Social Europe

  • EU Forward Project
  • YouTube
  • Podcast
  • Books
  • Newsletter
  • Membership

The Failure Of Free Migration

Robert Skidelsky 21st July 2016

Robert Skidelsky

Robert Skidelsky

The horrendous attack by a French-Tunisian man on a crowd in Nice celebrating Bastille Day, which killed 84 and injured hundreds more, will give National Front leader Marine Le Pen a massive boost in next spring’s presidential election. It doesn’t matter whether the murderer, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, had any links to radical Islamism. Throughout the Western world, a toxic mix of physical, economic, and cultural insecurity has been fueling anti-immigration sentiment and politics precisely at the moment when the disintegration of post-colonial states across the Islamic crescent is producing a refugee problem on a scale not seen since World War II.

In the last 30 years or so, a key benchmark for liberal-democratic societies has been their openness to newcomers. Only bigots could not see that immigration benefits both hosts and migrants; so the task of political leadership was to keep such views out of the dominant discourse, and to facilitate integration or assimilation. Unfortunately, most Western elites failed to appreciate the conditions of success.

Although the movement of peoples has been a constant feature of human history, it has been relatively bloodless only when it was into scantily settled or developing territories. A classic case was the nineteenth-century emigrations from Europe to the New World. Between 1840 and 1914, 55 million people left Europe for the Americas – much larger, relative to population, than migration since WWII. Nearly all the movers were economic migrants, pushed out of their countries by famine and agricultural depression and pulled to the New World by the promise of free land and a better life.

As the world industrialized and filled up with people, the flow of people from developed to developing areas reversed. Poverty and starvation still pushed migrants off the land in poor countries; now, however, the pull factor was not free land, but better jobs in developed countries.

This set up today’s tension. After WWII, Western governments devised policies that aimed to balance the economic benefits of immigration (cheap labor) with protection of domestic jobs and ways of life. For example, between 1955 and 1973, West Germany admitted 14 million “guest workers,” largely from Turkey. But, though the guests were expected to return home after two years, these controls gradually weakened as part of the general movement toward free trade and free capital movements.

Alongside economic motives for migration there has always been another: ethnic, religious, and political persecution. Examples include the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, of Huguenots from France in 1685, of Germans and others from Eastern Europe following WWII, of some Palestinians from Israel in 1948, and of Indians from Uganda in the 1970s.

In recent years, refugees have mainly been fleeing either persecution or extreme insecurity following state disintegration. We saw this in the Balkans in the 1990s, and in Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa in the 2000s. The five million Syrians now in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan are the latest and most dramatic example of this pattern.

For this class of migrant, push factors are by far the most important. But the line between refugees and economic migrants blurs over time. History indicates that most refugees do not return to their country of origin. It takes too long for the feeling of extreme insecurity to subside; and, meanwhile, the lure of a better life takes hold.

This explains an important fact about popular perception: most people in the host countries do not distinguish between economic migrants and refugees. Both are typically viewed as claimants on existing resources, not as creators of new resources. The flight of East Asians from Kenya during that country’s “Africanization” campaign led directly to the UK’s anti-immigration legislation of 1968.

This historical perspective suggests three conclusions. First, anti-immigrant sentiment is not based only on prejudice, ignorance, or political opportunism. Anti-immigrant language is not just socially constructed. Words are not mirrors of things “out there,”  but they have some relation to such things. You cannot manipulate something unless there is something to manipulate. We have little chance of changing the words unless we alter the realities to which they refer.

Second, the era of unregulated mass population movement is drawing to a close. As the Brexit vote shows, Europe’s political class greatly underestimated the strains caused by free mobility across borders – a shibboleth of the failed neoliberal project of maximizing market-based resource allocation. Critics of neoliberalism cannot consistently exempt population movements from regulation. Indeed, the fatal flaw of free mobility in the EU is that it always presupposed a state to manage the movement. This state does not exist. Giving people an EU passport doesn’t legitimize a single labor market, which is why “emergency brakes” on migration within the EU are inevitable.

Third, we need to accept the fact that most of the refugees arriving in the EU will not return home.

The way forward is difficult. The easiest steps are those that increase voters’ security, in the widest sense, because such policies are within the control of political leaders. These measures will include not just a cap on the number of economic migrants, but also policies leading to expectation of full employment and continuity of income. Only if voters’ economic insecurity is diminished is there any hope for active policies to assimilate or integrate refugees, whose numbers Western leaders cannot directly control.

The unsolved problem is how to reduce those factors pushing people out of their own countries.

We may hope that economic development in Eastern Europe – or Mexico – will equalize conditions sufficiently to end net flows from one region to another; but ending the flow of refugees from the Middle East and Africa is altogether more daunting. Restoration of order and creation of legitimate authority are preconditions of economic development, and we don’t know how this is to be done. In some cases, it may require redrawing borders. But it is hard to see that happening without years of fighting, or to know how the West can reduce the bloodshed.

One thing seems certain to me: without increased security at both ends, political violence will spill over from the Islamic world to its nearest neighbors in Europe.

Copyright: Project Syndicate 2016 The Failure of Free Migration

Robert Skidelsky
Robert Skidelsky

Robert Skidelsky is a member of the British House of Lords, Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Warwick University, and the author of a prize-winning three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes. He began his political career in the Labour party, was a founding member of the Social Democratic Party, and served as the Conservative Party’s spokesman for Treasury affairs in the House of Lords until he was sacked for his opposition to NATO’s 1999 bombing of Kosovo. Since 2001, he has sat in the House of Lords as an independent.

Harvard University Press Advertisement

Social Europe Ad - Promoting European social policies

We need your help.

Support Social Europe for less than €5 per month and help keep our content freely accessible to everyone. Your support empowers independent publishing and drives the conversations that matter. Thank you very much!

Social Europe Membership

Click here to become a member

Most Recent Articles

u421983ae 3b0caff337bf 0 Europe’s Euro Ambition: A Risky Bid for “Exorbitant Privilege”Peter Bofinger
u4219834676b2eb11 1 Trump’s Attacks on Academia: Is the U.S. University System Itself to Blame?Bo Rothstein
u4219834677aa07d271bc7 2 Shaping the Future of Digital Work: A Bold Proposal for Platform Worker RightsValerio De Stefano
u421983462ef5c965ea38 0 Europe Must Adapt to Its Ageing WorkforceFranz Eiffe and Karel Fric
u42198346789a3f266f5e8 1 Poland’s Polarised Election Signals a Wider Crisis for Liberal DemocracyCatherine De Vries

Most Popular Articles

startupsgovernment e1744799195663 Governments Are Not StartupsMariana Mazzucato
u421986cbef 2549 4e0c b6c4 b5bb01362b52 0 American SuicideJoschka Fischer
u42198346769d6584 1580 41fe 8c7d 3b9398aa5ec5 1 Why Trump Keeps Winning: The Truth No One AdmitsBo Rothstein
u421983467 a350a084 b098 4970 9834 739dc11b73a5 1 America Is About to Become the Next BrexitJ Bradford DeLong
u4219834676ba1b3a2 b4e1 4c79 960b 6770c60533fa 1 The End of the ‘West’ and Europe’s FutureGuillaume Duval
u421983462e c2ec 4dd2 90a4 b9cfb6856465 1 The Transatlantic Alliance Is Dying—What Comes Next for Europe?Frank Hoffer
u421983467 2a24 4c75 9482 03c99ea44770 3 Trump’s Trade War Tears North America Apart – Could Canada and Mexico Turn to Europe?Malcolm Fairbrother
u4219834676e2a479 85e9 435a bf3f 59c90bfe6225 3 Why Good Business Leaders Tune Out the Trump Noise and Stay FocusedStefan Stern
u42198346 4ba7 b898 27a9d72779f7 1 Confronting the Pandemic’s Toxic Political LegacyJan-Werner Müller
u4219834676574c9 df78 4d38 939b 929d7aea0c20 2 The End of Progess? The Dire Consequences of Trump’s ReturnJoseph Stiglitz

Eurofound advertisement

Ageing workforce
How are minimum wage levels changing in Europe?

In a new Eurofound Talks podcast episode, host Mary McCaughey speaks with Eurofound expert Carlos Vacas Soriano about recent changes to minimum wages in Europe and their implications.

Listeners can delve into the intricacies of Europe's minimum wage dynamics and the driving factors behind these shifts. The conversation also highlights the broader effects of minimum wage changes on income inequality and gender equality.

Listen to the episode for free. Also make sure to subscribe to Eurofound Talks so you don’t miss an episode!

LISTEN NOW

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

Spring Issues

The Spring issue of The Progressive Post is out!


Since President Trump’s inauguration, the US – hitherto the cornerstone of Western security – is destabilising the world order it helped to build. The US security umbrella is apparently closing on Europe, Ukraine finds itself less and less protected, and the traditional defender of free trade is now shutting the door to foreign goods, sending stock markets on a rollercoaster. How will the European Union respond to this dramatic landscape change? .


Among this issue’s highlights, we discuss European defence strategies, assess how the US president's recent announcements will impact international trade and explore the risks  and opportunities that algorithms pose for workers.


READ THE MAGAZINE

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

WSI Report

WSI Minimum Wage Report 2025

The trend towards significant nominal minimum wage increases is continuing this year. In view of falling inflation rates, this translates into a sizeable increase in purchasing power for minimum wage earners in most European countries. The background to this is the implementation of the European Minimum Wage Directive, which has led to a reorientation of minimum wage policy in many countries and is thus boosting the dynamics of minimum wages. Most EU countries are now following the reference values for adequate minimum wages enshrined in the directive, which are 60% of the median wage or 50 % of the average wage. However, for Germany, a structural increase is still necessary to make progress towards an adequate minimum wage.

DOWNLOAD HERE

S&D Group in the European Parliament advertisement

Cohesion Policy

S&D Position Paper on Cohesion Policy post-2027: a resilient future for European territorial equity”,

Cohesion Policy aims to promote harmonious development and reduce economic, social and territorial disparities between the regions of the Union, and the backwardness of the least favoured regions with a particular focus on rural areas, areas affected by industrial transition and regions suffering from severe and permanent natural or demographic handicaps, such as outermost regions, regions with very low population density, islands, cross-border and mountain regions.

READ THE FULL POSITION PAPER HERE

ETUI advertisement

HESA Magazine Cover

What kind of impact is artificial intelligence (AI) having, or likely to have, on the way we work and the conditions we work under? Discover the latest issue of HesaMag, the ETUI’s health and safety magazine, which considers this question from many angles.

DOWNLOAD HERE

Social Europe

Our Mission

Team

Article Submission

Advertisements

Membership

Social Europe Archives

Themes Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

Miscellaneous

RSS Feed

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641