Opinion: Like it or not, high immigration is here to stay

Migrants at the US southern border on May 12, 2023. Many elections this year will be cast as referendums on governments’ failure to cut migration. Photo / Veronica Cardenas, The New York Times

OPINION:

By 1890, so many European immigrants were arriving at New York City’s “Golden Door” that the US government began building a new reception station on Ellis Island. That year, 14.8 per cent of the American population were immigrants. That remains an all-time high, but the most recent figure of 13.9 per cent is the highest in a century. 

Meanwhile, the UK has matched the US’s 1890 record, with 14.8 per cent of its population born overseas. The number of native-born British citizens who are non-white — a source of anguish to many far-right voters — keeps rising, too.

Similarly, Canada has recorded its strongest annual population growth since 1957.

With record-breaking international travel projected for 2024 and wars multiplying, influxes will continue. And so, in a year when half the world’s adults can vote in elections (another record), immigration is dominating Western politics. Migration divides parliaments in Washington, Paris and London. Germany’s anti-migrant AfD party is polling at record levels.

But politicians are caught in a bind: they promise to cut immigration, while knowing their societies couldn’t function without it. Governments claim to want to block the workers they need. How do they resolve that contradiction? 

The need for immigration is evident in yet another recent record: the highest employment rate ever measured across developed countries, above 70 per cent. Employers can’t find staff. In Greater Paris, where I live, most home-care workers, construction workers and half of all cooks are immigrants. Imagine the chaos if far-right leader Marine Le Pen actually implemented her side’s longstanding fantasy of chucking them out. Similarly, the best way for the US to adjudicate asylum cases faster would be to recruit immigrant judges. 

Even Italy’s far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has brought in hundreds of thousands of foreign workers, and admits she hasn’t curbed irregular migration. Immigration, she reflects, is “the most complex phenomenon I’ve ever had to deal with”. After all, with nearly one in four Italians aged 65 or over, who but immigrants can look after them or fund their pensions? 

Politicians might also reflect that their societies are handling migration pretty well. Plainly, newcomers aren’t depriving natives of jobs. Rising migration has also coincided with a 30-year decline in violent crime across developed countries. (The US’s Covid-era bounce is fading.) And immigrant cities — New York, Toronto, Miami, London and Paris — are the West’s most dynamic, sought-after places. Anti-immigrant parties tend to find most support precisely in regions with few immigrants.

So there’s the conundrum for politicians: how to rail against migration without stopping it? One way is to do like Qatar: let in adult migrants without their dependents. Hence Rishi Sunak’s muscular New Year’s greeting: “From today, the majority of foreign university students cannot bring family members to the UK.” He presumably envisages an outcome like Qatar’s: lonely foreigners FaceTiming home from their “executive bachelor” apartments, liable for deportation the day their assignment ends. At least Qatar, unlike Britain, has built homes for them. 

Western governments are generally choosing to wave through migration while fighting culture wars against its most visibly chaotic manifestations. That’s why the British government pretends that the country’s biggest problem is small boats bringing irregular migrants across the Channel. Sunak is betting his political fortune on an expensive, impractical and illegal scheme to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda, even though asylum applicants made up just 8 per cent of non-EU immigrants to Britain in 2022. In the US, Republican-run Texas has noisily built about 16 kilometres of wall along its 1931km border with Mexico.

These performative policies are very of our time. In democratic politics, there’s a perennial tension between trying to improve the country and trying to convince targeted swing voters that you are improving it. Recently, the pendulum has swung the latter way. The pretend war on migration is meant to be lost. Migrants will keep coming. That contradiction seems designed to increase voters’ distrust of politicians. 

Many elections this year will be cast as referendums on governments’ failure to cut migration. November’s Dutch election showed how that could play out. Mainstream parties talked tough on migration, but the far right, invited to major on its favourite issue, came first. Geert Wilders’ PVV party — which has advocated banning the Koran — is now in talks to lead the next government. That shock result could become an international template in 2024.

• Simon Kuper is a Financial Times columnist and feature writer

Written by: Simon Kuper

© Financial Times