The European Commission is talking sense on immigration. Last week Franco Frattini, the justice commissioner, said that Europe must relax its immigration controls and open the door to an extra 20 million workers over the next two decades. His argument flies in the face of received political wisdom. Instead of cracking down on illegal migrants arriving overland from Asia through Eastern Europe or in small boats from Africa via the Canary islands, Europe should build safe “pathways” for those who are desperate to work in Europe.
This is not just talk. Frattini plans to table a new law that besides setting out minimum working standards for immigrants will establish a one-stop shop for them to apply for working permits. Moreover, the commission is establishing an information center in Mali, a country that is a major source of illegal emigrants. Locals can use it to apply for jobs in Spain and France. He is also promoting the concept of “circular migration” — that migrants, whether skilled or unskilled, come to Europe for a period without their families and then return home.
Frattini seems intent on puncturing some of the myths on immigration, a subject that is riddled with misinformation, if not fantasies, at so many levels. Norman Podhoretz, the American neoconservative has recently predicted that Western Europe will be “conquered from within by Islamofacism”. Yet the influx of Muslim migrants has peaked long ago, and today’s flood is coming from Eastern Europe. Besides, the Muslim birthrate inside Europe is falling rapidly and there are far less terrorist-inclined Muslims in Europe than there have been, over the last 30 years — Baader-Meinhof, Red Brigade, (both trained by Palestinian militants) IRA, ETA and Animal Rights terrorists, all home grown, of basically Christian descent.
The interesting thing about today’s flood of East Europeans is that they want to keep their roots at home intact. Circular migration is not the old German Gastabeiter program under a new name, as The Economist has charged. All has changed in the 40 years since that began. Home today is a two-hour flight on a low cost airline. And, as the Poles have shown, if there is no hassle about coming and going, they will tend to leave their families at home. So why not extend this practice to Africans and Asians?
Long ago, as the Cato Institute has studied, the US conducted a “secret” (“secret” because nobody talks about it) experiment in circularity.
The subject was Puerto Rican immigration — the people who gave us “West Side Story”. Because of Puerto Rica’s special political status the flood of immigrants that came to New York and elsewhere faced no barriers and no controls. But even in the 1980s nearly half of the immigrants stayed on the mainland for only two years. In the 1990s the traffic ceased of its own accord, as Puerto Rico developed rapidly. The truth is that most migrant workers, if given a choice and if they feel they can come and go easily if they have made a mistake, usually prefer to go home once jobs open up or once they have achieved their goals — savings for a house or to start a small business.
Immigrants who cause the kind of problems that rattle receiving societies often act as they do in a desperate attempt to cling on to what they think is the way of doing things back home or simply because they feel trapped. But if they are free to come and go they will have more the mentality of tourists — who want to learn about the country they have temporarily moved to and who have no major gripe with it. Freer movement will also undermine the “moving body industry” and the evils of the black market.
Step by step we have to move the immigration phenomenon back to where it was in the 1960s, unrecognized though it generally was at that time, when emigrants only decided to uproot themselves because they knew their would be jobs at the other end.
No unfilled vacancies, no migrant flows or, at least, much smaller ones. This doesn’t only mean using the older members of our society better, it means often re-fashioning many low-paid jobs so that they have more appeal for native workers (who now include the large numbers of second and third generation offspring of migrants).
