How migration really works by Hein de Haas published by Penguin
Rory O’Kelly on Migration
This book sets out to test opinions about migration against the facts. The author, a Dutch professor of sociology, lists 22 common myths and demonstrates their falsity. The whole book deserves careful reading.
The central point, however, is an economic one. People move from one place to another mainly to improve their financial circumstances. This took emigrants from Europe to other continents in earlier centuries, and they now move from Africa, South America and Asia to Europe and the US for the same reason. More succinctly, migration is driven by labour shortages in the receiving countries.
Migration is a rational decision. Migrants generally do better in their destination countries. If their travel is unauthorised, they may need to pay smugglers to help them, but this is usually a good investment. Smugglers may be dishonest or incompetent, but so may be providers of any other service. Legal barriers impose costs and dangers, but will not stop migration as long as the demand for labour exists.
What prohibition can do is choke off what the author calls “circular migration”. This is the system in which people may spend a few years in youth, or a few months at a time throughout life, in another country, while still remaining rooted in their birth country. The author’s early research was on movement between North Africa and Southern Europe, where this was a standard feature, but pre-Brexit movements within the EU would be another example. Barriers to free movement make migration more likely to be permanent. The growth of large settled immigrant communities is largely the result of attempts to stop immigration.
The author is perhaps a little casual in dismissing concepts like “trafficking” and “modern slavery”. We know that activities banned by the state are usually taken over by organised crime, and it is hard to see why migration should be a complete exception. Overall, however, it is hard to resist the conclusion that people migrate because they want to, for perfectly sensible reasons.
Problems arise because Governments reliant on migrant labour refuse to provide housing and other infrastructure which it necessitates, or to regulate labour markets to prevent exploitation. The author accepts that immigration, though generally beneficial to destination countries, is more so to richer people within them and can be detrimental to poor people on the margins of the labour market. It is fairly obvious that restricting immigration, if it were possible, would not be the right solution to these problems.
In fact, it is not. The author summarises the situation concisely: “the most effective way to bring down immigration is to wreck the economy”.
People who start this book with a low opinion of governments in the UK and other Western countries will end it with a much lower one. These governments have followed policies which have caused many thousands of deaths and inflicted huge hardship on even larger numbers, all at a cost of many billions, most of which has gone to unscrupulous private contractors. All this has been done in pursuit of an objective which is unachievable, which they know to be unachievable, and which in fact they do not even want to achieve, since doing so would result in economic catastrophe.
Readers interested in migration more widely will find a lot else in this enormously well-researched book. Questions such as the relation of immigration to crime, whether migration causes a brain drain in exporting countries and whether migration is the solution for ageing populations are addressed in detail, and the author is as harsh on myths promoted by supporters of migration as on those of its opponents. The most striking conclusion from the book is the extraordinary triviality of most of what currently passes for political debate on the subject.