According to the
latest data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR),
68.5 million people were on the run at the end of 2017 - around three million
more than in the previous year and more than at any time since the end of the
Second World War. Overall, the countries in the global South bear the main
burden of receiving refugees: 85 percent of all refugees registered by UNHCR
worldwide have found refuge in developing regions.
Africa's future
migration potential is of particular concern to politicians. The first worry is
of demographic nature as the decline in birth rates is painfully slow south of
the Sahara. According to UN projections, Africa's population will double to 2.5
billion by 2050. Although medical progress and the expansion of health systems
are increasing life expectancy, the standard of living has remained low, not
least because of high birth rates.
The second worry are, despite improvements, much of Africa´s economic perspectives: Low training
and labour market opportunities for a young growing population feed migration.
According
to the IMF, 85 percent of African migrants are economically motivated.
The proportion
of African migrants who actually leave their continent has increased from a
quarter to a third in the last quarter of a century, to six million today.
Population growth and the increasing proportion of intra-African migrants
suggest that their number will rise to 20 million in the coming decades. Most
of these Africans nowadays want to migrate to Western Europe. Sure, actual
migration to Europe has declined since the peak in 2015/16. This is due to
Frontex, border closures, drowning and enslavement of migrants - but it says little about Africa´s future migration
potential.
According to Dani
Rodrik's globalization trilemma, democracy, national sovereignty and global
economic integration are mutually incompatible: combine any two of the three,
but never have all three simultaneously and in full. Politics can only choose
two of three options: full global market liberalization (hyper globalization),
national sovereignty or democracy. If it accepts unrestricted globalisation,
politics must abandon its own course. A good example is the gold standard
prevailing until the beginning of the 20th century, to which an independent
monetary policy had to be sacrificed. Alternatively, autocratic or technocratic
governments could decree that full market liberalization or the globally
harmonized rules negotiated by the government must be accepted by all. Finally,
a fairly unrealistic alternative would be a world government: democracy and the
global market would be maintained, national sovereignty renounced. An
international government and a global parliament would correct the mistakes of
globalisation.
Analogous to Rodrik's
Trilemma, Europe looks increasingly confronted with a migration trilemma. Only
two out of three options can be achieved at the same time: mass immigration, a
self-determined social contract or democracy with respect for human rights. In
his much maligned book Exodus: How
Migration is Changing Our World, Paul Collier discusses a limit beyond
which immigration could be harmful to a society's complex social model due to alienation
and erosion of public trust. In his long essay After Europe,
Ivan Krastev argues how massive immigration promotes
populist parties and threatens the future of the entire European project. In
her 1943 essay We
Refugees, Hannah Arendt had already pointed to the dilemma between mass
refuge and respect for human rights. Allowing massive refuge means respecting
human rights but, according to Arendt, losing national sovereignty, i.e.
self-determination.
These trade-offs
of the migration trilemma certainly lack rigour. But they cannot be denied. It
is possible to promote immigration and become a melting pot, just as in the
past in Argentina, Australia, Brazil and North America, all sparsely populated
areas before settlement. The multicultural melting-pot perspective is quite
tempting and shows its appeal not only in France's soccer team. The settlement
strategy requires immigrants to identify with the host country and to feel that
they belong to their new country. Historically,
inclusion of immigrants has worked best with the help of compulsory military
service, the right to vote and, above all, patriotic education and training.
However, the urban ghettos of, say, Brazil, France or the United States also
testify to blatant integration deficits that are intolerable for socially
homogeneous societies.
From an ethical
point of view, the global governance of migration would be a possible way out
of the migration trilemma. This route remains unrealistic as national
jurisdiction on migration would have to be subjugated in a legally binding
manner. The recently adopted draft 2018 global migration compact - signed by
all UN member states except the USA – has so far not passed that legal
threshold and remains a legally non-binding document laying down principles for
dealing with migrants and refugees.
Thus, akin to national
capital controls under the Bretton Woods compromise in Rodrik's globalization
trilemma, a realistic option remains the control of migration flows through
national immigration laws that legalize a selection of admitted immigrants. As suggested
by former Mexico-US border evidence, regular migration (if paired with ´robust
enforcement´) can reduce the inflow of clandestine migrants. To be sure, the offset between legal and illegal immigrants is one only if all migration is regularized. Migration laws can attenuate the trilemma presented here; they cannot solve it.
*Originally published in German: https://makronom.de/europa-im-migrationstrilemma-27303
