Immigration policies

Philip Bowring, the Hong Kong based columnist for the International Herald Tribune, made an eloquent plea for some sane thinking on immigration in last week's IHT. While refraining from recommending actual policies, he advocated that many nations, both rich and poor, put migration on their national agendas.

In a way, that already has happened in the EU, the USA and elsewhere. In the EU especially, immigration is seen as a problem that needs to be stopped. As a result, the EU has invested in all forms of border protection and tried to coordinate national legislation, policies and information exchange on migrants. Whether they are the 'illegal immigrants' that try to cross the Mediterranean, asylum seekers or people who try to reunite with their families or spouses. In general, the aim is to stop immigration altogether. Judging by the number of people who have entered the Netherlands (sorry I don't have statistics for the whole EU territory), it works. We have less migrants and dramatically less asylum seekers.

However, there has gone remarkably little thought into the question 'why?' Why are we so averse to immigration? Of course, anybody reading the newspaper or living in the banlieues of the French cities will have an answer. "We have bred a whole new underclass of alienated second-generation immigrants who can survive in a poverty trap thanks to social welfare and other arrangements which in fact were nothing short of elites trying to bribe these new members of society under the guise of multiculturalism all the time not addressing the real problems of integration, language skills and all the other factors that are necessary to make these newcomers into true Europeans. In order to begin addressing these problems we need to prevent them from getting worse by a continuing influx of migrants" -- or something to that effect.

This may very well be an answer that you would arrive at if you follow our media. Most Dutch thinkers and politicians seems to have reached this conclusion. However, it is quite mistaken. First, we should realize that there are migrants and migrants. Unskilled, illiterate spouses from the Rif in Morocco are entirely different from highly skilled, motivated Chinese students or Indian IT specialists. For example, until quite recently, students had to pay the same visa fees as other migrants seeking to stay in Holland for a long time (usually 1-3 years). In order to quench the influx of migrants these fees were raised considerably (up to €450!). This would deter poor people from applying for the visa and thus only let those desirable migrants in. However, the effect is that students don't come to Holland because of the ridiculous high visa fee; that highly skilled workers either go elsewhere or enter Holland via one of the EU countries that does not have such high visa fees (usually Germany), or opt for work in those other EU countries. And guess what: the undesirable unskilled migrants come anyway because they'll pawn everything they have to allow their relatives or spouses to come to the land of milk and honey. In other words, the level of the visa-fees does not do what the minister wants them to do (and don't get me started on the fees for visa renewal...)

Furthermore, if there is anything we can learn from the sociology of migrant labor is that the higher the obstacles you put in their way, the less likely they will go away or return to their respective countries, because they invested so much to come/stay here that leaving now would be very uneconomical. In short, if you want migrants, especially unskilled migrants, to leave asap, this is not the way.

And is it really true we don't need those migrants? What about some of the cherished institutions of the welfare state? Will we be able to finance them with a smaller tax base as result of the rapid aging of our society? Who is going to work for these institutions? My uncle who recently died spent the last four months of his life in a nursing home in Amsterdam. 75% of the staff were of migrant origin: Surinamese, Antillian, Moroccan, Turkish, etc. "Dutch" people don't want to work in these places, so if we want to staff them properly we need people, migrants, to do this kind of work.

Finally, in spite of recent "successes" in the 'battle against immigration', these policies are never wholly successful. We keep getting them anyway. So we'd better do some hard thinking and creative legislation to target those immigrants that we want and need as well as those of whom we think it only fair and decent that they should enter, instead of trying to stop them altogether.

In short, I would like our government develop a proper immigration policy which is flexible, well-informed about how the incentives for migrants work and keeps in mind the needs of our society both now and in the future. Bowring is right: we need to question the received wisdom and put immigration on the national agenda.

A story

Let me tell you a story with a morale (how old fashioned!) and an open ending (how modern!).

"I live in a nice house, plenty of room, all the amenities that modern life offers, with a pleasant garden, perhaps a swimming pool. (Told you you had to imagine this.) I have neigbors who are not so well off. I don't like the sight of them, so I have built a wall around my property. I occasionally hear their noises and I see them, when I venture out of my house. Some of my neighbors are really poor. In fact, some of them live in lean-to shanties that are erected against the walls of my property. I cannot do anything about that. The laws in this country protect my property rights right up to the edge of my wall -- but not beyond.

Sometimes, I wish they would not be there and that I would not be confronted with them. However, sometimes they prove to be useful. For example, the person mowing my lawn used to be one of them. I caught him one time climbing my wall. When I accosted him and asked him what he wanted, he said he merely wanted to look at my house. When I asked him again, this time a bit more forcefully, he admitted that he was looking at a way to stay in my beautiful house rather than his own lean-to hut made of corrugated iron and wood. He looked at my lawn and offered to mow it, in exchange for him living in the garage. I agreed to that. I hate mowing the lawn and while living in my garage he doesn't bother me and in fact, he looks more decent and healthier as a result.

But then trouble really started: his relatives also started to climb my walls. I tried to apprehend them and most of them I caught and kicked out. However, they kept coming. Some of them were living in my attic when I found them and I tried getting rid of them, but they claimed they had lived in my attic for so long now, they had nowhere else to go. My wife, who is a bleeding heart liberal said that I should tolerate them. So now they are renting the guestroom and a are regular borders in my house. Others, who I cannot kick out right away, I lock up in my cellar until I can kick them out. True, they haven't tried to steal anything or destroy anything. Nor have they been violent to me or my family. It is just that I found that I sleep better knowing that they are locked up in the basement awaiting eviction.

I then tried to make it more difficult for my neighbors and the relatives of my new guests to enter the premises. I long stopped answering the front door when I suspected it was one of them. I became quite handy in refusing them anything at the front door. I also raised the walls. Only the most tenacious and agile managed to climb the walls now. I hired security guards to patrol the premises. I put barbed wire and cut glass on the walls, so it was impossible for even the strongest among them to enter without cutting their hands seriously.

However, it was to no avail. Still they tried to enter my house through all kinds of devious ways. And once they were in, it was getting harder and harder to turn them out again.

The whole situation began to take its toll. Some of my neighbors started to charge those who wanted to enter my house money in exchange for help getting in. I then dug a moat and when that did not stop them, I put spears and barbed wire in the water. I also sent out warnings which were published all around the walls of my house. It deterred some, but not all.

And then I was confronted with victims. First, two lovely children cut their hands quite badly on the barbed wire and had to be seen to by a physician. My wife was so moved that she allowed them to stay. They now camp in a corner in our kitchen. Not long after that somebody had a nasty fall from my walls. He broke his leg and was lying for hours between the wall and the moat until he died. The same day a party of fifteen drowned in the moat.

I do think it is terrible, but I am not to blame. These pesky neighbors of mine make their own choices, as I make mine in order to protect my house which is already not as nice as it used to be. I have no guilt whatsoever in their fate.

Then this damn philosopher came by. I think his name was Capetti or something foreign sounding like that. He argued that I had a responsibility in the deaths of my neighbors. He claimed that if I had not raised these walls and dug this moat, nobody would have died. He argued that I had to do more, much more, to prevent people from dying. He said that I could not pretend that it was only the fault of my neighbors if they hurt themselves climbing the walls.

He even went so far as to question my right to prevent these neighbors from entering. Although he never said that I should take down the walls and allow my property to be overrun by these neighbors.

I questioned his sanity and suggested he see professional help. By his very logic, we bear responsibilty of the deaths of these illegal immigrants that try to enter the EU via the Mediterranean or the Eastern border of the EU. In his opinion, it is only because of us that the middle men and people smugglers have a business at all.

Of course, everybody knows it has got nothing to do with us that each year, on average, 300 people die trying to enter the EU. Capetti is a fool!"

As the protagonist of the story realizes all too well: I do think we bear a responsibility for the fate that all these aspiring migrants to the rich Western nations meet. What kind of responsibility and what kinds of duties and obligations follows from this, I am not sure (yet), but I will keep you posted.