The best way to stop immigration …
Dutch migration researcher Hein de Haas discusses the misused stereotypes and the unknown reality of immigration – and the paradoxical phenomenon that stricter border controls often increase the number of immigrants.
Interview by Thomas Steinfeld
The University of Amsterdam’s social sciences department is housed in a modern building in the southeast of the city center. The large building boldly spans the Nieuwe Achtergracht canal. Sociologist and migration researcher Hein de Haas has his office on the sixth floor. Educated in the Netherlands, he was co-director of the International Migration Institute at Oxford University before being appointed to Amsterdam in 2015. Since the early 1990s, he has conducted field research, primarily in Morocco and other countries in North and West Africa. Last year, he published the book How Migration Really Works, which being translated in thirteen languages, including German (S. Fischer Verlag).
Mr. de Haas, you recently appeared on Dutch television on the popular talk show “Vandaag Inside” (“Today Inside”). Almost a million people tuned in. During the program, you explained that while immigration to the Netherlands, as to other European countries, can cause problems at the local level, it is by no means out of control and does not pose an extraordinary threat. How did you deal with such statements on entertainment television?
Very good. They let me speak for almost 20 minutes. There was laughter. Afterward, I received a lot of mail, and the daily press also took notice.
What were people laughing about?
If you wanted to drastically reduce immigration, there was only one option, I said. You have to ruin the economy. People found that statement funny. But it’s true: The demand for labor is by far the most important driver of immigration.
In Germany, the government ordered the reintroduction of border controls a few days ago to “strengthen internal security.”
In response to migration crises, over the past decades European countries have repeatedly introduced or tightened temporary border controls. However, regulations were always lifted after some time. Such controls are primarily symbolic, especially when carried out in the form of random checks. The data show that, in the longer run, immigration restrictions, such as visas or border fences, often counteract their stated purpose as long as the causes of migration persist.
Why is that?
As long as the borders are open, many migrants commute between their countries of origin and their destination. Many return to their home country after a few years. However, if migrants fear they will not be allowed to migrate again after their return they tend to cancel return plans and instead stay in the country of immigration.
A study I conducted with my team at Oxford University has for example shown that immigration restrictions break the so-called circularity of migration. They therefore encourage permanent settlement, which in turn leads to them bringing their relatives over. Paradoxically, the number of immigrants in the country could therefore increase rather than decrease due to stricter border controls. This is for instance what happened with former ‘guest workers’ from Turkey, and Mexican workers in the US.
Doesn't that also mean that the ‘floodgates’ aren't actually being closed?
Another same study I conducted at Oxford showed that immigration policy in Western countries has become more flexible in recent decades. This reveals a large and growing gap between tough rhetoric and political practice.
Why is border control of relatively little importance for immigration?
Only a small proportion of immigrants migrate illegally. For example, only about ten percent of people leaving Africa travel without the necessary documents. A large share of undocumented migrants have actually crossed the border legally. Then their visas expire, and they stay. So, many undocumented migrants actually came by plane. Even a hermetically sealed border wall can’t prevent this.
And then little happens?
In reality, a large portion of immigration is desired—or at least convenient because the workers are welcomed. This also applies to illegal migration. Politicians know this, and labor enforcement is correspondingly lax. If one truly wanted to combat ‘illegal’ immigration, one would have to systematically go through construction sites, farms, restaurants, and even private households and punish employers, instead of migrants. But that rarely happens.
Almost sixteen percent of people living in Germany were born abroad. Most of them work, and by no means only in low-wage jobs.
The large migration movements of recent decades have primarily been about work and family members who follow migrant workers. Asylum also plays a significant, but comparatively smaller, role. Business cycles and immigration levels are closely linked. All across the world, labor shortage has reached unprecedented proportions in recent years, so migration went up as well. Immigrants are everywhere in the labor market today, not least in jobs where physical presence is required and where there are no locals willing or able to perform certain jobs.
You accuse politicians of hypocrisy.
On the one hand, they claim to want to stop illegal migration and to end the exploitation of migrant workers, but on the other, they turn a blind eye to the employment of undocumented migrants. The best example of how reality differs from what is publicly claimed is Great Britain: One of the goals of Brexit was to reduce immigration. The opposite happened: Net immigration to Great Britain almost quadrupled in the years following Brexit. While Brexit disrupted free migration from Eastern Europe, the labor shortages persisted.
In Germany, there is currently a debate about introducing an asylum application quota.
On the one hand, asylum is a human right, which would be curtailed or even denied by a quota. On the other hand, it seems to me that the debate is based on a distorted perception: not only because the number of international refugees in the world, relative to the population, is relatively constant in the long run, but also because the proportion of rejected asylum applications in the EU has remained relatively stable over the years. And as I said: In reality, asylum does not play the role it assumes in the public debate. For instance, between 2012 and 2022, asylum applications accounted for approximately fifteen percent of total immigration to Germany.
That’s quite a few people.
Especially at the local level, the arrival of large numbers of asylum seekers can of course lead to real challenges and problems, we shouldn’t deny that. The lack of solidarity and cooperation between European countries—and between the federal states within Germany—regarding a fair distribution of responsibility for hosting refugees also remains a real problem.
A problem of highly varying severity.
For people who are confronted with the real—and certainly not always positive—changes that migration can bring to their daily lives, statistics are something abstract. This is especially true in neighborhoods where many migrants live or even make up the majority of the population. Some concerns about a lack of integration, isolation, and segregation are justified. However, such developments have little to do with the massive wave or even the threat that some politicians and opinion leaders make of migration.
In Germany, it's often said that the ‘rush’ of immigrants dates back to 2015, the flight of many Syrians to Europe, and Angela Merkel's “we can do it” [“wir schaffen das”] policy.
The data—notably a study by sociologist Ludger Pries—refutes the whole assumption that Merkel’s statements actually had such an impact. In fact, the number of Syrian refugees had already reached its sharpest increase before the phrase “we can do it.”
Moreover, refugee migration rarely occurs continuously. It is unpredictable and highly volatile. It has its own internal dynamics. It follows wars and violent repression, rising suddenly only to then decline rapidly again—although politicians often misleading the public by falsely attributing these latter declines to their policies.
In comparison, labor immigration is steadier and fluctuates with economic cycles.
Migration has changed direction. While until the early 20th century it flowed from Europe to other continents, primarily to the Americas, since the Second World War it has been heading in other directions, to Europe, but also to the Gulf States—and, of course, further on to the United States and Canada.
In my book, I call this development the “global migration reversal." Between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries, approximately 150 million people—nine percent of the world's population in 1900—moved from one continent to another. More than a third were European. After the Second World War, Europeans stopped migrating to the New World. Instead, Western Europe became an important destination for migration, initially primarily from former colonies and Mediterranean countries, but in recent decades increasingly from more distant countries.
The overall global migration rate has remained unchanged at around 3 to 3.5 percent of the world’s population for decades. For Western European countries, however, the migration reversal was a new and unexpected experience. It is not surprising that it has provoked concern and intense political debate.
Returning to categories like ‘mass migration’ or ‘flood’: Don’t they also imply that migrants are denied the ability to act with a plan?
It’s not the poorest and uneducated who are heading for Europe. The poorest stay where they are. And when the hardship becomes too great, they may go to the neighboring village, the city, or perhaps a neighboring country. The poorest generally lack the means to emigrate. Most migrants come from emerging countries: not from the poorest countries like Madagascar or South Sudan, but rather from Mexico, Morocco, Turkey, India, China, or the Philippines.
Migrants have to pay for transport; they need visas, diplomas, or intermediaries. The money may be borrowed, or relatives may pool their resources, but these people have resources. And they act with a plan, they calculate the risk, and that may include a perilous passage across the Mediterranean. The reality of migration is generally different from the cliché of a desperate escape from misery.
And yet, many of these carefully planned migrations end in drowning in the Mediterranean.
Increased border controls increase the risks for migrants and their dependence on smugglers because they have to choose longer and more dangerous migration routes. However, this doesn’t stop migrants from trying. Migrants generally have good reasons to cross borders, whether to escape violence and oppression or to find work and send money home.
In the immigration countries, it’s often said that we need to support poor countries so that people stay home.
The paradox is emigration usually increases when poor countries become wealthier. This is partly because migration requires considerable resources, and partly because factors such as education and access to information change people’s life goals and aspirations, generally away from traditional, agrarian lifestyles.
The most meaningful form of development aid, incidentally, is provided by the migrants themselves. They send a part of their income back home, and this money is used to build houses, start businesses, or pay for their children’s education—and this money does go into the pockets of expensive consultancies or government bureaucracies, but flows directly to to those who need it.
Around 1990, just under $30 billion in such remittances was sent back to home countries worldwide. In 2020, this figure was over $500 billion—two and a half times the amount of official development assistance.
Why is political rhetoric that increasingly views immigration as theft, or perhaps better yet, as a robbery of the property and soul of the native people, so successful?
Such resentments have a long history. Max Weber, one of the founding fathers of sociology, believed that Polish farmworkers belonged to an “inferior” race and were displacing German farmers. In the United States, for example, until the first half of the 20th century, Southern Italians and the Irish were often considered incapable of integration. Who belong to ‘us’ and who not is a question that is answered differently in every historical situation. In the long run, however, ‘they’ generally become ‘us.’
At the moment, the prospects seem rather short-term.
That’s true. However, the case of Ukrainian refugees shows how selective host societies can be in dealing with xenophobic sentiment: At a time when everyone was saying, “The boat is full,” neither Germany nor other European countries had a problem accepting hundreds of thousands or even millions of Ukrainians. This shows that the willingness to accept refugees is primarily a question of political will, not of numbers.
Aren’t these sentiments also a phenomenon of globalization? When one’s own state engages internationally, when it reflects on itself in terms of ‘location’ and ‘competition,’ some citizens feel cheated out of the benefits of their citizenship.
What is commonly called ‘multiculturalism’ plays a role in such demarcations—by elevating cultural differences to categorical differences. This initially occurred through the expectation that ‘guest workers’ would return to their homeland, where raising migrant children in their own language and culture was intended to serve as a means of preventing integration and preparing them for their eventual return.
Later, the same concept of multiculturalism transformed into a certain ideological glorification of ethnic diversity. Ultimately, however, this exclusionary attitude was based on the inability or unwillingness of the new European host societies to recognize the permanent nature of the stay of guest workers and other migrants.
Some of these consequences are explained by failed integration.
There is no doubt that in immigration countries, especially in Northwestern Europe, there are certain groups of refugees or members of the so-called second generation who have disproportionate unemployment rates and live in marginalized positions. However, this is primarily the result of economic exclusion and the failure of governments to take responsibility for the integration of these groups.
For far too long, these problems have been ignored by host societies, which viewed the stay of migrants as temporary and turned a blind eye when problems arose. We risk making the same mistakes by treating the new generation of migrants as cheap labor and giving too little thought to their future integration.
The contradictions seem to be intensifying at present.
Extremisms feed each other. Right-wing extremist violence has its counterpart in the jihadist movement among some radicalized immigrant groups.
And then a "radicalized" person runs off with a knife.
These are horrific acts and cause for legitimate concern; but they are unrepresentative of entire migrant communities. Despite the stereotype of ‘failed integration,’ the vast majority are doing remarkably well.
The task, and especially the task of politicians, should be to solve problems and reduce tensions, and to promote social cohesion, rather than sowing divisions between population groups.
This text is a translated and slightly adapted and extended version of an interview in Spanish with Thomas Steinfeld, originally published in German in Die Süddeutsche Zeitung on 24 September 2024.