gap between a Salvadoran and an American.
But this period in time won’t last. Assuming climate change has the effects we anticipate, the flood of Africans and Middle Easterners heading for Europe will grow exponentially. Europe won’t allow it. Things will get much worse, more violent. The floor of the Mediterranean is already covered in millennia of human remains, more to come.
The US is unique in that the people we get are culturally close and our economy would actually be helped by an influx of more young people. But politically we need to find a way to ease the panic over ‘Messicans takin’ our jerbs and fukkin’ our wimmin.’ Support for more legal immigration will rest on how well we stop illegal immigration.
An interesting note: the relatively prosperous Dominican Republic is building a wall across its entire border with desperate and doomed Haiti.
@James Joyner:
As point 13 in your linked note make clear, that only counts in situations where the “first country” has agreed to accept them as refugees. The US can’t unilaterally go “Mexico should have taken these people” and send legitimate refugees there if Mexico refuses to take them.
@James Joyner: This is also applicable in EU terms and a source of signficant tension between southern states and N. EU.
@Scott: This is hangover 1970s stereotyping: excepting Sub-Saharan Africa and most particularly the Sahel but not solely, there is not now massive population growth in developing countries, net birth rates are falling, you can profitably look at this Wikipedia and the helpful map – everything red is accelerating population (deeper red, higher), green is at replacement current birth rate, blue, below. It is quite quickly evident the old ideas hanging over from literally the 1970s are false.
What is the case is that economic growth is not sufficient – and generally although the Left loves its USAID to Oxfam Poverty Porn of traditional lifestyles etc – economic modernisation is needed to support better opportunities at the populations prevailing, old traditional modes are not sufficient (and in farming in particular over-stress soil particularly in climate change).
While the simplistic (and equally 197os stereotype) blithering on by JKB about socialist-marxist is not particularly enlightening, it is not entirely wrong – although really in most developed markets the underlying reality of economic inefficiency is not a Left-Right thing but something of an unholy blend – whether wearing the masque of socialism or traditionalism, oligarchic (whether pseudo-socialist state oligarchs [e.g. Algerian junta, Venezuela] or private ones) models is a serious barrier. As is over-regulation – applying developed markets models before there is the actual capacity to effect them properly and efficiently (or pay for them) under pretences….
@Sleeping Dog:
While from a labour cost PoV indeed Europe and other low-birth developed countries can use immigrants – with automation and AI developments, this is an assumption that needs great caution.
Regardless there is clearly a rate of change of population assimilation that regardless of labour cost utility, the cultural-political ability to swallow is exceeded (and not just in developed countries, the poor treatment of migrants who may be tempted to stay, in developing countries shows this is not merely developed countries ethno-racism – see Tunisia, South Africa).
@Stormy Dragon: That amounts to an absurdity: the US is simply required to take anyone who’s potentially at risk at home because no other country will take them. In which case, we have the same right as the intervening countries to refuse to take them.
@Scott:
While this was true in years past, it is significantly less true now. Looking at 2015-2020 data, there are 20 countries with negative growth (that number is likely higher, as there are 43 countries for which we don’t yet have data, the large majority of these are small to tiny nations and some of those had negative growth in the 2010-2015 data set). Next, there are 66 countries with less than 1% growth. 55 have between 1% and 2%. 32 have between 2% and 3%. Only 10 have growth rates above 3% and many of them are for unique reasons. The only two that exceed 4% are oil wealth nations with relatively small populations (Oman and Bahrain). Of the eight remaining, all have steadily declining population growth and in most of them it might be lower even today if not for refugee crises from neighboring countries.
The population bomb is no longer the driving force it was a half century ago. And for countries still experiencing high population growth the solution is very well known at this point: educate girls. A centuries worth of data makes that very clear – increase education for girls and the population growth slows and eventually reverses, and this happens in as little as one generation.
The primary causes of mass immigration in today’s world are armed conflicts and economic devastation. And when people feel compelled to leave they are no longer willing to just migrate to the next country over. Even in the poorest towns and villages in the developing world people are exposed to media showing what life is like the West. Many, many people have family and close friends there who they talk to regularly. While immigrating is rife with difficulties, it is no longer the wing and a prayer moon shot it was before VHS tapes, DVDs, internet/email and now the Web and mobile phones. When I lived in a small village in Ghana, it was an all day affair to get to the big city where I could make a long distance call to the US, at the cost each minute of more than a days salary for most people. Today those same people regularly call or text their sister/brother/cousin in Toronto or Los Angeles, often while walking back from their fields where they still plant, weed and harvest with a short handled hoe in brutal heat. It’s obvious that the possibilities available if they immigrate are very much on their mind, and the means to do so are widely shared.
The West’s immigration system including the asylum laws were made for a different era. It is going to collapse. If liberals and progressives aren’t willing to get in front of it then the collapse will be managed by racists and the billionaires who finance them.
@Modulo Myself: While it is true that many here are primarily motivated by bigotry, the reality is that we are a country of 340M people. If we opened our doors there would be a billion or more coming here in the first year. We have to control immigration and if liberals want to do that as humanely as possible (I sure as hell do!) then we have to take responsibility for it. If we throw up our hands and say, “All attempts to manage immigration is racist and we have to fight it”, then the bigots will end up responsible for the solution.
@MarkedMan:
Yep. This is a situation where it’s better to adjust now rather than wait for the pressure to finally erase any possibility of a humane approach.
Immigration is now a weapon. Putin is flooding Finland with migrants from middle eastern and African countries, in retaliation for joining NATO.
I would not be at all surprised if many at our southern borders weren’t encouraged by certain political operatives here. Destabilizing democracies is cheaper and easier than Putin and his cronies ever imagined.
Certainly. On the other hand, it is the cheaper choice, and we have to do something to reduce the cost of government given that we’ve reduced the size of the actual middle class* and can no longer pass the cost onto it.
Still, for some the futility of expulsion to Mexico may be more of a feature than a bug.
*as opposed to those who we call middle class simply because they are in the midrange percentages of a monumentally wide “income range.” (And let’s not forget that many still wish to consider themselves middle class here given that being poor amounts to a sort of death sentence for family and loved ones eta: in a zero-sum philosophy/system some see the US to be.)
“If you build it, they will come.
On the other hand maybe, if we destroy it, they will stop. (Which, sadly, may be an argument for electing Trump in 2024. 🙁 )
@James Joyner: “on account of…” is doing a lot of work here.
In the early 80s I personally knew a young man from El Salvador who when reached 17 was told by both the rebels and pro-government sides to pick a side or die.
How would one go about documenting this to a immigration judge? And ” people who simply want to live” isn’t one of the protected classes.
And where are these safe harbors to which refugees should apply first?
The use of “economic refugee” as a rationale for exclusion needs to be challenged as well. Why shouldn’t we welcome these people and process them in an orderly way?
@Sleeping Dog:
Indeed. It’s always
good… well at least convenient, to have a servant class that’s large enough to satisfy demand.@MarkedMan:
Citation needed.
Every article I have ever read about immigration notes how incredibly expensive it is and few can afford it.
If we increased the number of visas tenfold who would suddenly be able to afford it who presently cant?
@JKB: Thank you! Your first sentence caused me to break out laughing out loud that I couldn’t finish reading what you were writing for the tears in my eyes. This has been a depressing post. It’s nice to have someone who knows the importance of bringing some levity and can do it well.
@James Joyner:
We agreed to certain obligations under the treaty. The fact other countries aren’t living up to their obligations doesn’t mean we get to too, as the treaty specifically disallows rejecting refugees due to a lack of reciprocity. Indeed, the fact the proposed recipient country isn’t abiding by its obligations as a signatory pretty much demonstrates the fact that it’s not really a “safe country”.
Now if you don’t like the terms of the treaty and think we should terminate it, then come out and say that. But we need to stop trying to legalistically argue that up is really down so that we can abridge our duties while still pretending we’re upholding them.
@Chip Daniels: Yes indeed! Or to put it another way, do we really believe that the combination of our laws and interdiction resources are currently turning back what would be more than 80 or 90 percent of those seeking to immigrate here presently based on “a billion or more coming in the first year?”
@Modulo Myself: Or perhaps in fact Americans (and in fact Europeans in Europe, Tunisians in Tunisia, South Africans) have motivations and concerns that are broader than your stereotyping and fairly simplistic economic focus.
While myself I am quite favourable to immigration, it is fundamentally unhelpful and self-blinding to go to “stupidity” as explanation.
@Stormy Dragon: Given EU interpretations as well, it is rather more accurate to say he does not agree with the Activist interpretation of obligations, rather than prima facie obligations.
@James Joyner:..They’re just poor.
@Andy:..bus tickets…
How about bus tickets to Mar a Lago!
There are those who say that Trump is the Christ! *
He has lots of room and more money than anyone. Trump will tell you that.
How about the next busload of migrants get dropped off at the gates of ‘Lago and make Trump prove what a good Christian he is.
*Trigger Warning: Reading this link can make you puke.
@Chip Daniels:
We do. Last year there were a little over a million legal immigrants, the vast majority of which were from developing countries. And there are currently over 10M illegal immigrants living in the US. What would you suggest would be an acceptable number? And then once that number was reached, how would we stop additional people from coming in?
A few random thoughts and ideas. Not necessarily good ideas, mind you…
The US-Mexico border is very long and hard to maintain, and most of the current wave are from further South, so it would make sense to bolster the much shorter Mexico-Guatamala border.
Border states have problems, and if we brought more of the immigrants into the system, we could make them settle in other areas. More immigration, but with strings attached that make it easier to manage. Restricting movement obviously has some legal implications, but if they have to report to their caseworker in person every month or two, we can get a decent amount of compliance with our goals like that.
Every time we crack down on hiring, it is at the state level and hurts the red states that do it. So, let’s do that. Hurt red states, I mean. Greater enforcement in states deemed to be having an “immigration emergency”. This would also push illegal immigrants away from the border and further north with a stick.
Can we just topple the government of Venezuela? They seem to be not great in general, and are creating problems for us. I’m almost thinking of a regular toppling of governments that are creating immigration problems for the US. Americans love a good war.
Set up English language schools throughout Central America. Feed the kids cheese burgers. In 20 years, we might not even notice that we have so many illegal immigrants. It’s only a problem when you see it. We might need to get Americans to start using spicy ketchup (salsa) on their burgers.
We have a Spare Dakota. I know I’ve already promised it to the Israelis, but I think they can share.
Mexico is lovely. Lots of countries are lovely. In addition to looking at the problems in the countries of origin, we should be looking at ways to make other potential destination countries more appealing. We have an absolute hatred of anything government-planned here, but would a large US government backed investment in Central America make sense and keep people from coming here.
@Chip Daniels: @Chip Daniels:
There were 125,000 people from India alone, despite the fact that once they get here there is an 18 year wait list to become a citizen. 18 years. (It varies by country of origin because there are quotas). If we said “any Indian who wants to come to America and become a citizen can do so if they pay the fee, I would guess hundreds of millions would attempt it.
There is no way to know, but here are two things that make me think the number is very conservatively a billion. First, in the 70’s and 80’s Ireland had poor economic outlook but a very peaceful social order (I’m talking Republic of Ireland here, not Northern Ireland). 40% of Irish youth emigrated, and 60% of the college educated ones did, primarily to the US and Europe. As white English speakers and Europeans they had an easier time then most, but still, 40%! My parents were Irish immigrants and we had a regular travel brigade of cousins in the Chicago area to work illegally and many stayed, at least until Ireland’s economy picked up. So 40% of the youth from a country much better off than most. They probably had better economic outlook than 6-7M of the 8M+ people in the world today, and still they picked up and moved.
The second was from my Peace Corps experience in Ghana. I taught woodworking in a small village and had just under 20 students. If I had walked in one day and said, “There’s a bus leaving in 10 minutes and if you get on it you will eventually end up working in the US, but you won’t be able to so much as say good bye to your family, all but one of my students would have gotten on it. People who I know even slightly would often bring the conversation around to taking one of their children with me back to the US. (The understanding was that the kid would live with me, work around the house, cook, clean, etc and I would provide food, shelter and an education). This easily happened 40-50 times in the two years I was there. And that was just people I knew. If I happened to visit a very isolated village, strangers would come up to me and ask me to take a child to the US with me.
Of course there are no “citations” on what would happen if we threw our doors open wide, but anyone who has spent significant time in the developing world (i.e. where 7 billion of the world’s people live) with the average people there, would make the same guess I do: no less than 100’s of millions, and more likely a billion or two.
@Michael Reynolds:
The current wave of immigrants has a lot of indigenous people, and mixed-indigenous people. The nominally-White folks are more likely to be staying put, as they get the most economic opportunities in their home countries.
Any further discussion will involve phrases and words like “colonialism” and “White Supremacy” and be interpreted as “woke.” Or, we can quote Donald Trump about how they aren’t sending their best and know he means whitest.
As an aside, this is likely why a lot of the Latinos in the US are either opposed to more immigration, or don’t prioritize immigration reform as highly as Mayonnaise-Americans assume they do. These new immigrants aren’t “their people.”
At the risk of sounding like someone other than the comfortable middle aged white guy that I am, it’s White Supremacy, and Off-White Supremacy, all the way down.
(I feel like I have committed a cultural appropriation of the green-haired youth with piercings and pronouns.)
@Michael Reynolds: “Assuming climate change has the effects we anticipate,”
But why should we assume that? After all, you just pointed out that the people who care about the environment are a bunch of whiny jerks who are not only always wrong, but have inconvenienced you with bans on grocery bags.
If we had only ignored all those bitching progressive losers, we’d be in much better shape. People in Ohio could still stay warm in the winter, for instance, just by hanging out by the rivers that could still catch on fire.
@Mister Bluster:
I wonder if the lone 5-star review is a joke. Hope so.
@wr:
I often feel that you’re addressing someone standing just behind me. Or maybe you don’t take the time to read before you screed, and fair enough, so do I sometimes. Your comment is so off-base it leaves me baffled. You could not back up a single accusation. Your comment is not factual.
@MarkedMan:
What prevents those Ghanians from emigrating right now?
The fact that it isn’t legal??
Every essay on immigration notes that the barriers we have erected are failing. That for every one we deport, several others enter.
In other words we already have “open borders”.
And yet, amazingly enough, the answer seems to be that we…er, um, erect borders because I guess this time they will work when they have utterly failed every time before.
Isn’t over 40% of illegal immigration from people visiting the US but overstaying their visas?
Maybe we could do something about that first?
@Grumpy realist:
A lot of the commentary about immigration reminds me of the issue of homelessness, where people just start waving their arms and demanding we DO SOMETHING.
As if, you know, there is some cheap and easy solution out there that somehow, everyone involved has just overlooked.
Legal barriers to anything only work when the desire to evade the law is minor. When there is this sort of tremendous pressure, like with drugs, prohibition could only work by turning the entire continent into some sort of North Korean armed camp.
@Chip Daniels:
Yes, primarily. Ghanaians, and I presume, people all over the world, regularly get better off relatives to pay for school fees, help them start a business, take a child in and send them to a trade school. If they had the option to instead ask those relatives to pay the fees to apply for a visa that was sure to be awarded, and then a one way ticket to the US, along with a promise to pay back any outlay with interest once the recipient was established? I think somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of the population under 40 years old would grab that chance. For crying out loud, the number of people willing to walk 4000 miles or more through a f*cking jungle, through unimaginable dangers, paying thousands of dollars to strangers who may abandon them (or much, much worse) is sufficient to break our immigration system and yet you think that a visa fee is sufficient to keep 100 or 1000 times that out? You are dreaming!
@MarkedMan: Or rather than walk through the Central American jungles, walk across the Sahara. That’s the EU route and the movement is significant (one need only look for the news for example on Morocco-Spanish Enclave attempts to do forced border crossing [Ceuta, Melilla] – the people are heavily West Africans, not Maghrebine).
Of course visa fees high enough to be dissuasive also present economic issues – for example for genuine business people attempting to develop EU or American business and needing to do prospecting in person (quite usual for business and even more so for an African entrepreneur needing to outreach given the Nigeria Email scammer hurdle)
I am on a number of impact VC investment selection committees, and it stuns me the extent to which Americans and Europeans are blind to the fact that African entrepreneurs who are unable to prospect markets – due to combined home market capital controls and to challenges getting visas – are massively limited. Sometimes the questions in selection committee really…. While of course those entrepreneurs who are from the oligarchic families (whether private sector or the public sector where ostensibly the resources are in the hands of the State) have far less challenges, reinforcing unhealthy distributions.
Of course sans entrepreneurial economic growth in non-primary sectors, and with ongoing climate stress, there is yet more pressure.
@Grumpy realist: Probably exit controls which you all bizarrely don’t have. No exit stamp / exit control only entry control… always found that quite peculiar. It does mean visibility on who is leaving is quite poor.
Markets.
Advanced economies pull workers from underutilized labor pools. Underutilized labor pools push workers towards opportunity. The pressure will continue as long as there is a disparity. This pressure can be resisted with barriers, physical and legal, slowing the flow, but the pressure remains. Over time, however, as more workers leave underdeveloped economies, there is less pressure to leave. As more workers arrive in developed economies, there is less pull for more workers. Also, underdeveloped countries will continue to develop (economically, politically, demographically) also reducing the pressure.
Eventually, the pressure equalizes. However, there is always a sloshing effect, tipping the bucket one way then the other before everything levels out. The faster that economic development, political stability, and a reduction in population growth is achieved in underdeveloped countries, the sooner equilibrium can be reached, perhaps in a generation or two.
I wonder if the coming population crash in the US will affect Republican policies vis-a-vis immigration policies. I just read this tidbit of news that Florida has changed its labor laws to have 16-year and 17-years available to work on school nights (apparently, this age is too young to be “polluted” with gay literature, but old enough to engage in night work and to be at risk at failing high school).
And, according to the same tidbit, the housing industry in Florida is also agitating to put these same youths on roofing/industrial jobs.
I would think it would be better to have adult immigrants doing these jobs, rather than forcing their children to fail school.
@Ha Nguyen: My children won’t be the ones failing in school. It’ll be kids competing for a spot at my kids’ preferred college who will be.
Why should I oppose that?