Right Wing Politicians Are Stoking The Flames Of Xenophobia To Advance Their Own Careers

House GOP Blocking Biden Border Enforcement Funds To Make It Worse So Trump Can Campaign On It

Trump said they're coming so they can vote for Democrats

I’m with some friends and one keeps saying that Trump is going to win next year because of what is called “the crisis at the border.” The macro reasons for a need for immigrants isn’t something voters think about when they see pictures like the one above (which my friend sent to drive home his point). The U.S., like other rich western countries, face aging populations and declining birth rates which will lead to labor shortages and economic stagnation. 

Immigration can help address these demographic challenges by providing a younger workforce and contributing to population growth. Generally, immigrants are filling labor shortages in crucial sectors like agriculture, construction and healthcare, especially for jobs with lower wages or demanding working conditions that native-born citizens aren’t willing to take. This can boost economic growth and productivity and lead to higher payroll tax contributions that directly fund Social Security. This larger pool mitigates the effects of an aging population and declining birth rates among native-born citizens, both of which contribute to a smaller tax base. Immigrants tend to be younger than native-born Americans. This reduces the immediate burden on the Social Security system as fewer retirees are drawing benefits compared to working-age individuals paying into it. On top of that, immigrants often bring new skills, ideas and entrepreneurial spirit, which contributes to innovation, technological advancement and the creation of new businesses. This strengthens the economy and creates jobs.

Sociology professor and author (How Migration Really Works) Hein de Haas tackled the problem for The Guardian on Friday with an essay, Everything politicians tell you about immigration is wrong. This is how it actually works. I don’t think any MAGAts will be reading it and changes their minds about the xenophobia that is rampant among Trump supporters. He began by noting that “a toxic combination of poverty, inequality, violence, oppression, climate breakdown and population growth appear to be pushing growing numbers of people from Africa, Asia and Latin America to embark upon desperate journeys to reach the shores of the wealthy west.”

All of this results in the popular idea of a “migration crisis” that will require drastic countermeasures to prevent massive waves of people arriving in the future, apparently exceeding the absorption capacity of western societies and economies.

Despite this, however, there is no scientific evidence to sustain the claim that global migration is accelerating. International migrants account for about 3% of the world population, and this percentage has remained remarkably stable over the past half a century.

Likewise, refugee migration is much more limited than political rhetoric and media images suggest. About 10% of all international migrants are refugees, representing 0.3% of the world population. While refugee flows fluctuate strongly with levels of conflict, there is no evidence of a long-term increasing trend. About 80-85% of refugees remain in regions of origin, and that share has also remained rather stable over the past decades. And there is no evidence that illegal migration is spinning out of control— in fact, the large majority of migrants who move from the global south to the global north continue to move legally. For instance, nine out of 10 Africans move to Europe legally, with passports and papers in hand.

The evidence also turns common understandings of the causes of migration on its head. The conventional view is that south-to-north migration is in essence the outgrowth of poverty, inequality and violence in origin countries— hence the popular idea that poverty reduction and development are the only long-term solutions to migration.

However, this assumption is undermined by evidence showing that migration rises as poor countries become richer. This is because increasing levels of income and education, alongside infrastructure improvements, raise people’s capabilities and aspirations to migrate. Instead of the stereotypical “desperate flight from misery,” in reality migration is generally an investment in the long-term wellbeing of families and requires significant resources. Poverty actually deprives people of the resources required to move over long distances, let alone to cross continents.

… [D]espite global averages remaining stable, it is difficult to deny that legal immigration to the US, Britain and western Europe has been growing over the past decades. The frequent discontent this has caused has gone along with repeated calls for less, more controlled or more selective immigration.

But border crackdowns have clearly failed to achieve these objectives or have even made problems worse because they were not based on an understanding of how migration really works. The main reason is that these policies ignored the most important root cause of migration: persistent labour demand.

The misleading assertion that poverty causes migration conceals the fact that labour demand has been the main driver of growing immigration to western countries since the 1990s. More widespread education, women’s emancipation and population aging have led to labour shortages; these have fueled a growing demand for migrant workers in sectors such as agriculture, construction, cleaning, hospitality, transport and food processing, as supplies of local workers willing and able to do such jobs have increasingly run dry. Without such chronic labour shortages, most migrants wouldn’t have come.

But this hasn’t been a natural process. It is instead one that has been encouraged by decades of policies geared towards economic and labour market liberalisation, which have fueled the growth of precarious jobs that local workers won’t take. Politicians from left to right know this reality, but they don’t dare admit it out of fear of being seen as “soft on immigration.” They choose instead to talk tough and revert to acts of political showmanship that create an appearance of control, but that in effect function as a smokescreen to conceal the true nature of immigration policy. Under this current arrangement, more and more migrants are allowed in, and the employment of undocumented workers is widely tolerated as they fill in crucial labour shortages.

Politicians have turned a blind eye as proven by almost laughably low levels of workplace enforcement.

To break away from this legacy of failed policies, politicians need to gather the courage to tell an honest story about migration: that it is a phenomenon that benefits some people more than others; that it can have downsides for some, but cannot be thought or wished away; and that there are no simple solutions for complex problems.

Fundamental choices have to be made. For example, do we want to live in a society in which more and more work— transport, construction, cleaning, care of elderly people and children, food provision— is outsourced to a new class of servants made up mainly of migrant workers? Do we want a large agricultural sector that partly relies on subsidies and is dependent on migrants for the necessary labour? The present reality shows that we cannot divorce debates about immigration from broader debates about inequality, labour, social justice and, most importantly, the kind of society we want to live in.

Politicians with “the courage to tell an honest story about migration?” Sure! Instead we wind up with politicians like Trump, DeSantis and Abbott in the U.S.demagoguing the issues surrounding migration. And it’s just as bad in Europe. Right wing politicians in Europe have used xenophobia to boost their own careers in country after country, like Rishi Sunak, Suella Braverman, Priti Pate and Nigel Farage in the UK; Alice Weidel and Alexander Gauland in Germany; Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour in France; Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini in Italy; Viktor Orbán and Zsolt Semjén in Hungary; Geert Wilders and Thierry Baudet in Holland; Theo Francken, Tom Van Grieken and Bart De Wever in Belgium; Santiago Abascal and José María Mazón in Spain; Jimmie Åkesson and Richard Jomshof in Sweden; Morten Messerschmidt and Pia Kjærsgaard in Denmark; Herbert Kickl and Heinz-Christian Strache in Austria; and Marco Chiesa in Switzerland.