On drugs and immigration

Immigrants are a lot like drugs, only far more beneficial (Source: here)

It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic. The British press reported today that an Iranian refugee had been deported to France for the second time in barely two months. The Iranian was deported the first time under a British-French agreement that for every refugee who enters Britain illegally one must be sent back. It did not take long for the Iranian to come back, though. He has now been deported for the second time. According to the Iranian, he returned Britain, because he had been the victim of modern slavery in northern France. I am ready to bet he will soon be back to Britain for a third time!

The story illustrates the utter uselessness of immigration policies in rich countries. Britain’s one-in-one-out immigration policy is a political gimmick. It assumes that Britain actually catches all illegal immigrants, which is patently not the case. In fact, like many other rich countries, Britain has driven immigration underground, where it is far more difficult to monitor and control actual flows of people. The British government has no clue how many people are entering the country illegally.

Needless to say, policies that drive immigration underground push already very vulnerable immigrants into the arms of criminals. The vast majority of refugees arriving in Europe are extremely vulnerable to begin with; they are homeless, jobless, and without health insurance. In the arms of people-smugglers, they also become indebted to mafia-like organisations, who exploit them from morning to night.

Moreover, many immigrants cannot return home - and it is not just that they face harrowing poverty and insecurity at home. They cannot return home until they have earned enough money to pay the people who smuggled them in. If they don’t pay, their families at home will suffer horrific consequences.

It is pure hell for immigrants to rely on criminal people-smugglers, but they have no choice because Britain and most other European countries - Spain being an important exception - have closed off nearly all legal routes into their countries, regardless of the merits of the immigrants' claims for asylum.

It is callous and deeply immoral to treat vulnerable people the way rich countries treat refugees and illegal immigrants. It is also stupid, because rich countries actually need them! Due to ageing populations and declining birth rates, rich economies will need millions of immigrant workers over the coming decades. Europe alone will require some 45 million workers from outside the continent over the next 15 years without which Europe faces stagnation and serious erosion in public services.

Still, my biggest gripe with current immigration policies in Europe is that they will never work! It is therefore a complete waste to spend billions of tax payers money on trying to keep these people out. The immigrants will come anyway. It is exactly analogous to fighting the drug trade by attacking drug smugglers; the drugs come anyway.

Why, you may ask, do hard-line policies not work?

Let me try to illustrate why with reference to US drug smuggling, which is extremely similar to the people-smuggling, but far more familiar to most people. For decades, the US has tried to keep South American cocaine and other drugs out of the United States, but, without exception, all attempts have failed. Drugs continue to pour into the United States in large quantities. Discouraging home use by increasing penalties for drug users has achieved nothing. Attacking drug production in certain Latin American countries just shifted production to other countries. Trump’s most recent attempt to discourage the drug trade through legally questionable bombings of boats off the Venezuelan coast will also fail.

The reason US drug policy is failing so badly is that it does not recognise that the drugs trade is incredibly lucrative due to both huge demand for drugs within the United States and lots of supply from Latin America. The economic forces are simply too powerful; no matter how hard the US tries to stamp out the trade it just continues. It is always worth the risk to produce and smuggle drugs to addicted Americans.

Europe’s war on immigration is exactly analogous to the US war on drugs. It will fail and for exactly the same reasons. Africans and other people in the developing world travel to Europe due to extremely strong economic incentives. This is really obvious the moment you look at the numbers. In their home countries, hundreds of millions of young Africans and people from elsewhere in the developing world earn little more than a Euro a day. In comparison, the minimum wage in, say, Germany is 13 Euros per hour!

An African immigrant can therefore expect to earn 130 times more in Germany than at home per ten-hour workday. Or to put it in terms that are more relatable to people from the rich north: the average German income per year is 50,000 Euros. Getting 130 times more than that would amount to 6.5 million Euros! Would you consider migrating? Of course, if the immigrant actually acquires skills and starts to earn more than the minimum wage then the earnings differential could be many times higher.

No wonder why people move. Now, ask yourself, do you seriously believe that the enormous pay gap between Europe and Africa will change anytime soon? Because if not the trade in people will most certainly continue. Note also that exactly the same demand and supply dynamics drive the people-smuggling business. People-smuggling will continue to be extremely lucrative -especially at high migrant volumes - as long as the wage differential remains as wide as it is today.

S, this is the reality we are dealing with. To make any kind of progress on Europe’s stale immigration policies, we must force policy makers to address reality rather than the illusion they usually peddle that immigration can be stopped through cruelty and ever higher barriers to immigration. The truth is that no matter how cruel our policies get they will never deter a trade based on such powerful economic incentives.

The only feasible way forward is to decriminalise and regulate immigration; this is where the policy focus should be, rather than trying to keep immigrants out and failing over and over again.

I recognise, of course, that most of our politicians are too intellectually challenged, cowardly, or both to face immigration reality. I also recognise that many voters in rich countries are too culturally brainwashed to even countenance a world in which people from many cultures live together harmoniously and productively, although such realities exist in many of our larger cities and in countries like Switzerland or Qatar (for more on cultural brainwashing, see here).

My modest aspiration in writing this note is to get the thinkers among us to contemplate an answer to this very simple question: Given the reality that immigration will increase inexorably in the future due to unstoppable improvements in global income, communications, and transport, how do we design a truly sustainable immigration policy?

The End