Donald Trump, America’s new president, has cut back massively on US commitments to asylum seekers, blocked all asylum processes and started to remove irregular immigrants.
Trump’s new measures are far reaching. They include the suspension of the US refugee admissions programme. Flights booked for refugees to the US have been cancelled. Arrests and deportations have begun.
Strongly anti-immigrant policies were also pursued under the Biden administration, though Trump’s dramatic steps take them much further. Other countries in the global north have also introduced tougher policies. The 2024 EU Pact on Migration and Asylum sets out tougher border controls, quicker assessment of asylum seekers and swifter removal of those who did not qualify. In the UK, Labour prime minister Keir Starmer has promised to bring down the net migration rate and treat people-smugglers like terrorists.
Based on my research into migration over the past 30 years I believe that these measures are unlikely to last. There are two linked trends that make closing the borders of the global north impractical and destined for revision.
The first is that populations in most of the global north are ageing fast (on average) and the fertility rate, or natural population growth rate, has plummeted. There are many more older people as a percentage of the population.
Secondly, with a workforce shrinking and the dependency ratio (the proportion of non-working to working people) rising rapidly, closing borders to potential labourers from other countries, without any other change, would lead to declining living standards in the global north. Economic growth and government revenues would slow or stagnate, undermining infrastructure maintenance and social service provision.
There are several possible strategies that could be alternatives to anti-immigration measures. Some older people could migrate south, robots and AI could do more work, workers in the global south could perform remote work for the north, and arrangements could be made to allow migrants into the north either permanently or as circulating migrants.
All these strategies are already in use, if modestly. Their application would have to expand considerably.
Misplaced panic
The responses of governments in the global north are exaggerated. Governments putting in place tough anti-immigrant measures have done so on the back of a narrative that there’s been a significant rise in the number of migrants worldwide.
This isn’t true. Some countries, such as the US, Germany and Colombia, have seen a spike in refugees and other migrants. But for the rest of the world the picture remains much the same as it has done for decades.
Foreign-born residents (the most widely used definition of migrants) rose as a proportion of residents worldwide from 2.3% in 1970 to 3.6% in 2020. But in 1960 the number was over 3%, and in the late 1800s migrants made up somewhere between 3% and 5% of the global population.
So, 3.6% is nothing new.
As for refugees, in 2023 there were about 38 million,