Immigration Totally Explained

Immigration is the movement of people from one place to another. While human migration has existed throughout human history, immigration implies long-term permanent residence (and often eventual citizenship) by the immigrants: tourists and short-term visitors are not considered immigrants (see expatriates). However, seasonal labour migration (typically for periods of less than a year) is often treated as a form of immigration. The global volume of immigration is high in absolute terms, but low in relative terms. The International Intergration and Refugee Association estimated 190 million international migrants in 2005, about 3 percent of global population. The other 97 percent still live in the state in which they were born, or its successor state. The Middle East, some parts of Europe, little areas of South East Asia, and a few spots in the West Indies have the highest numbers of immigration population recorded by the UN Census 2005. The modern idea of immigration is related to the development of nation-states and nationality law. Citizenship of a nation-state confers an inalienable right of residence in that state, but residence of immigrants is subject to conditions set by immigration law. The nation-state made immigration a political issue: by definition it's the homeland of a nation defined by shared ethnicity and/or culture, and in most cases immigrants have a different ethnicity and culture. This has led to social tensions, xenophobia, and conflicts about national identity, in many developed countries. Illegal immigration refers to immigration across national borders in a way that violates the immigration laws of the destination country. Under this definition, an illegal immigrant is a foreigner who either illegally crossed an international political border, be it by land, sea or air, or a foreigner who legally entered a country but nevertheless overstay their visa in order to live and/or work therein.

Global statistics

According to the Report of the Secretary-General on International migration and development, most migrants are in the high-income developed countries, 91 million in 2005. Low and lower-middle income countries, 64 percent in Oman. In Europe, only Luxembourg approaches this level, with 45% of the labour force foreign.
   The European Union allows free migration between member states (with some restrictions on the so-called New Member States, or those which joined in 2004 and 2007). Most is from former eastern bloc states to the developed western European states, especially Italy, Spain, Germany and Britain. Noticeably, some countries seemed to be favoured by these new EU member nationals than others. For example, there are large numbers of Poles who have moved to the UK, Ireland and Netherlands, while Romanians have chosen Italy and Spain. While France and Germany put in place controls to curb Eastern European migration, the UK (along with Ireland) didn't impose restrictions.
   Following Poland's entry into the EU in May 2004 it's estimated that by the start of 2007 375,000 Poles have registered to work in the UK, although the total Polish population in the UK is believed to be 750,000. Many Poles work in seasonal occupations and a large number is likely to move back and forth including between Ireland and other EU Western nations.
   According to Eurostat, Some EU member states are currently receiving large-scale immigration: for instance Spain, where the economy has created more than half of all the new jobs in the EU over the past five years. The EU, in 2005, had an overall net gain from international migration of +1.8 million people. This accounts for almost 85% of Europe’s total population growth in 2005.
   In 2004, total 140,033 people immigrated to France. Of them, 90,250 were from Africa and 13,710 from Europe. In 2005, immigration fell slightly to 135,890.
   In recent years, immigration has accounted for more than half of Norway's population growth. In 2006, Statistics Norway's (SSB) counted a record 45,800 immigrants arriving in Norway — 30% higher than 2005. At the beginning of 2007, there were 415,300 persons in Norway with an immigrant background (for example immigrants, or born of immigrant parents), comprising 8.3 per cent of the total population.
   In 2004 the number of people who became British citizens rose to a record 140,795 - a rise of 12% on the previous year. This number had risen dramatically since 2000. The overwhelming majority of new citizens come from Africa (32%) and Asia (40%), the largest three groups being people from Pakistan, India and Somalia. In 2005, an estimated 565,000 migrants arrived to live in the UK for at least a year, most of the migrants were people from Asia, the Indian sub-continent and Africa, while 380,000 people emigrated from the UK for a year or more, with Australia, Spain and France most popular destinations.
   British emigration towards Southern Europe is of special relevance. Citizens from the European Union make up a growing proportion of immigrants in Spain. They mainly come from countries like the UK and Germany, but the British case is of special interest due to its magnitude. The British authorities estimate that the real population of UK citizens living in Spain is much larger than Spanish official figures suggest, establishing them at about 1.000.000, about 800.000 being permanent residents. According to the Financial Times, Spain is the most favoured destination for West Europeans considering to move from their own country and seek jobs elsewhere in the EU.
   Since 2000, Spain has absorbed around 4 million immigrants, adding 10% to its population. Immigrant population now tops over 4.5 million. According to residence permit data for 2005, about 500,000 were Moroccan, another 500,000 were Ecuadorian, more than 200,000 were Romanian, and 260,000 were Colombian. In 2005 alone, a regularisation programme increased the legal immigrant population by 700,000 people.
   The overall level of immigration to Australia has grown substantially during the last decade. Net overseas migration increased from 30,000 in 1993 to 118,000 in 2003-04. The largest components of immigration are the skilled migration and family re-union programs. In recent years the mandatory detention of unauthorised arrivals by boat has generated great levels of controversy. During the 2004-05, total 123,424 people immigrated to Australia. Of them, 17,736 were from Africa, 54,804 from Asia, 21,131 from Oceania, 18,220 from United Kingdom, 1,506 from South America, and 2,369 from Eastern Europe. 131,000 people migrated to Australia in 2005-06 and migration target for 2006-07 was 144,000. New Zealand has relatively open immigration policies. 23% of the population was born overseas, mainly in Asia, Oceania, and UK, one of the highest rates in the world. In 2004-2005, a target of 45,000 immigrants was set by the New Zealand immigration Service and represented 1.5% of the total population. According to the 2001 census projections, by 2050 57% of all New Zealand children will have Maori or Pacific ancestry, while 68% will be non-European.
   After 2000, legal immigrants to the United States numbered approximately 1,000,000 per year. In 2006, 1.27 million immigrants were granted legal residence. Mexico has been the leading source of new U.S. residents for over two decades; and since 1998, China, India and the Philippines have been in the top four sending countries every year.
   In California, non-Hispanic whites slipped from 80% of the state's population in 1970 to 43% in 2006. By one account, the actual number of annual legal immigrants was estimated at 500,000 to 600,000 in 1989. This subsequently increased and is now well over 1 million annually, not including illegal migration or temporary work visas. Net illegal immigration also soared from about 130,000 per year in the 1970s to as high as 1,500,000 per year in 2006.
   Since World War II, more refugees have found homes in the U.S. than any other nation and more than 2 million refugees have arrived in the U.S. since 1980. Of the top ten countries accepting resettled refugees in 2006, the United States accepted more than twice as much as the next nine countries combined, although some smaller countries accept more refugees per capita.
   Twenty cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Chicago, Miami, Denver, Seattle and Portland, Maine, have adopted “sanctuary” ordinances banning police from asking people about their immigration status. If current birth and immigration rates were to remain unchanged for another 60 to 70 years, US population would double to some 600 million people. The actual number of admitted refugees rose in subsequent years with refugee ceiling for 2006 at 70,000. A May 25, 2007 article notes that in the past seven months only 69 people from Iraq have been granted refugee status in the United States.
   As explained by Immigration Solutions Group in Washington DC, in contrast to a "point-system" used by Canada and many other countries, the United States utilizes "preference categories" with an emphasis on a system that satisfies the specific needs of the market economy by providing employers with appropriately qualified employees that are not otherwise available in the current market. Under this system, the United States accepts 140,000 employment-based permanent residents per year with extraordinary ability persons and mulinational executives receiving first preference, exceptional ability and advanced degree holders second, follow by bachelor degree holders and other workers with sponsors third, and so on. Additionally, the United States accepts more than double that number based on family immigration.

Causes

Theories of immigration traditionally distinguish between push factors and pull factors. Push factors refer primarily to the motive for emigration from the country of origin. In the case of economic migration (usually labour migration), differentials in wage rates are prominent. Poor individuals from less developed countries can have far higher standards of living in developed countries than in their originating countries. Escape from poverty (personal or for relatives staying behind) is a traditional push factor, the availability of jobs is the related pull factor. Natural disasters and overpopulation can amplify poverty-driven migration flows. This kind of migration may be illegal immigration in the destination country (emigration is also illegal in some countries, such as North Korea).
   Emigration and immigration are sometimes mandatory in a contract of employment: religious missionaries, and employees of transnational corporations, international non-governmental organisations and the diplomatic service can expect to work 'overseas'. They are often referred to as 'expatriates', and their conditions of employment are typically equal to or better than those applying in the host country (for similar work).
   For some migrants, education is the primary pull factor (although most international students are not classified as immigrants, but may choose to do so if they refuse to return). Retirement migration from rich countries to lower-cost countries with better climate, is a new type of international migration. An example is immigration of retired British citizens to Spain or Italy. Some, although relatively few, immigrants justify their drive to be in a different country for cultural or health related reasons and very seldom, again in relative quantitative terms compared to the actual number of international migrants world-wide, choose to migrate as a form of self-expression towards the establishment or to satisfy their need to directly perceive other cultural environments because economics is almost always the primary motivator for constant, long-term, or permanent migration, but especially for that type of inter-regional or inter-continental migration; that holds true even for people from developed countries.
   Non-economic push factors include persecution (religious and otherwise), frequent abuse, bullying, oppression, ethnic cleansing and even genocide, and risks to civilians during war. Political motives traditionally motivate refugee flows - to escape dictatorship for instance.
   Some migration is for personal reasons, based on a relationship (for example to be with family or a partner), such as in family reunification or transnational marriage. In a few cases, an individual may wish to emigrate to a new country in a form of transferred patriotism. Evasion of criminal justice (for example avoiding arrest) is a (mostly negative) personal motivation. This type of emigration and immigration isn't normally legal, if a crime is internationally recognized, although criminals may disguise their identities or find other loopholes to evade detection. There have been cases, for example, of those who might be guilty of war crimes disguising themselves as victims of war or conflict and then pursuing asylum in a different country.
   Barriers to immigration come not only in legal form; natural barriers to immigration can also be very powerful. Immigrants when leaving their country also leave everything familiar: their family, friends, support network, and culture. They also need to liquidate their assets often at a large cost, and incur the expense of moving. When they arrive in a new country this is often with many uncertainties including finding work, where to live, new laws, new cultural norms, language or accent issues, possible racism and other exclusionary behaviour towards them and their family. These barriers act to limit international migration: scenarios where populations move en masse to other continents, creating huge population surges, and their associated strain on infrastructure and services, ignore these inherent limits on migration.

Differing perspectives

Immigration is often highly politicized, and in some countries, a major political issue. Opposition to immigration is generally far more prominent than support for it, but that's to some extent countered by economic interests.

Supporting arguments

General arguments

The main arguments cited in support of immigration are economic arguments, such as a free labor market, and cultural arguments appealing to the value of cultural diversity. Some groups also support immigration as a device to boost small population numbers, like in New Zealand and Canada, or, like in Europe, to reverse demographic aging trends.
Support for fully open borders is limited to a minority. Some free-market libertarians believe that a free global labour market with no restrictions on immigration would, in the long run, boost global prosperity. There are also groups which oppose border controls on idealistic and humanitarian grounds - believing that people from poor countries should be allowed to enter rich countries, to benefit from their higher standards of living. Others are advocates of world government and wish to eliminate or severely limit the power of nation-states. This includes the nation-state's ability to grant and deny individuals entry across borders, which advocates of world government generally view as arbitrary and unfair distinctions made on what should be one planet earth.

Economic arguments

Countries like New Zealand, which has experimented with both qualifications- and job-offer-based entry systems, have reported that under the latter system (where much weight is put on the immigrant already having a job offer), the immigrants actually show a much lower uptake of government benefits than the normal population. Under a mostly qualification-based system, many highly trained doctors and engineers had instead been reduced to driving taxis. According to CDC, TB cases among foreign-born individuals remain disproportionately high, at nearly nine times the rate of U.S.-born persons. In 2003, nearly 26 percent of foreign-born TB patients in the United States were from Mexico. Another third of the foreign-born cases were among those from the Philippines, Vietnam, India and China, the CDC report said.

Economic arguments

Economic needs-driven immigration is opposed by labor-market protectionists, often arguing from economic nationalism. The core of their arguments is that a nation's jobs are the ‘property’ of that nation, and that allowing foreigners to take them is equivalent to a loss of that property. They may also criticise immigration of this type as a form of corporate welfare, where business is indirectly subsidised by government expenditure to promote the immigration and the assimilation of the immigrants. A more common criticism is that the immigrant employees are almost always paid less than a non-immigrant worker in the same job, and that the immigration depresses wages, especially as immigrants are usually not unionised. Other groups feel that the focus should be not on immigration control, but on equal rights for the immigrants, to avoid their exploitation.
Arguments against the cost of immigration - for instance the provision of schools for the additional population - are prominent in the United States and Canada, see Economic impact of immigration to Canada, although much current research has pointed to the fact that the U.S. and Canada are actually dependent on immigrant labor, see The Center for U.S. - Mexico Immigration Analysis.

Nationalistic arguments

Non-economic opposition to immigration is closely associated with nationalism, in Europe a ‘nationalist party’ is almost a synonym for ‘anti-immigration party’. Although traditionally, economic arguments dominated the United States immigration debate, it has become more polarized in recent years, as evidenced by nationalist demands to deploy the military to the US borders. The emergence of private border militias in the United States has attracted much media attention. Nevertheless, the southern border of the European Union in the Spanish exclaves of Ceuta and Melilla has at least as many military patrols as the US-Mexico border.
The primary argument of some nationalist opponents in Europe and Asia is that immigrants simply don't belong in a nation-state which is by definition intended for another ethnic group. France, therefore, is for the French, Germany is for the Germans, Japan is for the Japanese, and so on. Immigration is seen as altering the ethnic and cultural composition of the national population, and consequently the national character. From a nationalist perspective, high-volume immigration potentially distorts or dilutes their national culture. On the other hand, the immigrants who move into a country become citizens of that country. For example, an immigrant who moves into France becomes French. Furthermore, most countries are made up of immigrants. Japan is made up of people who came from China. According to the Out of Africa theory, Europeans immigrated from Africa.
One of the responses of nation-states to mass immigration is to promote the cultural assimilation of immigrants into the national community, and their integration into the political, social, and economic structures. In the United States, cultural assimilation is traditionally seen as a process taking place among minorities themselves, the ‘melting pot’. In Europe, where nation-states have a tradition of national unification by cultural and linguistic policies, variants of these policies have been proposed to accelerate the assimilation of immigrants. The introduction of citizenship tests for immigrants is the most visible form of state-promoted assimilation. The test usually include some form of language exam, and some countries have reintroduced forms of language prohibition.

Environmentalist arguments

Environmentalist opposition to immigration is prominent in the United States, which has the largest absolute numbers of immigrants. Responses to immigration are a controversial topic among environmental activists, especially within the Sierra Club. Some oppose the immigration-driven population growth in the United States as unsustainable, and advocate immigration reduction. Other environmentalists see overpopulation and environmental degradation as global problems, that should be addressed by other methods. Most European countries don't have the high population growth of the United States, and some experience population decline. In such circumstances, the effect of immigration is to reduce decline, or delay its onset, rather than substantially increase the population. The Republic of Ireland is one of the only EU countries comparable to the United States in this respect, since large-scale immigration contributed to substantial population growth. Spain has also witnessed a recent boost in population due to high immigration. Dale Allen Pfeiffer claims that to achieve a sustainable economy and avert disaster, the United States must reduce its population by at least one-third, and world population will have to be reduced by two-thirds. Current U.S. population of more than 300 million and world population exceeding 6.6 billion is, according to Pfeiffer, unsustainable. Fast-shrinking supplies of oil and gas are essential to modern agriculture, so coming decades could see spiraling food prices without relief and massive starvation on a global level such as never experienced before by the humans.

As political issue

The political debate about immigration is now a feature of most developed countries. Some, such as Japan, traditionally had very little immigration, and it wasn't a major political issue. Some countries such as Italy, and especially the Republic of Ireland and Spain, have shifted within a generation, from traditional labor emigration, to mass immigration, and this has become a political issue. Some European countries, such as the United Kingdom and Germany, have seen major immigration since the 1960’s and immigration has already been a political issue for decades. Political debates about immigration typically focus on statistics, the immigration law and policy, and the implementation of existing restrictions. In some European countries the debate in the 1990’s was focused on asylum seekers, but restrictive policies within the European Union have sharply reduced asylum seekers. In Western Europe the debate focuses on immigration from the Enlargement of the European Union and new member states of the EU, especially from Poland.
The politics of immigration have become increasingly associated with others issues, such as national security, terrorism, and in western Europe especially, with the presence of Islam as a new major religion. Some right-wing parties see an unassimilated, economically deprived, and generally hostile immigrant population as a threat to national stability. They fear new events such as the 2005 civil unrest in France that point to the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy as an example of the value conflicts arising from immigration of Muslims in Western Europe. Because of all these associations, immigration has become an emotional political issue in many European countries.

Ethics

Freedom of movement is often recognized as a civil right, although there's uncertainty over whether this right applies to movement between national borders as opposed to movement within national borders. According to Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, citizens may not be forbidden to leave their country. There is no similar provision regarding entry of non-citizens. Those who reject this distinction on ethical grounds, argue that the freedom of movement both within and between countries is a basic human right, and that the restrictive immigration policies, typical of nation-states, violate this human right of freedom of movement. Such arguments are common among anti-state ideologies like anarchism and libertarianism.
Where immigration is permitted, it's typically selective. Ethnic selection, such as the White Australia policy, has generally disappeared, but priority is usually given to the educated, skilled, and wealthy. Less privileged individuals, including the mass of poor people in low-income countries, can't avail of these immigration opportunities. This inequality has also been criticised as conflicting with the principle of equal opportunities, which apply (at least in theory) within democratic nation-states. The fact that the door is closed for the unskilled, while at the same time many developed countries have a huge demand for unskilled labour, is a major factor in illegal immigration. The contradictory nature of this policy - which specifically disadvantages the unskilled immigrants while exploiting their labour - has also been criticised on ethical grounds. Immigration polices which selectively grant freedom of movement to targeted individuals are intended to produce a net economic gain for the host country. They can also mean net loss for a poor donor country through the loss of the educated minority - the brain drain. This can exacerbate the global inequality in standards of living that provided the motivation for the individual to migrate in the first place. An example of the ‘competition for skilled labour’ is active recruitment of health workers by First World countries, from the Third World.

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