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Refugees have become so pervasive in human consciousness that the Oxford Dictionaries for Children identified “refugee” as the 2016 Oxford Children’s Word of the Year, based on findings from the “500 Words” global children’s writing competition sponsored by BBC Radio 2. According to the BBC, “refugee” was selected “due to a significant increase in usage by entrants writing in this year’s competition combined with the sophisticated context that children were using it in and the rise in emotive and descriptive language around it.”
The precarious humanitarian situation at Europe's borders is creating what seems to be an irresolvable tension between the interests of European states to seal off their borders and the respect for fundamental human rights. Frontex, EU's External Border Control Agency, in particular has been since its inception in 2004 embroiled in a fair amount of public controversy.
An average of 30 percent of the British public have identified immigration as one of their most important concerns since 2003; in recent months, 50 per cent or more have named this as one of the most important issues facing the UK.
With this family history behind me, questions of immigration are never far from my mind. I owe my existence to the generosity of the UK in taking in generations of refugees, as well as the kindness shown by one wealthy unmarried Christian woman – who agreed to foster my father for a few months until his parents arrived, but as that never happened, becoming his guardian until adulthood.
The international response to the photographs of the dead body of three year-old Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi, washed ashore on a Turkish beach on 2 September 2015, has prompted intense debate. That debate has been not only about the proper attitude of Britain and other countries to the refugee crisis, but also about the proper place of strong emotions in political life.
Over 30,000 migrants, including rape and torture victims, are detained in the UK in the course of a year, a third of them for over 28 days. Some detainees remain incarcerated for years, as Britain does not set a time limit to immigration detention (the only country in the European Union not to do so). No detainee is ever told how long his or her detention will last, for nobody knows. It can be days, it can be years.
Immigration policies in the US and UK look very different right now. Barack Obama is painting immigration as part of the American dream, and forcing executive action to protect five million unauthorized immigrants from deportation. Meanwhile, David Cameron’s government is treating immigration “like a disease”, vowing to cut net migration “to the tens of thousands” and sending around posters saying “go home”. US immigration policies appear radically open while UK policies appear radically closed.
But beneath appearances there is a strikingly symmetrical gap between talk and action in both places. While courageously defying Congress to protect Mexico’s huddled masses, Obama is also presiding over a “formidable immigration enforcement machinery”, which consumes more federal dollars than all other law enforcement agencies combined, detains more unauthorized immigrants than inmates in all federal prisons, and has already deported millions.
While talking tough, the UK government remains even more open to immigration than most classic settler societies: it switched from open Imperial borders to open EU borders without evolving a modern migration management system in the interim. Net migration is beyond government control because emigration and EU migration cannot be hindered, family migrants can appeal to the courts, and foreign workers and students are economically needed.
So these debates are mirror images: the US is talking open while acting closed; the UK is talking closed but acting open. What explains this pattern? The different talk is no mystery: Obama’s Democrats lean Left while Cameron’s Conservatives lean Right. But this cannot explain the gaps between talk and action. These are related to another political division that cuts across the left-right spectrum: the division between “Open and Closed”.
Different party factions have different reasons for being open or closed to immigration. On the Left, the Liberal Intelligentsia is culturally open, valuing diversity and minority rights, while the Labour Movement is economically closed, fearing immigration will undermine wages and working conditions. On the Right, the Business Elite is economically open to cheap and pliable migrant labour, while the Nationalist Right is culturally closed to immigration, fearing it dilutes national identity. Left and Right were once the markers of class, but now your education, accent and address only indicate whether you’re Open or Closed.
Image used with permission.
Sympathetic talk can often satisfy culturally motivated supporters, but economic interest groups demand more concrete action in the opposite direction. So, a right-leaning leader may talk tough to appease the Nationalist Right, but keep actual policies more open to please the Business Elite. A left-leaning leader may talk open to arouse the Liberal Intelligentsia, but act more closed so as to soothe the Labour Movement. These two-track strategies can unite party factions, and even appeal to “strange bedfellows” across the aisle.
US and UK immigration debates illustrate this pattern. The UK government always knew it would miss its net migration target: its own 2011 impact assessments predicted making about half the promised reductions. This must have reassured Business Elites, who monitor such signals. Meanwhile for the Nationalist Right it’s enough to have “a governing party committed to reducing net migration” as “a longer term objective”. It’s the thought that counts for these easygoing fellows.
So, the Conservatives’ net migration targets are failing rather successfully. The clearest beneficiary is UKIP – a more natural Tory sidekick than the Lib Dems, and one which, by straddling the Closed end of the spectrum, siphons substantial support from the Labour Movement. Almost half the UK electorate supports the Tories or UKIP; together they easily dominate the divided Left which, by aping the old Tory One Nation slogan, offers nothing concrete to the Labour Movement, and disappoints the Liberal Intelligentsia, who ask, ‘Why doesn’t a man with Miliband’s refugee background stand up for what’s right?’
Maybe Miliband should have followed Barack Obama instead of David Cameron. Obama knows that the thought also counts for America’s Liberal Intelligentsia. For example, Paul Krugman writes, “Today’s immigrants are the same, in aspiration and behavior, as my grandparents were — people seeking a better life, and by and large finding it. That’s why I enthusiastically support President Obama’s new immigration initiative. It’s a simple matter of human decency.”
It’s also a simple matter of political pragmatism. Hispanics will comprise 30% of all Americans by 2050; many of those protected today are their parents. Both parties know this but the Democrats are more motivated by it. They have won amongst Hispanic voters in every presidential election in living memory, often with 60-80% majorities: losing Hispanic voters would be game changing. But the Republicans just can’t bring themselves to let Obama win by passing comprehensive immigration reform. Just spite the face now: worry about sewing the nose back on later.
Obama’s actions secure the Hispanic vote, but more importantly they pacify the Labour Movement. Milton Friedman once argued that immigration benefits America’s economy as long as it’s illegal. For ‘economy’ read ‘employers’, who want workers they can hire and fire at will without paying for costly minimum wages or working conditions. In other words, Friedman liked unauthorized immigration because he thought it undermined everything the Labour Movement believes in. No wonder the unions hated him: he was a red flag to a bull.
Luckily Obama’s actions don’t protect ‘illegal immigrants’. Those protected have not migrated for over five years, long enough for someone to become a full citizen in most countries, the US included. They are not immigrants anymore, but unauthorized residents. And once they’re authorized, they’ll just be plain old workers: no longer enemies of the Labour Movement, but souls ripe for conversion to it. For the real immigrants, the velvet glove comes off, and an iron-fisted border force instills mortal dread in anyone whose dreams of being exploited in the First World might threaten US health and safety procedures. To be clear, Obama’s actions protect the resident labour force from unauthorized immigration.
So, Obama’s talk-open-act-closed strategy is working quite nicely for the Democrats, throwing a bone to the Labour Movement while massaging the conscience of the Liberal Intelligentsia – and even courting the Business Elite, who would rather not break the law just by giving jobs to people who want them. So even if they don’t revive Obama’s standing, the executive orders are a shot in the arm for the Democrats. It’s Hillary’s race to lose in 2016 (although come to think of it, that’s what The Economist said during the 2007 primaries…).
In sum: the politics of international migration reveal a new political landscape that cannot be captured by the old categories of Left and Right. Governments on both sides of the Atlantic are talking one way on immigration but acting another, so as to satisfy conflicting demands from Open and Closed party factions while wooing their opponents’ supporters.
So are Left and Right parties dinosaurs? Not necessarily. Things may look different in countries with more parties, but I suspect that the four factions outlined above will crop up even in countries led by multi-party coalitions. We need more studies to know – if this framework works in your country, I’d be interested to hear. Another interesting challenge is to understand how these patterns relate to the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment – a question touched on by a recent special issue of Migration Studies.
To commemorate International Migrants Day this year, OUP have compiled scholarly papers examining human migration in all its manifestations, from across our law and social science journals. The highly topical articles featured in this collection are freely available for a limited time.
Featured image credit: Immigration at Ellis Island, 1900. By the Brown Brothers, Department of the Treasury. Records of the Public Health Service. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
From news stories about unaccompanied minors from Central America to invisible workers without legal standing, immigration continues to stir debate in the United States. The arguments framing the issue are often inflected with distorted ideas and words. We sat down with Hiroshi Motomura, the author of Immigration Outside the Law, to discuss this contentious topic.
You use the term “unauthorized migrants” instead of “illegal” or “undocumented” immigrants. Why this choice of words?
This is a topic that is so controversial that even the labels provoke deep disagreement. The words “illegal” or “undocumented” often reflect very strong views. Because my goal is to explain what makes these debates so heated and then to analyze the issues carefully, I start with neutral terms, like “unauthorized” and “immigration outside the law.” I reach some firm conclusions about the nature of unauthorized migration and the best policy responses, but I try hard to work through the many arguments on both sides, acknowledging my own assumptions and taking all views seriously. This effort requires that I start with neutral terms.
What was the influence of the landmark 1982 US Supreme Court decision in Plyler v. Doe on our current discussion of immigration policy?
Plyler was pivotal. The Court said that the state of Texas couldn’t keep kids out of public schools just because they are in the United States unlawfully. It was a 5–4 decision, and we can debate whether the Court would come out the same way today. But Plyler it is much more than constitutional law. Plyler turned on three questions that remain at the heart of controversy. First, what does it mean to be in the United States lawfully––is “illegal” or “undocumented” more apt? Second, what is the state and local role in immigration policy? Third, should unauthorized migrants be integrated into US society—are they “Americans in waiting”?
Many unauthorized migrants are Americans in waiting, meaning that their integration into American society should be recognized and fostered. Unauthorized migrants have contributed to US society, especially through work, often over a long period of time. Their contributions justify lawful immigration status and a path to citizenship. An argument that is just as strong, though less often heard, is that unauthorized migrants have come to the United States as part of an economic system that depends on them — to be tolerated when we need them and exposed to discretionary enforcement when we don’t. These two arguments aren’t mutually exclusive, and both find support in history and the reality of today’s America.
Can unauthorized migrants currently assert their rights within the US legal system?
Unauthorized migrants can assert rights in many settings. They can sue if an employer refuses to pay them. They have a right to due process in the courts. In many states, unauthorized residents are eligible for driver’s licenses and in-state tuition rates at public colleges and universities. They are not relegated to oblivion. Why not? These rights recognize in small ways that unauthorized migrants are Americans in waiting. To be sure, broad scale legalization proposals in Congress attract a lot of attention, but mini-legalizations take place every day in settings where decision-makers at all levels of government acknowledge the place of unauthorized migrants in American society.
What have state and local governments done to address immigration outside the law?
The state government authority was at the heart of Plyler, and the state and local role has been controversial ever since. States and localities have tried to enforce federal immigration laws directly or indirectly. Arizona’s SB 1070 is a prominent example. At the same time, other states and localities try to integrate unauthorized migrants, through driver’s licenses, ID cards, and access to higher education, and by curtailing cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. Does federal immigration authority displace both types of state or local laws? I think not. The compelling reason to limit state and local enforcement is preventative––so state and local officials can’t enforce immigration laws in ways that are selective and discriminatory. This concern doesn’t apply when states and localities recognize or foster the integration of unauthorized migrants.
A version of this article will appear in the UCLA School of Law alumni magazine.
Immigration it seems is always in the headlines. While UKIP and others make political waves with their opposition to European free movement, immigration is said to be one of the biggest issues of voter concern. However, the issues that make the headlines are only a tiny part of the picture. Restricting immigration is treated as an uncontroversial objective. Some air time, though less, is given to the damage done to migrants by restrictive laws and policies. Very little attention is given to the damage done to the social fabric by those same laws and policies, and to the reality that measures targeting migrants have an adverse effect on all of us.
In the last months of 2013 and the first of 2014 the Immigration Bill made its way through Parliament. Surprisingly, as immigration was a dominant political theme at that time, its provisions received minimal media attention. Provisions of the Immigration Act 2014 include:
All rights of appeal against immigration decisions are abolished, except where the decision is to refuse international protection or where removal would breach the Refugee Convention or the appellant’s human rights.
Banks and building societies are prohibited from opening accounts for individuals ‘who require leave to enter or remain in the UK but do not have it’.
Driving licences may not be issued to those who require leave but do not have it.
Charges for health care are to be levied on all migrants.
Landlords will be subject to penalties if they let property to individuals who ‘require leave to enter or remain in the UK but do not have it’.
The abolition of rights of appeal against immigration decisions comes after years of attrition of immigration appeal rights, and it is only this previous attrition that reduces the impact of these new measures.
Interestingly, an earlier episode of attrition of appeal rights was commented upon by Tony Blair in 1992:
“It is a novel, bizarre and misguided principle of the legal system that if the exercise of legal rights is causing administrative inconvenience, the solution is to remove the right. […] When a right of appeal is removed, what is removed is a valuable and necessary constraint on those who exercise original jurisdiction. That is true not merely of immigration officers but of anybody.”
Some effects of s.15 Immigration Act 2014 can be predicted:
There will be no independent remedy for an individual who has suffered due to a mistake.
There will be less incentive to improve Home Office decision-making.
Studies, work, and life plans of migrants and their families will be disrupted.
Employers and universities may lose employees and students.
Judicial review will likely proliferate.
When a student’s studies are prematurely ended or a specialist worker has to leave the country, not only they but others around them are affected. As well as the employer or university, friendships, treatment plans, agreements with landlords, voluntary work obligations, all are disrupted. Migrants do not live in isolation.
Most of us can accommodate to misfortune, but injustice is harder to live with. If our friend, our student or our colleague has not been able to put their case, what is the effect on our confidence in our own system of government? There is no right to be heard. Does this not have an impact on our belief in what are famously described as ‘British values’?
The prohibition on holding a driving licence, opening a bank or building society account not only affects the person who cannot get access to these basic features of ordinary life in the UK, it also affects the person who must decide whether to issue a licence or open an account.
A bank or building society employee must now assess a potential customer’s immigration status. Whether they wish to do so or not, the staff member is exercising a form of internal immigration control.
Bank and building society accounts have become essential to live ordinary life in the United Kingdom. People will be denied access to these facilities on faulty grounds. Bank and building society employees will find that their relationship with their customers has changed from service to scrutiny. All of us will be subject to immigration status checks.
The measures restricting access to private tenancies, bank and building society accounts and driving licences are not, as such, immigration control. They are penalties on those already resident. They apply not only to government matters but also to purely commercial and private transactions. They insert mutual surveillance into social relationships.
It was revealed by Sarah Teather MP that the government working group some of whose policies found their way into the Immigration Act was called ‘the Hostile Environment Working Group’. In the Immigration Act we are being recruited to the project of the hostile environment. We are required to treat other people as disentitled, not to a government benefit, which in the end we know is determined by government, but to a private facility. This asks us to change our perceptions of each other, and as such is hostile to us all.
Gina Clayton works on European asylum and migration projects, including reports for the Fundamental Rights Agency and the AIDA database, chairs refugee charities in South Yorkshire, and is an OISC adviser on asylum law. She is the author of Textbook on Immigration and Asylum Law.
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Image credit: Gavel. By Kuzma, via iStockphoto.
Let’s assume that Nobel economist Paul Krugman and others are right about China’s economy being “in big trouble” and headed for a “nasty slump.” What does this mean for the 150 million current Chinese workers who left their home villages to fill jobs in the new economy’s growth centers? When a rapidly emerging economy built on these internal migrants — aka surplus rural labor — begins to cool, what becomes of the peasants-turned-factory-workers who made the economic miracle possible?
The answer depends largely on public policy choices (past and present). China’s leaders have long understood the destabilizing effects of large-scale labor migration, which is why they institutionalized the modern hukou system of household registration in the 1950s. In post-market reform China, a hukou operates less like an internal passport than it once did, with fewer restrictions on mobility, but all Chinese still must register in the location of their birth, and access to many services is still tied to that location. Although government officials have discussed the issue and adopted minor reforms around the edges of the hukou system for some time, receipt of pensions, health care, unemployment insurance, and other basic social benefits still tends to be highly skewed in the new economy toward areas of rapid economic development and their registrants. Migrant workers and their families are typically stuck at the end of the social protection queue.
Take schooling, for example. Public education is a national entitlement for all Chinese children under age 14, but locally financed. Until recently, children of migrants were included in the budgets of their rural home districts, where they were registered but did not use services; at the same time, they were excluded from the budgets of their actual areas of residence, where they needed services but could not register. Some migrant-receiving urban districts addressed the mismatch by charging fees for migrant children to attend their schools. This practice caused severe material hardship for many migrant families and led others to use substandard schools that catered to migrant children. The Chinese government introduced new policies in 2003 that tied responsibility for education delivery to the receiving jurisdiction rather than the district of origin and forbade the imposition of differential school fees based on household registration status. The policies did not address the financing constraints of the receiving local governments, however, and did not offer fiscal relief for local and municipal jurisdictions faced with large numbers of migrant students. As a result, differences in local-provincial financing arrangements have led to substantial district-by-district differences in educational access and quality for children of migrants.
Alongside widely recognized problems like education financing, novel problems associated with labor migration are sure to emerge if and when the much-anticipated economic downturn occurs. Redundancies will probably hit migrants first. Some laid-off migrants will return to their rural home districts, where social insurance systems tend to be thin. Other laid-off migrants will stay in the cities, placing additional pressure on urban social programs. From the migrants’ perspective, it is not immediately clear which option—stay in the city or return to the countryside—is best. In keeping with the location of economic growth, greater priority has been given to developing social programs in urban areas to replace the old, pre-reform arrangements, which depended heavily on guarantees of lifetime employment and direct provision of social services by state-owned enterprises. But migrant workers have tended to fall through the cracks of these new, post-reform urban social programs. Meanwhile, rural services have only slowly improved, lagging far behind those offered by urban social programs.
From the perspective of the general welfare, public policy needs to strike a delicate balance of incentives for return migration vs. encouraging migrants to stay in cities, while also stimulating domestic consumption nationwide. Return migration, for example, ought to serve the dual goals of taking pressure off urban social systems and transferring skills, knowledge, and human resources to the countryside. Policy might steer return migration toward rural areas that demonstrate better prospects for future job growth. Return migrants also might be encouraged and/or assisted to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities back home. At the same time, urban enterprises will need to recall some of their laid-off workers when economic growth resumes, and that points to the value of providing reasonably generous unemployment benefits for migrants in cities alongside opportunities for up-skilling during periods of slower growth. Expanded public and private spending on pensions, unemployment benefits, health care, child care, and other benefits and services are likely to be used to stimulate domestic consumption and provide a counterweight to what many have referred to as China’s lop-sided, investment-heavy growth model. Making these benefits available everywhere and regardless of hukou could be seen as advancing both economic development and social protection goals.
China, of course, is not the first country to experience enormous economic growth driven by rural to urban migration. In many countries, the result was massive urban poverty and hardship; think of Dickensian London and America’s dangerous 19th and early 20th century slums. So far, China seems to have avoided the worst elements of these costly transitions. But the hukou system has caused hardships of its own—particularly for China’s migrant worker population—in the country’s post-market reform era. With many prominent economists predicting far slower economic growth rates in the future, policymakers must promptly address the issues facing migrant workers and their families. Will China’s leaders be able to cross this river before it floods, or will they be caught in the middle, feeling for the next stone?
Douglas J. Besharov, JD, is the Norman and Florence Brody Professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council of the United States. Karen Baehler is Scholar in Residence at the School of Public Affairs at American University. They co-edited Chinese Social Policy in a Time of Transition.
The Trojan War. The history of piracy. The great naval battles between Carthage and Rome. The Jewish Diaspora into Hellenistic worlds. The rise of Islam. The Grand Tours of the 19th century. The mass tourism of the 20th. We may have missed World Maritime Day on March 17th, but we can still admire the watery wonder of the sea and its peoples. As brilliant and sweeping as the Mediterranean itself, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean interweaves major political and naval developments with the ebb and flow of trade. Author David Abulafia stresses the remarkable ability of Mediterranean cultures to uphold the civilizing ideal of convivencia, “living together,” exemplified in medieval Spain, where Christian theologians studied Arabic texts with the help of Jewish and Muslim scholars, and traceable throughout the history of the region. And now a quick quiz on the history of the Mediterranean…
What are the oldest large-scale buildings of the Mediterranean?
(1) The Acropolis in Athens
(2) Mnajdra temple complex in Malta
(3) Leptis Magna in modern day Khoms, Libya
(4) The necropolis of Orvieto, Italy
What do the famous Cycladic figurines depict?
(1) Kings with a distinctive left foot stepped forward
(2) Female companions of the dead
(3) The bull-leapers, ancient athletes who performed acrobatics using bulls
(4) Fertility goddesses with distinctly long hair
What destroyed the Akrotiri on Thera in 1500 BC?
(1) A succession of difficult weather and poor growing seasons led to them abandoning the island
(2) A series of raids from nearby Minoan Crete devastated their population and economy
(3) A mysterious illness
(4) A massive volcanic eruption
The Battle of Actium played what decisive role in Mediterranean history?
(1) Lord Nelson of the British Navy defeated Napoleon and the French fleet — the first in a series of victories ensuring the British naval dominance of the Mediterranean during the Napoleonic Wars
(2) Cleopatra and Mark Antony’s forces were defeated — the last resistance to Octavian’s power grab — which eventually allowed him to transform the Roman Republic into the Empire
(3) Roman forces, so weakened by the cost of their victory at Actium, could no longer defend against invading Germanic tribes on the Italian peninsula
(4) The Venetian fleet led by Andrea Dandolo defeated the Genoese fleet, allowing Venice to dominate the glass trade in Renaissance Europe
What did the Venetians steal from fellow Christian city Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade and erect in front of St Mark’s Basilica?
(1) The throne of Constantine
(2) The gold and jewel encrusted reliquary of Saint Mark’s head
(3) Four magnificient horses of ancient Greek workmanship
(4) A Persian statue, symbol of Constantinople’s reach across trade routes
In the Battle of Lepanto, an alliance of Mediterranean Christian states defeated the Ottoman fleet. Which famous writer was known as “the cripple of Lepanto”?
(1) Ben Jonson, English playwright and notorious fighter
(2) Petrarch, Italian poet and father of Humanism
(3) Cervantes, Spanish author of Don Quixote
(4) Michel de Montaigne, French essayist and aristocrat
To which war does the Marine’s hymn refer with the verse “The shores of Tripoli”?
(1) The Revolutionary War (the British navy routinely press-ganged American citizens across the seas into becoming British sailors)
(2) First Barbary War (American involvement to end
0 Comments on A quiz on the Great Sea — the Mediterranean as of 1/1/1900
Wars continue to be fought for resources and control of territory, but it’s been some time since any nation took up arms against another for spices. (more…)
