The European fortress is quite porous. According to Frontex, 2023 closed with 380,000 illegal immigrants entering the Union, 56,852 of them in Spain, the European country with the highest number after Italy. The hangover from this wave, the most intense since 2016, translates into deaths (3,863) and repatriations (more than 4,000 in Spain), and in the hardening of immigration discourse and policies. The massive regularization of immigrants that Congress approved to process should not mislead us about the sign of the times, which points in the opposite direction. Rishi Sunak has finally convinced the British Parliament to deport irregular migrants to Rwanda. Giorgia Meloni prefers Albania. Here Vox promises a “return ticket” for each one, it is understood that to her country of origin, although perhaps it is to the continent, we do not know well. The left is also tightening its grip. The German post-communists of Die Linke have given birth, through a split, to a left-wing anti-immigrant party. And European social democrats have just supported a migration pact that invokes obligatory but flexible solidarity—solidarity ma non troppo— to restrict immigration.
We are moved by the unfortunate immigrants that the news and World Press Photo show us, but not so much that we stop thinking that there are plenty of them here. In 2017, the last year in which the CIS was interested in our attitudes towards immigration, 6 out of 10 Spaniards considered the number of immigrants in our country to be high or excessive. This belief, increasingly common in rich countries, is fertile ground for the fears that populism fuels and that economists and philosophers try to defuse.
First, there is economic anxiety. Added to the fear that immigrants will parasite and break our welfare state is the fear that the increase in labor force associated with their arrival will increase native unemployment and reduce wages. The available evidence does not support these fears. Far from being a burden on the taxpayer, in Spain immigrants are creditors of our Social Security system. They represent 10% of income and 1% of expenses. This net contribution motivates the calculation of some experts who, taking into account the growing aging of the population, condition the maintenance of the system on the entry of 200,000 immigrants per year. In Germany they need twice as many.
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The impact of immigration on unemployment is, according to most studies, very low or non-existent. The relationship with salaries is more complex. It can reduce them when immigrants and locals compete for the same jobs, although more often immigrants, particularly unskilled ones, take lower-paid jobs, which, if the market is flexible, allows locals to access better jobs more quickly. higher salaries. In addition, immigrants also consume. The increase in demand for goods and services translates into an increase in the demand for labor which, in turn, helps avoid a general decrease in wages. The labor market is not a zero-sum game, we saw it with the massive incorporation of women.
It is true that the literature that supports these conclusions assumes current levels of immigration and it is not advisable to extrapolate it, without great doses of caution – otherwise it is pure speculation – to scenarios with more flexible immigration policies. But some have done the math and argue that we can be optimistic about the positive impact of immigration on the economy. also in those scenarios. In a well-known study, economist Michael Clemens estimates that eliminating all immigration barriers would increase global GDP by between 50% and 150%. Being less ambitious, he calculates that only by allowing 7% of the world’s population to emigrate would we be able to increase global productivity by 10%.
We are moved by the unfortunate migrants on the news, but not enough to stop thinking that there are plenty of them here
Then there is the cultural threat. As described by political scientist Eric Kaufmann (Whiteshift, 2018), the white majorities are beginning to be minorities and are suspicious of immigration because they see the cultural homogeneity necessary to maintain their common institutions, practices and identity in danger. Here lies pragmatic nationalism, that of the philosopher David Miller, who extols the instrumental value of culturally cohesive societies to generate social capital and make it easier for citizens to contribute their taxes to the maintenance of the system: that of “mine for mine.” The problem is that down this slope it is easy to slide towards the dismantling of the State, it all depends on how we interpret “mine.”
Obviously, classical nationalism is rooted in the same atavistic fears, which defends the intrinsic value of cultural identity and the need to preserve it. Houellebecquian dystopias aside, it is not clear that immigration threatens the cultural identity of a country to the point of destroying it. Just as it is not clear that we can use cultural identity to legitimize the hardening of borders without having to recognize eo ipso the need to raise borders within a State when its perimeter does not coincide with that of the identities that inhabit it. We know the drift. But there is a more important consideration and that is that identities are not essences. Except in the case of indigenous populations, the identities that nationalism claims to preserve are the condensed and mutable fruit of other identities: those of people who came, just as we left.
The fear of the cultural threat contains, however, a reasonable concern and is that raised by illiberal immigration, that which, in the name of religion or ancestral customs, justifies the violation of basic rights, often those of women. Some progressive feminists, such as Susan Moller Okin, have openly questioned whether multiculturalism is bad for women, and maintain that it is. Today one part of the left prefers not to ask this question and the other prefers not to answer. But what follows from Okin’s conclusion is not Vox’s return ticket, but rather something more costly and for which there are no simple recipes: the assimilation of immigrants into whatever is necessary to maintain freedom and equality among men and women. And if, as Martha Nussbaum anticipates, “this represents an assault on many traditions (…) so much the better, because any tradition that denies these things is unjust.”
The reasons of immigrants are the ones we all have, because they come as standard: to survive and feed our children. Faced with them, States invoke what any club or association does: the right to decide who is a member. It is not an easy conflict to resolve. Perhaps the first step is to clarify whether the burden of proof, the duty of justification, rests with whoever puts up the fence or whoever stays behind.
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