Migrant misery from Europe to the US

It’s an increasingly hard world for those seeking a better life in richer countries. Immigrants aren’t welcome in most states, even where demographic trends reflect the need to expand the labor force to levels able to sustain and support aging populations.

While both Europe and the United States will have to face the need for younger workers in the coming decades, citizens in the wealthy nations, no matter what their ethnic backgrounds, dislike mass immigration and punish politicians who allow it.

In Europe especially, immigration is the main driving force for nationalism, for the rise of populist parties and for the decline of the center left. There are exceptions like Spain and Ireland, Scotland.
But the movement remains towards exclusion.

In Germany, Europe’s leading economy and most powerful nation, Chancellor Angela Merkel differs sharply with her Interior Minister, Horst Seehofer, on the latter’s call to block migrants already registered in another EU country from entering Germany. Merkel hopes to find an EU-wide agreement at the June 28-29 EU summit.

Merkel’s closest EU ally, France’s President Emmanuel Macron, has himself hardened his stance on migrants, telling Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte that those requesting asylum should be handled by centers established outside of Europe.

Macron framed it in humanitarian language, saying that it’s not right for those with no chance of getting asylum in Europe to die in the Mediterranean or live in “unworthy” conditions, but his proposal would mean that France follows Italy in banning entry to migrant ships.

This toughening stance begins to move the Western European EU members closer to the Central Europeans – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia – all of which have refused to take the quota of migrants decided for them by the EU. In a powerful essay, Branko Milanovic, a former economist at the World Bank, argues that for these states, liberated from communism and control by the Soviet Union (and before Moscow, from the Austro-Hungarian empire), are deeply opposed to a migration which would dilute their ethnic homogeneity and new-found national freedom.

US President Donald Trump is one who sees migrants all but wholly through the prism of “threat.” He is unremittingly harsh, using terms like “infest” and “animals” in his references to those trying to enter the United States without documentation.

The pressure of the poor on the rich world is one of the sorriest sights of the past few years. The pressure will not go away; neither will the resistance to it. Africa and the Middle East, especially its war zones, will continue to pour forth tired, poor and huddled masses, and they will continue to be pushed back. Leaders, liberal and conservative, will have little choice but to join the push-back party if they wish to remain in office.

These leaders must now get smarter – rather than more reactionary. The poverty and conflict that increasingly divides the world must be addressed more comprehensively than it has been so far. The effects of its misery can no longer be confined within poorer borders: it more and more becomes the rich world’s emergency too.

By: John Lloyd