Migration of the desperate: reconciling compassion with no political order

Tom Farer, Dean, Josef Korbel School of International Studies at University of Denver

It is a sunny day in the spring of 2022.  Liberated from the restraint and anxiety of Covid-19, you are taking a meditative stroll along the shore of a pond near your home when you see a child thrashing desperately in the water and hear her screams. You are not a saint, never imagined yourself a hero, are moderately conservative in your views, satisfied with the status quo and the comfortable life it has yielded to you and your family.  But because, like most of us, whether pious or secular, you are hard wired with some sense of moral obligation, you will wade into the water and lift that child in your arms and carry her safely ashore. 

The millions, soon the tens of millions, struggling towards the borders of rich countries and dying by the hundreds and soon to be thousands in the attempt, people driven by the growing fury of hurricanes and typhoons and floods and the desiccation of hitherto fertile lands and the exhaustion of once surging rivers and the extinction of fish stocks, and by the brutality or failure of governments and by civil wars and pitiless gangs: Are they not that child? 

Some no doubt satisfy the formal criteria for refugee status for they are fleeing persecution by agents of notional governments.  Many others are simply fleeing corrupt or merely dysfunctional regimes; they are the collateral damage of failed when not willfully murderous states.  Since all are fleeing for their lives, whatever the technical legal distinctions among them, there is no moral one.

Confronted not with one but with millions of drowning fellow human beings, what should the citizens of rich states--the sort of relatively decent, relatively moral people who could not let that single child drown--ask of their governments? Or, to reverse the order of interrogation, what should centrist-to-liberal governments, acting as stewards of the national interest, ask of their citizens?

First they should do exactly that: Ask.  By definition an authentic liberal democracy is one in which all issues deemed consequential by the electorate (other than those insulated from majority rule by bills of rights) are decided by that electorate’s votes.  Who and how many may enter and settle and on what conditions are among today’s most consequential issues.  So governing parties must seek electoral support for migration policies they believe will serve the interests of the country which in liberal democracies include acting in ways compatible with the belief undergirding liberal democratic government, namely belief in the moral value of all human beings.

Backing for a relatively generous migration policy cannot be secured simply by appealing only to the moral sentiments of the majority who, while decent people, are not saints.  It must be accompanied by an appeal to self-interest. Absent migration the fate of countries with aging and shrinking populations (which describes all of the rich countries of the West) is economic stagnation, intergenerational conflict, and increasingly shabby social support for everyone, above all those who have retired or been forced to retire from the work force. Japan, hitherto the rich democracy most resistant to migration, is the living, subtly decaying proof.  And the appeal to self-interest and Samaritan sentiments must be accompanied by detailed plans and the demonstrated will to control migration in accordance with electoral commitments.

I have elaborated such a plan in my recently published book “Migration and Integration: The Case for Liberalism with Borders.”  In essence it calls for the creation of off-shore asylum-claim assessment and migration-preparation centers in low-wage countries like Mexico (or in the case of Europe like Morocco or Ghana).  Rich-country youth doing national service would help run the centers, teaching Western languages and cultural norms in their schools and working on-line with immigration judges to gather information relevant to asylum claims.  As they developed, these centers could function as self-supporting communities if they were integrated with the aid of tax and regulatory incentives into rich-country supply chains previously concentrated in South and East Asia. 

Prospective migrants would not be limited to persons with asylum claims.  Pressure on the borders of rich countries will come as well from the tens of millions not facing death or utter destitution in poor countries but eager to enhance their life chances.  Sub-Saharan Africa alone will add a billion people to the earth’s surface over the next 30 years; North Africa and the Middle East will add about 300 million. Those bare numbers will include men and women of unusual talent and unbounded energy, their potential flattened by dysfunctional governments and legacy social practices rich countries cannot repair. 

A wise migration policy will open a door for some number of those seeking not asylum but simply a more fulfilling life.  The means I propose integrate a lottery with a point system, a system that allows people to accumulate points by acquiring skills necessary for incorporation in the economies of rich countries and by finding through social media and the extraordinary cyber-world of games mentors and friends within the electorates of the West.  A lottery and a point system offer hope of legitimate entry.  Well-policed borders together with expeditious deportation of the recently-arrived undocumented and exclusion from participation in future lotteries of those attempting to jump the queue are necessary means for controlling borders without lethal violence.

My book elaborates these policy ideas after examining the migration experiences of the Nordic Countries, the UK and France.  I intended it as the beginning of a conversation.  Anyone who wants to continue it can find me at tfarer@du.edu.  Anyone who is curious about the personal experiences that have shaped my views can find them at “tomjfarer.com.

Certainly there will be many children among them, children our agents have ripped from their parents’ arms, locked in cages, or driven back into Mexico where, if they have any right at all, it is to sleep in a shack or a shanty or on the bare ground and try to remain alive while waiting to file a claim that they are at risk of dying should they be driven back to the place from which they began their terrible journey north.  Of course it is not only children pleading for rescue.    

The numbers are relentless. In 1950 about 93 million people were living in the Middle East and North Africa.  Today there are 380 million and that number is projected to be 680 million by 2050. Africa south of the Sahara is growing faster.  It will add at least a billion people to the earth’s population within 30 years.  Land and jobs will be available for a small fraction.  By the World Bank’s conservative estimate climate change alone will displace 140 million people over the next 30 years.

Of course not all or perhaps not even a majority will be driven from the lands of their birth.  More will simply seek a far better chance to shape a fulfilling life.  The roulette of birth is as remorseless today as it was in the Middle Ages.  The only difference is that then your fate was a function of the class into which you were born; today it is the geography of birth that determines how stunted will be your life chances.  Among those born in poor countries will be scientists like the ethnic Turkish husband and wife in Germany who developed the vaccine Pfizer is producing.