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.
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.
posted by Bruno at Wednesday, December 14, 2005
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