The desire for a better life and the need to escape oppression has motivated people to move vast distances for centuries. With the easy availability of modern transport, these trends have vastly accelerated in the current era. Humanity is on the move.
We now live in a world of great economic and political disparity. Some nations enjoy great wealth and stable and free political systems, while others have their citizens toiling away in abject poverty, or subject to terribly oppressive regimes. Because borders are porous, and often easily breached, there is a natural tendency for the wretched to move to the prosperous.
When two nations on opposite sides of this divide share a common border, the process is even more rapid. For decades, the United States has taken in a constant and essentially unstoppable flow of illegal migrants from Mexico. Even working as gardeners and dishwashers they enjoy a better life than what they had in rural poverty in Mexico. And their children are US citizens.
While America has dealt with immigration from poor countries for years, it is now the turn of Europe, Australia, and even some Asian countries. Australia has liberal asylum laws if you can get yourself onto Australian soil. The several hundred refugees rescued from a leaky vessel in the waters near an Australian island were trying to do just that. Most were coming from Afghanistan and had paid 10-15 thousand dollars each to organizers who promised them safe passage to the land of opportunity down under.
Such gang trafficking in human desperation now operates worldwide. In Thailand, there is smuggling of people from neighboring Laos. Thailand is not a developed country, but it is so much wealthier than Laos that it seems like the land of milk and honey to Laotians. Similarly, Pakistan is an impoverished place, but life is much better there than in famine-stricken Afghanistan. As a result, millions of Afghanis now make their homes in Pakistan.
In Europe, most of the nations of Western Europe have eliminated passport controls between themselves. Once you enter Western Europe, either by crossing the straits of Gibraltar in a flimsy dinghy by night, or slipping across the Polish-German border, you can freely travel between all these countries looking for menial labor and a new chance in life. Britain has maintained passport controls, as it is still the preferred destination of many of these people. But Britain now has a direct land connection with France via the rail tunnel below the English Channel, the so-called “Chunnel”. At the spot in France where the London-bound train enters the tunnel, would-be migrants gather nightly with the goal of jumping onto the train and hanging on for a ride to England. In the first six months this year, 25,000 people were caught trying to do this. Despite beefed-up security, the cat and mouse game with the guards continues. Four have died in the attempts.
Many other migrants die every year on the high seas, whether it is the Cubans trying to reach America, or Africans trying to make it across the Straits of Gibraltar. The Afghans who were rescued recently could easily have gone down without being noticed by the world. For these people, with little or no resources, to scrape together 10,000 dollars and then risk their lives is remarkable. And although many do make it through, others are caught and turned away, or simply left in limbo in some third country halfway to the destination they were hoping for.
For the rich countries, these refugee flows present a problem. Their own citizens don’t want immigrants, partly out of job concerns and partly out of a desire to keep brown and black people out of their country. But human desperation is so strong that no country has been able to effectively control its own border. The migrants keep coming. For the host countries the game really is to keep the rate of new arrivals to a manageable number, and to effectively integrate the newcomers with the least social disruption. America, Canada, and Australia are the best at this, and are the preferred destination of Third World immigrants.
While the migrants are motivated by a desire for a better life, the new host countries do benefit in the long run. These migrants do the jobs no one else will do, and ease the chronic labor shortages that many countries in the developed world have. Even though Europe’s unemployment rate is high at about 9%, there is still a shortage of low wage labor that the immigrants are happy to provide. Demand for low cost labor will continue to rise in many of these countries, and the rapid movement of population will persist.
Looking down the road, these population flows can have great significance.
The Latino presence in the United States has transformed this country from essentially an offshoot of Europe into something else. Europe is clearly going to be less White and homogeneous. What these shifts will do to relations between the First World and the Third World, between Christians and Muslims, between Europe, Asia, and America is to be seen. How can nations control the flow of immigration and plan for the reasonable assimilation of newcomers in the face of these powerful forces that are hurling the world’s poor at them?