Immigration Policy Around the Globe

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The Age (Melbourne, Australia)
November 19, 2007 Monday
First Edition
Fear of 'migrant hordes' gazumped by need for cheap labour;
EYE ON EUROPE
James Button - Europe correspondent.


Migrants are pouring in to Western Europe, despite public disquiet.

IN THE past three years, as Britain has experienced the largest wave of immigrants in its history, opinion polls have shown a big increase in the number of people who are alarmed about immigration. The Conservative Party accordingly pledges to cut migrant numbers, while rattled Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown talks of "British jobs for British workers" - a slogan that was once linked to the far-right British National Party.

The parties look to be vying with each other to build Fortress Britain. Yet it has not happened.

Brown promises tighter skilled migration quotas and better border control to reduce illegal immigration, but neither will dramatically affect numbers. The Conservatives struggle to specify which categories of immigrants they would cut. Meanwhile the British National Party, for all the fears of Labour MPs in working-class seats where the BNP is strongest, simply fails to rise.

It is not just Britain. Three in four Americans say they want more controls on immigration, according to the latest Pew Global Attitudes Survey. Yet neither main party in the US plans to seriously wind back legal immigration: the United States continues to take a million migrants a year.

The Pew Research Centre polled 45,000 people in 47 rich and poor countries and found that in 44 of them, majorities believed "we should restrict and control entry of people into our country more than we do now." (Australians, who were not polled, seem to be comfortable with their current high levels of immigration.)

Nevertheless, Spain, where 77% of people want more controls, is running a huge immigration program, with 4 million newcomers since 1996. Immigration to Italy is even larger - 700,000 a year - and 87% of people want more controls. Yet Prime Minister Romano Prodi has urged Italians to embrace the first mass immigration in their history.

What is going on? Are politicians totally out of step with the public, and is a reversal of policy therefore just a matter of time?
Perhaps, but I doubt it. Immigration is a fact of modern life and, despite periods of public unease, almost certain to remain so. That unease is hardly new. Arthur Calwell, the architect of Australia's postwar immigration program, was terrified of a backlash to his policy, and polls in the 1960s regularly showed that eight out of 10 Britons thought too many black people were entering the country.

If governments have dared defy public opinion, it is not out of brotherly love for foreigners but for hard-nosed economic reasons: to run factories and farms, to get streets swept.

Since the factories closed down in the 1970s and 1980s, Europe has struggled to integrate a mass of unskilled migrant workers and their children but even as it debates the perceived failures of integration, the clamour for new workers in new industries resumes.

Romanians, whose 500,000-strong presence in Italy is provoking huge hostility, are vital to the country's agriculture and aged-care sectors. Britain's biggest nursing home provider, the Southern Cross Healthcare Group, says it must have foreign workers because locals will not do the jobs (the pay is too poor). Without foreign doctors and nurses, former prime minister Tony Blair once said, the National Health Service could not run.

Could this new mobility of global workers be stopped? Yes, but probably not while the economy is good.

Many European countries are also experiencing high levels of emigration. Last year the Netherlands took 100,000 people but lost 130,000, while 200,000 Britons left last year - the highest figure in postwar history. Many of the leavers are skilled and must be replaced. Yet they are far less likely than earlier migrants to stay in their adopted countries. At least half the 400,000 Poles who have come to Britain in recent years are expected to go home.

The proportion of skilled immigrants is growing, and so is the number of countries from which migrants come. In Britain, whereas the first postwar migrations mainly comprised Pakistanis, Indians and West Indians, a report from the Institute of Public Policy Research names 18 groups of immigrants (including Australians) with populations of about 100,000 or more. As Australia's experience shows, more groups with fewer people in each makes the formation of so-called ethnic enclaves very difficult.

It would be wrong to be utopian. Immigration comes with costs, most of all to immigrants themselves, but also, disproportionately, to the poorer communities among whom many settle. There is evidence immigration is driving down low-skilled wages in Britain. Working-class concerns that it frays old social bonds should not be simply dismissed as racism.
Understandably, governments will want to manage migration in hard economic times or to ease public concern. They also have the right to make demands of migrants, such as language learning, which most want to do anyway. As Dutch sociologist Paul Scheffer says, if you demand nothing of migrants, "the veiled message is: you will never be part of this society". However, "when you make demands of newcomers, the receiving society also undertakes an obligation".

Over 50 years, millions of migrants have transformed and enriched Western societies, without provoking vast upheavals. Even so, British migration specialist Professor John Salt estimates that only 3% of the global population are migrants - a figure that has not risen for nearly 20 years. Australia is next door to 230 million, mostly poor, Indonesians, yet only a handful have ever tried to go to Australia.

There is no human tide overwhelming the West. Most people prefer to stay home.
James Button is Europe correspondent.