The case of the missing immigrants

Think a flood of migrants will push their way across Western borders? Think again.

What a week! 8 Billion and Counting launched Tuesday and it’s been great to see everyone’s photos with the book. If you haven’t gotten your copy yet please visit your local bookstore or favorite online retailer. There’s a lot in there to discuss so let me know what you think.

Now, down to business. This week’s edition expands on some ideas I shared in The Atlantic. I think we vastly overpredict human mobility because we forget that politics is an effective gatekeeper. When we put politics at the center, the future of migration looks a lot like the past, with highly restricted mobility and missed opportunities for both would-be emigrants and countries who could benefit from their skills and perspectives.

Germany has a reputation of being welcoming to refugees and asylum seekers because of their initial response to the 2015 migrant crisis. Indeed, the country approved 69 percent of its 631,000 cases in 2016. Then, they reverted to the mean. In 2020, Germany rejected over half of first-time asylum applications from non-EU citizens. What do I take from this? We don’t have the systems or the political will to deal with the millions of forcibly displaced persons now or in the future. We need to do better.

The Biden Administration hinted this week that it may end an emergency immigration restriction known as Title 42, put in place in March 2020 ostensibly to prevent immigrants from bringing COVID-19 into the US. There’s so much to say about this that I could fill three newsletters, but for now I want to expand on the core idea of my Atlantic piece: liberal democracies repeatedly choose not to take in those fleeing conflict, displaced by environmental changes, or just hoping for a better life. And they’re not going to change any time soon. This tendency towards restriction is true whether we’re talking about Democrats or Republicans in the US, or conservatives and liberals elsewhere. I think a general failure to acknowledge that restricting immigration is the norm, not an exception, leads to a lack of permanent solutions to migration issues. If Title 42 is lifted, there could be a rush at the border and the Biden Administration will feel compelled to respond with an iron fist or risk taking a hit in the midterm elections. The US has never had enough workers dedicated to processing visas or asylum applications and human rights violations ensue (remember the children in cages?). I would wager there’s another humanitarian and human rights disaster around the bend.

At the El Paso border in May 2019 at the height of the family separation tragedy. We visited both ICE detention facilities and Annunciation House. After talking to stakeholders across the board the situation seemed hopeless. And I don’t think anything has changed.

Both the political left and right also have constituents that pressure for more open immigration—humanitarians on the left and the private sector on the right—but they don’t seem to be shaping the national agendas at all. Instead, it’s a fight between the right and left to see who can be toughest on immigration in practice (although the left often employs rhetoric that belies its policies).

Giovanni Peri and Reem Zaiour of UC Davis report that due to COVID-19 restrictions on mobility and a backlog of US visa processing, “By the end of 2021 there were about 2 million fewer working-age immigrants living in the United States than there would have been if the pre-2020 immigration trend had continued unchanged.” According to their calculations, half of those would have been college-educated. But here’s the kicker: “This decline in immigrant and nonimmigrant visa arrivals resulted in zero growth in working-age foreign-born people in the United States.” This week the US Census Bureau reported that deaths outnumbered births in 73% of US counties from 2020 to 2021 (the subject of a future newsletter, so subscribe!), so it is clear that immigration is the key to future growth of the American workforce. The US immigration shortfall, which began even before COVID, has led to unfilled jobs in sectors more reliant on foreign labor, such as hospitality and food services. The authors give a lot more detail on the role of other factors, not just immigration, in unfilled jobs and economic competitiveness, and link to useful studies that can send you down a rabbit hole of labor force fun.

Stuart Geitel-Basten @stuartbasten is a demographer with a secret love of political science, or so I guess from his outstanding work infusing demography with politics. His Twitter is a must-follow for those who want to keep up with recent demographic research but are short on time to dig into the journals. Plus, he posts funny “lost in translation” photos from Hong Kong, where he’s based.