The left and right have failed us on migration
Avoid ideology, analyze data, understand what migration really is. Hein de Haas, a Dutch sociologist, founding member of the International Migration Institute in Oxford, and author of How Migration Really Works (published in Italian by Einaudi Stile Libero), when faced with the choice of which myth to debunk when it comes to migration, responds that he doesn't know where to start. But perhaps “the most relevant is the one according to which the right is against migration and the left is in favour of it.”
Interview by Annalisa Cuzzocrea
Isn't that right?
With my team at Oxford I analyzed 6,500 policies across Europe and North America, trying to understand whether there was a difference between right-wing and left-wing governments in terms of migration policies, and we found no significant difference. This might surprise many people, because we normally associate the right, and certainly the far right, with a tough stance on migration: closing borders, stopping smugglers. And the left with a humanitarian, softer, more open narrative.
Is it just a matter of perception?
Partly this is about rhetorics—right wing politicians in particular act much softer than they talk about migration. But it’s more complicated than that. Both the left and the right are internally divided on immigration. Many conservatives think that immigration threatens the identity of our societies, that it undermines our culture and religion. At the same time, however, right-wing parties are heavily influenced by business lobbies, which have an interest in opening borders for economic reasons. In practice, they tolerate the exploitation of legal and illegal immigrants.
And why is the left divided?
The left has historically been more opposed to immigration than the right from a class perspective. This was mainly because of the unions saw cheap foreign workers as a threat to native workers. It was feared that importing cheap labor would divide the working class, lower wages and creating unfair competition. Then there’s the camp in the left that I would call humanitarian and liberal, which is rooted in the left’s cultural roots and is open to welcoming foreigners and diversity.
Despite everything, however, the predominant narrative has always been one aimed at “fighting illegal migration” and “stopping the boats,” regardless of the government's political affiliation.
The debate, however, is extremely polarized.
This is precisely the biggest problem. We know so much about migration, there’s so much research, a century of migration scholarship, yet very little of this information reaches public policy. We’re pitted against each other, losing nuance. The pro-migration camp emphasizes how good migration is, the anti-migration camp turns it into an invasion, an existential threat. Both exaggerate to make a point, so it becomes an ideological issue. But what gets lost is true knowledge of the phenomenon. This brings me to the most important part of my book.
What is it?
The real question is why, over the last 35 years, since we’ve been talking about controlling migration in the Mediterranean and across the Mexican-US border, politicians have failed—in the long run—and why have they often even been counterproductive?
And how do we answer this question?
By observing how most policies are either knee-jerk, but ill-considered, reactions to panic, or largely symbolic measures born out of a desire to indulge into political showmanship, but without any understanding of how migration really works. That’s why I entitled my book “How Migration Really Works”, to signal that we need to understand how the migration process actually works before we can devise effective policies.
The book's data shows that migrants don't ‘steal jobs’; rather, they fill labor shortages.
This is very evident in Italy and is true throughout the West. Not that long ago, Western Europe was a continent of emigrants; Italy was one of the largest emigration countries in world history, not only to the Americas, but also to Northern Europe. These patterns have reversed since the 1950s and 1960s, as Europeans stopped migrating outside the continent and Western Europe became a major migration destination. Now, this is not a natural phenomenon; it is the result of a series of structural economic, social, and demographic trends that have increased immigration to Europe.
What are these trends?
The primary cause is economic growth, greater equality and the establishment of the modern welfare state. This meant that Europeans no longer felt the desire to migrate abroad. Then, from in the 1960s and 1970s, labor shortage began to grow, which was further fueled by women's emancipation and their massive entry into the formal labor market. This meant that many of those informal jobs in and around the home, such as child and elder care, cooking and housekeeping, could no longer be performed by women with the demise of the ‘housewife model’.
Increasing educational levels also meant that less and less native workers wanted to do hard, manual labour. The resulting growth in labor shortages in agriculture, industry, and services have been the main driver of immigration over the last 30-40 years. The transformation of Italy and other European societies from a countries of emigration to a country of immigration is driven by these profound economic, demographic, and social changes.
So immigration arose out of our need, only now we want to stop it?
Another myth to dispel is that migration functions like a tap that one can turn on and off. Governments have always found it difficult to control migration as it is a partly autonomous social process. If you increase border controls, migrants will generally find other routes. We know that most migrants working illegally actually arrived legally with a visa and then stayed. Not even a perfectly sealed off border wall – an illusion in itself – cannot prevent this phenomenon of ‘overstaying’. As long as there is a demand for labor, and we allow their employment, migrants will continue to arrive one way or another.
But it’s not just so-called economic migrants. You dispute the UN's own warning about the number of refugees.
Refugees are a much smaller phenomenon than you might think. Only 10% of all migrants in the world—that is, about 0.35% of the world's population—are refugees, but mainly because of its geographical location Italy is relatively highly exposed to the phenomenon. The problem in Europe, however, is primarily political, not one of numbers. There were many more Ukrainians than African refugees, but they weren’t treated as a problem.
It’s mainly a question of political will. The real problem is the lack of solidarity among European countries, such as between northern and southern countries like Greece and Italy, which face greater arrivals on their shores, and northern European countries. Orban may be very proud of his zero-rights-asylum policy, but the truth is that he shifts the burden onto other countries by letting refugees pass. It is a policy of a lack of solidarity – with refugees and with other European countries.
Another objection: there is no invasion.
The vast majority of migrants arrive legally, even in Italy. It’s just that you see the boats on television every day and you’re convinced the reality is different. Let’s go back to the statistics: of all the Africans who leave to Europe, approximately 9 out of 10 do so legally, one in ten illegally. It’s still a significant number, but it's not an invasion.
Is there a difference in the reception of White and Black refugees?
This, too, is complicated. Racism certainly plays a role, but throughout history, refugees have always been welcomed when they were fleeing a common enemy, often rather irrespective of their origin. In different countries, different immigrant groups are ‘targeted’. During the years I lived in Britain, Eastern European migrants were the migrant group most frowned upon. In the United States, it’s mainly about Latinos, most of whom are not Black and Christian.
Is Europe, by making deals with Libya and Tunisia, respecting international conventions on refugees?
No. What Europe is doing is trying to bribe autocrats. And it’s ironic that it was easier for Italy to make a deal with Tunisia now that it’s once again governed by an autocrat who doesn’t care that much about human rights violations compared to a democratically governed country it had become after the Arab Spring. The truth is that these leaders have an interest in leaving the door to a certain extent to negotiate the next agreement. And we are bribing and supporting autocratic regimes, helping them continue their repression of their own people. We are making ourselves vulnerable, exposed to their blackmail, and in doing so, we are undermining our credibility as European democracies. In Italian, do you have the expression "crocodile tears"?
It’s the same.
My problem is the hypocrisy. Politicians go on TV and say we have to ‘save’ those people, we have to ‘fight’ the smugglers, but it’s their own policies that have made refugees and other migrants dependent on the smugglers in the first place. In the early 1990s, Tunisians didn’t need visas to go to Italy, Moroccans didn't need visas to go to Spain. Many would come for seasonal or short-term work in agriculture and industry. Now, with Schengen visas and border controls, if I want to come, I have to pay a smugglers. Smuggling exists because of anti-immigration policies that don’t address the real causes of migration;
Then in his book, Hein de Haas shows that “let's help them at home” is the wrong recipe.
Paradoxically, development in poor countries generally leads to more migration. When poor countries in the Global South become less poor, better educated and better connected, more people will have the aspirations and resources to move and look for a better place to live and earn money. There is a reason most high-emigration countries are middle-income countries and not the poorest countries in the world. This is why emigration can’t be stopped by giving aid to such countries.
Rather, we need to reverse the perspective. It’s not so much poverty, but the labor demand that drives migration. I studied the case of Moroccan immigrants in Spain: they arrived in increasing numbers even during times that the economic situation in Morocco was improving. However, after the 2008 crisis, they stopped coming because in Spain there was no work and unemployment was high. To truly stop migration, we would have to wreck our countries’ economies. But that’s certainly not what we want.
The challenge is integration.
It can’t work if we don’t make foreigners feel welcome. If we continue to treat them like a convenient, expandable workforce who cares for our elderly, cleans our houses, performs tasks—in restaurant kitchens, hotels, in agriculture—that we no longer want to do, but don’t give them rights, that’s recipe for marginalization and isolation of such groups. In this way, today we create the new integration problems of tomorrow.
Problems of integration and segregation particularly arise in the second generation of groups that don’t feel accepted, that face long-term exclusion. This is what happens when we treat people as factors of production, and don’t think about their needs as people, and if politicians don’t take responsibility for their integration, but instead chose to look the other away. We have to think about the long-term social consequences of migration if we want to avoid such problems in the future.
There's a beautiful quote by the Swiss writer Max Frisch referring to large-scale Italian emigration to Switzerland, which the Swiss in the 1960s saw as a huge problem: “We wanted people, but we got people instead”
This text is a translated and slightly adapted and extended version of an interview in Italian with Annalisa Cuzzocrea, originally published in Italian in La Stampa on 29 September 2024.