As I arrive at the end of a decade heading the International Organization on Migration (IOM), I am more persuaded than ever that migration is one of the most important mega-trends of our time. Both the scale and nature of the movement of peoples across borders and within them are unprecedented. One of every seven human beings today is a migrant, which comes to a billion migrants out of a global population of about seven billion. The world began to approach these ratios around the end of the 19th century, and the wars of the first part of the 20th century kept those numbers high for a while. But the sheer numbers, diversity, and global character of migratory flows today are like nothing we’ve ever seen.
Migrants are old and young, rich and poor, religious and secular. Most seek better economic circumstances, but some are fleeing from violence and persecution. Some are organized (and sometimes exploited) by entrepreneurs of various descriptions, but many are more or less on their own as families and individuals. These differences matter because the laws in most “receiving” countries make them matter. Race, religion, education, health, and many other things divide migrants, and migrant groups, from one another, but they are united with each other, and united with non-migrants, by their common humanity. And more than that, those who are today part of “stay-put” humanity are often descended from family members just a generation or two before who were migrants themselves.
What should we call this still-emerging mega-trend: human mobility, migration, the clash of civilizations—or the gradual if often involuntary assimilation of an entire planet’s peoples into one globalized society? The name we choose matters. Some names emphasize the challenges inherent in migration. Others emphasize the opportunities.
Whatever we call it, it’s time to acknowledge the magnitude of what awaits us, and time to plot a more coherent strategy to manage it.
I say “manage,” not “overcome,” “defeat,” or “prevail against” because we can’t do any of those things. How do you “defeat” demography? How do you “overcome” proximity, or increased life expectancy? What would it mean to “prevail” in the integration of cultures and peoples? We live in a world of deep contrasts that can alienate or attract, or switch from doing one to the other.
However, wise policies can manage the contrasts better than unwise ones, and better than no real policies at all. For example, as the median age of most developed West European countries races toward 50, the median age of most West African countries has already dropped below 15. Elderly and declining European populations will need workers, both less and more skilled, to help care for them. Someone will also have to teach those skills. And many of those who are today teens in sub-Saharan Africa are desperate to live fulfilling and useful lives in safety and dignity—anywhere. Neither Europeans nor Africans can “win” unless they win together. But how?
The Central Med Route
To illustrate the complexities involved in answering that “how” question, let’s describe in some detail the world’s most deadly migration passage at present: the passage between Libya and Italy that IOM refers to as the Central Mediterranean migration route. For five years now, we have counted a rising, and then slightly ebbing, tide of death by drowning—3,283 in 2014; 3,783 in 2015; 5,143 in 2016; 3,139 in 2017, and 1,524 (so far) this year. That adds to about 17,000, more if we add the 636 who drowned off the coast of Lampedusa in October 2013. As many as 50,000 or more may have drowned since the year 2000, for the migration preceded the 2011 war in Libya.
In this aspect of the migration story, deaths are among the few “knowns” in a sea of unknowns. We don’t know nearly as well, for example, how many migrants today are still waiting in Libya, hoping to get to Europe. Nor do we know how many have died in the sands of the Sahara, or lie at the bottom of the Mediterranean—deaths never counted for lack of witnesses. Nor do we know how many count themselves as “stranded” in Libya, hoping now to get back home if not to Europe, or how many are still making their way toward Libya from somewhere else. And among those in this last group, how many have already died? We don’t know, and probably never will.
In the days following the Lampedusa tragedy, IOM and other humanitarian agencies grappled with a great many practical unknowns that had nothing to do with numbers. For many of us an early unknown in Libya was “who’s in charge?” And were they also in charge of dealing with migrants? Were distressed migrants only the ones in “official” detention centers? What about those “unofficial” detention centers (for a while, one was rumored to be within the confines of Tripoli’s municipal zoo) that may have been controlled by warring militias who dabbled in smuggling on the side. Or were more or less independent smugglers helping tribally kindred militias finance their firepower by sharing profits with them? Few could tell for sure, and those who knew weren’t telling us.
Data on deaths by drowning, however sketchy they often were, were nonetheless useful, and IOM became adept at compiling them. The more data we crunched, the closer we came to devising coping strategies. Thus, daily arrival numbers from authorities in Greece, Italy, and Spain helped us determine the breakdown of the migrants by gender, age, and nationality. Those data, beginning in 2015, gave us an entry point to sort the many unknown puzzle pieces into separate piles. We then hoped to assemble these pieces into plans to tackle what has been a nightmare for the migrants and an enormous management headache for European and Libyan authorities, as well as for the international humanitarian community.
For example, the data indicated that thousands of Senegalese already had entered Italy by sea from Libya. We knew of hundreds living precariously in Tripoli, and probably at least as many already in detention as undocumented migrants rousted by Libyan police. Because IOM has a large presence in Dakar, it proved relatively easy to enlist Senegalese diplomats in the rescue effort. What wasn’t so easy was everything else. Yes, there were Senegalese in Tripoli—many hundreds of them, just as we thought. Senegalese had been crossing the desert via ancient trade routes, at first looking for work in Libya but increasingly seeing Tripoli as a trampoline for jumping to Europe.
As long as there were still jobs to be had in Libya—in construction, food service, cleaning services, or simply begging for “jobs” like watching cars outside a shopping mall—most Senegalese preferred that to leaving for Europe. But by early 2015, internecine violence, militia fighting, and overall street crime had made a good job a liability. Africans complained they were being singled out and robbed by street gangs. With no remittance services to send their earnings home, many carried wads of cash with them—something the thugs noticed very quickly. Senegalese complained of the “Hamza boys” who roamed Tripoli’s streets, heavily armed with AK-47s and other weaponry. Others complained of police raids, particularly on compounds comprised of adjoining homes in various African enclaves throughout the capital. Money you were chary of carrying on your person you might try to hide in the compound. But, of course, others knew that too.
The threat of violence and robbery was so constant by March 2015 that Senegalese migrants were faced with a choice: attempt a jump to Europe or head home. We located almost 500 Senegalese in one of the government’s “official” detention centers who were eager to return home. Senegalese diplomats in Tunis worked with IOM staffers to verify that all seeking return were truly citizens of Senegal, and that all were doing so voluntarily. Since none had travel documents, IOM needed Senegalese diplomats to provide new ones.
There were other obstacles. For one, our preferred method of return would have been by airplane. But no charter company we talked to could be bonded to land in Tripoli, because no aircraft insurer was willing to underwrite even a temporary insurance policy for aircraft in or over the country. We could fly out of southern Tunisia, however, so in early 2015 we began a series of weekly bus shuttles out of Tripoli with about 230 passengers each: detention center to the Libya-Tunisia border, then up to Djerba, Tunisia, where our charter would take them to Dakar, Senegal.
On our second charter that spring, an IOM team raced down to the border crossing to greet several buses due by mid-morning. Instead they waited until almost midnight for the buses to arrive. We learned earlier that day that, after preparing some 200 men for their trip home, our team in Tripoli was told that the single official in charge of releasing men from the migrant detention center could not be found. No one else had authorization to release the men to IOM, and no one knew when this particular officer would surface to do his job.
Turns out the answer was “never”; he had been killed that morning, reportedly in a traffic accident on his way to the lock-up. It took many more hours before the buses rolled toward Tunisia, and still more time before our charter left Djerba en route to Dakar. One of IOM’s press officers, Joel Millman, accompanied the flight to Senegal. He reported back on who the passengers were, where they came from, and what their hopes had been when leaving Senegal months (and in some cases, years) before:
[T]he clear majority of these men come from the Casamance region of eastern Senegal, a remote area on the edge of the Sahel, the ‘shoreline’ that begins the vast Sahara Desert. Remarkably, when I asked for a show of hands, only two passengers on our flight had ever been to Dakar, Senegal’s capital, or anywhere else along the country’s Atlantic seacoast—although some had already been to Europe a few times, and others had worked in other African capitals. A second show of hands—for who had ever before been on an airplane—got a slightly bigger response, perhaps a dozen or so. The most common destination for these migrants had been Equatorial Guinea, like Libya, another petro-economy where work was abundant for Africans willing to travel long distances to get there.
Millman further reported that most of the men on the journey (and they were all men) were well educated, including many who had completed university. Virtually all could read and write and speak multiple languages—French, English, Arabic, and several of Senegal’s ethnic languages. Virtually all crossed the Sahara in months’ long journeys to Libya. Many said they had personally seen fellow migrants perish, either from dehydration, exhaustion, or, more commonly, road accidents. Few would renounce the notion of migrating again. Many had families with small businesses; others owned farms. Migration, they explained, was a way to accumulate the capital needed to seize the opportunities their education had prepared them for, but that their country could not yet provide them. None of them wanted to risk their lives, but no one knew of a better way to bridge this personal resources “gap.”
In other words, these migrants were not the poorest of the poor in their home country, nor were they the least well educated. They were, on balance, educated, ambitious, and capable of both long-term planning and sacrifice on behalf of their families. They were also computer literate, displaying a notable situational awareness of opportunities around the globe. In this the Senegalese contingent in Libya was little if any different from others IOM encountered—and little different, it is worth emphasizing, from the dominant pattern of economically motivated migration to America at the end of the 19th century.
As of about a month ago, the number of voluntary returnees from Libya assisted by IOM topped 32,000, who have returned home to 32 different countries. We now not only fly daily from Tripoli; we’ve also added flights from Benghazi and Zirtan. Of course, the migration emergency on the Mediterranean has not ended, but it is being managed. This year, for example—for the first time in four years—sea arrivals to Europe are on track to fall below 110,000 combined to Italy, Greece, and Spain. In 2015 the number was more than a million.
Circular Migration
For all the complexity of ground-level migration policy management, I’ve learned over ten years running the IOM that economically motivated migration itself is quite simple. In essence, the world wants two main things from most migrants—two halves of a single coin of human endeavor.
If you ask most people what these two things are, they’ll give you an answer like “stay out of trouble,” “learn the language,” or “pay taxes.” All true, but none of them is the first thing asked of migrants, which is to “show up”: Get here and do the job we need you to do.
Nowadays such a flat statement often elicits howls of protest: “No, that’s not what we want! We want them to stay away from us.” But the truth is that not a single country in Western Europe hasn’t spent some of the past 80 years relying on foreign labor to harvest and process the output of its agriculture sector. And in the United States and Canada there is barely a state or province that hasn’t relied on just-in-time farm labor for the past 60 years.
Countless other industries all over the world are in the same position: hospitality, health care, property maintenance, waste recycling, elder care. The list goes on and on. Increasingly, too, even some essential government jobs—in the military, public education, among the technicians who operate complex information or transportation hubs—today require regular infusions of foreign talent. And we’ve not even mentioned the “glamour” sector: actors, athletes, scholars—all of whom are encouraged to ply their trades globally for the benefit they bring to publics wherever they land.
Nor is it solely the rich, “developed” nations that seek skilled and even unskilled labor from beyond their borders. More and more “developing” countries are experiencing labor and skill shortages. If they are not overtly tailoring immigration regulations to accommodate these arrivals, they are often quietly tolerating them because they realize how much their societies need them. For example, Mexican farmers now rely on foreign workers, mostly from nearby Central America, just as Chile, Brazil, and Argentina draw ever more labor from the neighborhood, including Venezuela, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. Hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asians toil in the Middle East, and not just in the petro-emirates. Jordan has a growing population of Filipinos and Bangladeshis, two nationalities that, even now, continue to travel for work to two of the region’s most dangerous locations: Syria and Libya.
So the first thing the world wants from migrants is not for them to “stay home” but to “show up.” But there’s no mistaking the second thing the world wants from migrants: “Finish the job. Then go home.” This is what we mean when we speak of “circular migration.”
Circular migration is as old as humankind, if you count among their ranks the hunters and gatherers, who “migrated” with the seasons in search of game or to harvest wild fruits and grains. While business school professors may prefer fancy phrases like “just-in-time labor” for “a global supply chain,” migrants today are doing what they have always done: foraging the global landscape for a chance at a better life. Think of the thousands of Dutch, German, and Italian workers who crossed for centuries back and forth across Europe to dig a latticework of navigable canals and waterways; or the thousands of South Asian workers today building the football stadiums and skyscrapers of the petro-emirates. These enduring patterns are now enjoying a grand revival partly because it’s now quicker and cheaper than ever to get around.
Whether it’s just for a single, seasonal harvest or to find employment in a massive, decades-long construction project, a supply of imported labor always responds to someone’s demand for sweat and grit. For some, such labor may last a lifetime: soldiers signing on for years to join foreign armies, or seafarers undertaking lifelong journeys at the behest of another country’s enterprise.
It’s easy to forget how fluid this circular migration was historically, and how self-correcting it is during lean times and fat ones. And we forget how easily countries have resorted to welcoming outsiders whenever shortfalls of manpower surfaced. We forget, too, how well those workers responded when it was time for them to leave. Take just one example from the 1970s.
As Tony Judt described in Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, when a recession hit Europe following the sharp run-up of world oil prices, German industry almost immediately shed its foreign “guest workers”—at least a half a million—as soon as they were shown the door. “In 1975,” Judt wrote, “290,000 immigrant workers and their families left West Germany for Turkey, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Italy. In that same year, 200,000 Spaniards returned to Spain . . . returnees to Italy now outnumbered emigrants for the first time in modern memory, as they were shortly to do in Greece and Portugal.”
Of course, we know what happened: The recession passed and many of those workers came back. Judt pointed out that, “if published unemployment rates in West Germany (close to zero in 1970) did not climb above 8 percent of the labor force despite a slump in demand for manufactured goods, it was because most of the unemployed workers in Germany were not German—and thus not officially recorded.” A 1977 government study Judt referred to put the matter succinctly: “Germany is not an immigrant country. Germany is a place of residence for foreigners who will eventually return home voluntarily.”
Nor do we stop often enough to reflect on the great global “sorting” that is now taking place across frontiers and labor markets. During my ten years in Geneva, I was struck by how seamlessly outsiders had slipped into the Swiss mainstream, no matter whether they had been born in Africa, Asia, or Latin America.
We know that Switzerland, with about 27 percent of its residents born abroad, trails only Luxembourg as the European state with the highest proportion of its inhabitants born beyond its borders. Of course, about half of those come from neighboring Germany, Austria, France, and Italy—countries whose languages and customs already thrive in Switzerland. Nonetheless, the other half of that far-flung group comes from much further abroad.
An IOM colleague told me of a recent flight home from Madrid that was packed with Ecuadorans bound for Lausanne, a city close to Geneva with a large Latin American colony. It is one of five Swiss cities where Ecuador keeps a diplomatic mission (the others are Berne, Basel, Geneva, and Zurich). Many were returning from summer holidays as the start of the Swiss school year was just days away. My colleague was struck by how many of the students were Swiss-born, but almost all their parents were born in South America. One of them explained to my colleague, “We all got here through Spain,” referring to a longstanding labor agreement between Quito and Madrid that lasted until 2003, which allowed any Ecuadorian seeking a job in Spain to come without prior authorization. While the scheme worked for labor-hungry Spain, it also worked for Ecuadorians, and especially their children, who quickly acquired status as EU citizens allowed to work in almost any of the many cities across the Schengen Zone.
This has triggered a “euro rush” of labor migrants from Latin America, as a new generation of Spanish and Portuguese-speakers replace the aging Iberians who began arriving in Switzerland (and France, Germany, and Scandinavia) after World War II. Just as Brazilians have carved out a niche with their suburban home cleaners across the United States, many do the same work now across Ireland and Switzerland, two places where it’s easy to start a business out of one’s home, especially if it involves soliciting gigs cleaning someone else’s home.
We see a different kind of sorting in jobs requiring higher skills, too. Caribbean states, especially former British colonies, dominate the healthcare sector of richer English-speaking societies such as the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. Meanwhile, in the Caribbean many of these doctors, nurses, lab technicians, and other hospital aides are being replaced by other English-speaking healthcare workers from Africa. Most making this new Atlantic passage from Africa to the Caribbean come from Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, whose medical diaspora has been extending across the globe for decades. In Nigeria itself, the labor of this diaspora is being replaced by others schooled in English—notably Ghanaians, Zimbabweans, Kenyans, and Liberians.
For all these medical markets, circular migration is popular with patients and governments alike. It basically allows supply and demand to level out according to varying skill sets and salary expectations. It’s non-controversial, and Americans hear little about it because, for the most part, these laborers are free to come and go as they wish—as long as U.S. territory is not involved.
Breaking the Circle
Circular migration of various kinds was the norm across the planet for centuries before the world faced a migration “crisis.” What used to work reasonably well most of the time somehow no longer does, at least much of the time. What happened?
Despite the general desirability of circular migration, many wealthier countries now treat the safety, prosperity, and transparency enjoyed by their citizens as a limited resource that will be depleted if too many outsiders arrive in search of a share. Our way of life, in this view, has become a kind of collective “luxury good” that is depleted when a foreigner comes to toil in a high-performing economy, or to walk safe streets, or to enjoy a legal system that protects entrepreneurs trying to launch businesses.
We need not discuss here where this philosophy comes from, or the electoral appeal of politicians who promise to keep outsiders off our lawns. But the question is this: If we know what we want from migration, do we believe the systems now in place are providing the results we desire? Just about everyone would answer “no.”
But fewer, perhaps, understand the real reason why our system isn’t giving us what we want: Namely, the harder you make it for migrants to come, the harder you make it for them to leave. Circular migration suffers when workers can’t circulate. We now make it so hard for a Filipino woman to travel to a rich country to work as a nurse (or a nanny, or cruise ship attendant), that the lucky few who succeed usually do so only after paying exorbitant fees to labor brokers, so then they have to stay abroad even longer than they planned, both to pay off their travel debts and to earn a reasonable payoff for their efforts.
And those are legal guest workers. It’s even tougher for those inside national borders without legal residency status. In the United States we now make it so hard for a Central American to travel to Florida to pick produce or clean bathrooms that those “lucky” few who survive kidnappings, beatings, dangerous train rides, and extortion from their “guides” can scarcely contemplate making another trip. So they stay, growing the “underground” population that is now much larger than the one that alarmed us 32 years ago, the last time Congress tackled immigration reform, giving us more and more border “security” even as we grew less and less satisfied with the results.
In short, tightening restrictions on importing labor on the front end has almost ended what used to be a rather robust migration return flow.
Let’s consider what used to be mainly a seasonal workforce, but which increasingly appears to be a permanent (mostly) Latino population, at the lower-end of the skill chain. This segment, according to a recent Yale-MIT study, has grown from about three million undocumented foreign-born workers in 1986 to perhaps as many as 22 million today. Moreover, these migrants are now more dispersed around the country than was the case three or four decades ago, helping to spread anti-immigrant sentiment throughout American politics.
One question both so-called “restrictionists” as well as “open borders” advocates each must address is this: Is it even logical to consider “circular” migration for this population, when the rewards of coming and staying are greater now than ever before? On that, in many ways the jury is still out. Here differences between countries, and remedies designed to soften those differences, are instructive.
The 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), for example, largely was sold on the promise that modernizing Mexico’s economy via free trade would depress Mexicans’ urge to migrate. For NAFTA’s first 15 years, there was little evidence that was happening. True, NAFTA raised wages in Mexico. But that also meant raising Mexicans’ expectations, and giving many the means to migrate that they may have lacked before. NAFTA also increased cross-border recruitment for certain types of skills, particularly in agriculture. Like many aspects of globalism, there were unintended consequences, not the least of which was the tendency to put farmworkers within easy grasp of other low-end jobs—in restaurant kitchens, on construction sites, in suburban homes as cleaners or babysitters—all of which breeds skepticism that any scheme to aid Latin America by spurring job creation south of the border will have the added benefit of slowing migration.
As it happens, migration from Mexico has slowed dramatically, starting in 2015, just around the time many demographers predicted it would. Smaller family size in Mexico has been the primary reason for such a downturn, so that, even if NAFTA didn’t produce the job numbers promised by its boosters, so many fewer Mexicans than expected are now entering the workforce these days that a certain equilibrium has been found.
Nonetheless, millions more additional Latino job-seekers are rising (from Central America, Venezuela, Brazil, the Caribbean) and they, too, are discovering the relentless lure of an economy that provides better rewards for staying in the United States rather than “circulating” home every year. Circular migration is indeed an asset that works for many industries, but we can’t rely solely on a going-home strategy. We must also plan strategically for ways to integrate an evolving workforce.
What can we do to get circular migration back on track?
First, we need to determine where in the world patterns of migration have hardened into enduring, successful, market-based solutions that match opportunity with the labor at hand. We must also concede, finally, that in today’s world “at hand” means the right worker will often travel half-way across the globe if he or she is the best fit for the job.
Some governments today spend a fortune trying to “crack down” on migrants who fail to acquire the proper documentation to work. Many of these enforcement efforts are ineffective, if not comic. An all-too-typical example would be raids on U.S. chicken-processing plants that have to shut down entirely (and often only temporarily) after the existing workforce is chased underground.
Some of these crackdowns are more tragic. For the past few years, some oil-producing countries have been evicting migrants from the Horn of Africa, many back to places such as Ethiopia and Somalia, where a severe drought has produced dismal job prospects. Many of these Africans do jobs that locals won’t do: cleaning toilets, sweeping streets, washing cars. The tragedy comes when these former employees try to sneak back to their old jobs. Some die walking across Red Sea beaches, where smugglers wait to take them back to the Middle East. Some die on the voyage. Many more die by violence, especially those trying to cross back to their former jobs through war-torn Yemen.
Embracing circular migration would not only relieve the dangers many migrants face; it would work for both sending and receiving countries. And make no mistake: We now have the ability to analyze the job-sorting that is happening all around us, making the matching process between jobs and job-seekers both more efficient and safer than before.
Mass Irregular Migration
A far more urgent issue and opportunity than “circular migration” has emerged in the form of large-scale irregular migration. Unlike circular migration, irregular migration is not nearly as often the result of planning by ambitious and well-educated migrants. Rather, these are people who are either desperate or on the edge of desperation. Their psychological profile is more like that of a refugee than an economic migrant.
The phenomenon of irregular migration is already a major part of the “mega-trend” of our time. It is driven by factors such as: the demographic divide between an ageing Global North, with a negative replacement rate and declining population, and a youthful, largely unemployed Global South, with a high birth rate and burgeoning population; humanitarian disasters brought on by an unprecedented number of protracted armed conflicts from the western bulge of Africa to Southeast Asia; and the migratory effects of climate change and environmental degradation, which will increasingly come into play as major drivers of irregular or forced migration.1 Still other drivers include sudden and unpredictable economic collapse in failed states and major natural disasters having nothing to do with climate change. Over time, these drivers of irregular migration are such that many, perhaps most, societies on earth are destined to become increasingly multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and multi-lingual.
Many governments’ migration policies have not kept up with these changing realities. Indeed, in several cases policies have turned inward, reflecting a widening degree of anti-migrant sentiment throughout much of the world. The effects are proving catastrophic in at least two senses: first, by endangering the lives of human beings who will be on the move because they sense little or no choice; and, second, by denying these very governments, societies, and economies the contributions that migrants, historically, have always made.
Migrant integration is thus perhaps the largest challenge we will face in the years ahead—a policy imperative that must be accomplished in an increasingly toxic environment of hostility toward the “other.” Educating and preparing the citizenry for the inevitable will be highly sensitive politically. This is not the sort of issue that wins elections, so political courage will be required. Nonetheless, IOM has demonstrated that the right programs, managed properly, can erode political resistance to doing what is both necessary and right.
One pilot program from my time at IOM links migrant women from Myanmar with elder-care centers in Thailand. Thailand has one of the fastest-ageing societies in the world: The proportion of people aged 65 years and above is projected to increase from 7.5 million to 17 million between 2016 and 2040—more than a quarter of the population. This demographic shift will happen against the background of an 11 percent decline in the working-age population, the fastest contraction in the region.
Migrant workers are projected to fill the labor gap, particularly as caregivers for elder family members in Thai households. In anticipation of this, IOM partnered with HomeNet Thailand and the National Catholic Commission on Migration to provide, beginning in 2017, elderly caregiving skills-training for female migrants. The first class for an 80-hour training program was conducted by a Thai academy specializing in child and elderly care. The first matriculants were 32 migrant domestic workers from Myanmar who were taught how to meet the daily needs of the elderly and how to provide basic medical training such as first aid, chronic disease management, and nasogastric intubation (feeding someone through a tube)—not glamorous work, but essential.
We all want to win, but to do so we must understand the field we’re playing on, match our players to the best opportunities, and then recognize which roles we need to import players to fill.
In the end each society will do these things in their own way. Europe, now in its eighth decade of importing massive numbers of low-skilled laborers to clean their streets and cook their meals, is not going suddenly to decide to “protect” those jobs for locals who, in any case, are not eager to do them. On the other hand, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia appear unlikely to replace their legions of Egyptian, Yemeni, Sudanese, and Syrian guest workers with their own citizens. If anything, they’re primed to look even further afield for workers—to Indonesia, Cambodia, or Sri Lanka. Some Gulf countries are even starting to replace highly skilled imports from the region, like teachers and surgeons, with non-Arabic speaking employees. One remarkable example: The Hamad Medical Corporation of Qatar today employees 450 Cuban doctors, nurses, and medical technicians in the town of Dukhan, west of Doha. Last year it served nearly 80,000 patients—up from about 18,000 the year its facility opened in 2012. The clinic’s official name is The Cuban Hospital.
One place where we can look to see the future is in sports. Professional athletes tend nowadays to toil in a globalized industry that not only is popular across class lines, but often functions as the social “glue” that replaces one form of tribalism—ethnic competition—with the usually more benign form of fandom. Most countries would no sooner restrict entry of talented soccer players than they would talented scientists. But it goes much further: All over the world states are tweaking laws to attract athletes, whether Europeans looking to former colonies to strengthen their World Cup squads or Gulf emirates naturalizing other countries’ former Olympians in search of gold medals.
In many countries this has become routine. Consider the 2007 U.S. legislation called the Creating Opportunities for Minor League Professionals, Entertainers, and Teams Act, known as the “Compete” Act.
Before this law, only top performers—reliable stars who already had competed their way onto Major League rosters—would garner the coveted “green cards” needed to work in the United States. Foreign-born minor leaguers mostly had to learn their craft offshore, or else be among the anointed few already deemed destined for Big League success to get one of their teams’ precious passes. For U.S.-born players, this was a form of job protection. Typically, MLB teams incubate hundreds of players in the minor leagues and consider themselves successful if even a handful of those prospects graduate to the game’s top level. Wages for those young professionals are substantial, mainly because professional clubs have competition: university teams, who can offer scholarships annually worth tens of thousands of dollars to players they seek to recruit. Organizations had to commit millions of dollars each year to minor leaguers just to fill rosters to develop their prospects.
But with the Compete Act, the economics changed: Instead of having minor league teams with practically no imported players, farm systems could stockpile foreigners, doling out an unlimited number of green cards without having to worry that their few big bets might not pay off. One beneficiary of the legislation was a Chicago Cubs farmhand, the shortstop Hak-ju Lee.
Lee spent parts of six summers in the United States playing minor league baseball after the Compete Act lifted the quota on the number of work visas professional sports teams were able to dole out to their star performers. In the end Hak-ju Lee never made it to the Show. He was traded to the Tampa Bay Rays and came within spitting distance of baseball’s top-tier when an injury ended his career. He didn’t make it to his ultimate goal, but he didn’t leave the game empty-handed either, earning more than a million dollars over the course of his short professional career in the United States. During that eight-year span, Lee was one of about 5,000 imported players shuffled on and off professional rosters.
It could be argued that about half of those 5,000 “displaced” Americans from the game. But no one in the United States makes that argument, any more than British fans claim that a Jamaican sprinter in the Olympics displaces a UK athlete, or that a Bulgarian weightlifter bumps a Bahraini. In part that’s because we recognize the specialization involved in something as challenging as athletics, and in part it’s because we prize merit over all else as an aesthetic matter. But of course it’s also because we like to win.
So here is an embarrassing question: If ordinary people can set aside their ethnic and racial sensitivities in professional sports, all in the name of the sheer art of performance, why do people seem to have a hard time doing the same when it comes to the art of living, working, and taking care of one’s family?
The current U.S. immigration system is not giving us the results we want. We can do a much better job of dealing with circular immigration, and if we do that then the more difficult challenge of dealing with mass irregular migration will become somewhat easier politically. Happily, few American, even today, oppose the nation lifting its lamp beside the golden door for genuine refugees fleeing persecution and oppression. Those opponents’ numbers will grow fewer still if we can rationalize our approach to the “large-number” challenges.
Neither the United States nor any other government need embrace utopian visions of “open borders” in order to vastly improve our legal immigration systems. It is still the case that most migrants simply want to succeed by their own lights and then return home to their families. We can help them, and help ourselves, if we’re willing and wise.
1For example, at least one Pacific island nation, Kiribati, is already purchasing property in a neighboring island state so it will have a place to relocate its people when the sea rises high enough to force inhabitants to flee.