By Gavin St Pier
Immigration
MIGRATION is never out of the news. This week it is the one million in Lebanon on the move in a desperate bid to avoid being caught in the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel. Spare a particular thought for the fact that Lebanon, a country of only six million, had taken in 1.5 million refugees from Syria’s internal conflict.
A few weeks ago, it was the turn of nervous dog and cat owners in Springfield, Ohio, to hog the headlines, whipped up by former President Trump to unjustifiably fear the city’s Haitians’ non-existent appetite for their pets.
The ongoing political chaos in Venezuela has caused eight million, or 25% of its population, to seek a better life outside their country. A number of these have wound up working in the Channel Islands’ hospitality sector – and the exodus is continuing apace, with 1,000 a day crossing the border into Brazil.
What are the characteristics for an “ideal immigrant” for a host nation? Someone who is young and single is a good start, ensuring that neither they nor their non-existent dependants will be a drain on the host nation’s education and health services. They should ideally already be fluent in the native language to aid their swift integration and ensure they can be highly productive in the workforce.
Someone who is skilled or highly educated at the expense of some other jurisdiction’s taxpayers is a bonus. Failing that, the preference would be for someone willing to do the less well-paid and attractive jobs that the host population do not much like to do themselves. Ideally, they might only stay a few years, so they become net contributors to the public finances before there is any risk they start drawing on the host’s public services. And when they leave, if they are replaced by a clone of their younger selves, that will do nicely.
That, of course, has largely been the model for Channel Islands immigration for several decades, particularly sourced from our former European partners, Portugal, Poland and the Baltic States. It has changed a little with the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union, replacing the freedom of movement for EU citizens around partner nations with a requirement for expensive visas, but the model largely remains intact. Consequently, our guest labour has been more broadly sourced, with Kenya, Bangladesh and the Philippines rising high up the league table of non-UK source nations of labour.
In the last decade, there have been repeated crises with accompanying tragedy as the small boats bring in waves of refugees seeking relief from conflicts ranging from Afghanistan, Syria and Libya among others, as well as economic migrants from sub-Saharan Africa. First in the eastern Mediterranean, the boats floated (and sank) between Turkey and Greece and then in the southern Med between Libya and Italy or Malta. In the English Channel, rubber dinghies deployed by the people smugglers have replaced the dash of individuals seeking to jump on moving trains going through the Channel Tunnel or to hide in lorries headed for the ferries.
Our location in the western Channel, surrounded by pretty treacherous rocks and tides may have helped insulate us from being targeted. While the criminals plying their people trade might not care less whether their paying clients survive the journey or not, one can presume that a high death toll on a particular route is probably not that good for the future pipeline of business. In addition to geography and tidal flows, our tiny size must also help render us a pretty unattractive target destination.
The Channel Islands have been privileged to be able to operate a system of immigration that is controlled and allows us to choose those “ideal immigrants” in terms of numbers and skills that we think benefit our economies and communities. We should recognise that this is not the norm. Most other jurisdictions struggle to limit illegal migration across their borders and then have to deal with the costs and social consequences of failing to do so.
Neither can we afford to be complacent. The drivers of illegal migration are set to increase, not decrease, in the decades ahead. As climate change makes great swathes of the planet uninhabitable through heat, famine or water shortage, millions more will need to move. To this mass movement must be added those of conflicts over water resources and the proxy conflicts to be fought out between the great powers as the unipolar dominance of the United States wanes with its retreat (back) into isolationism.
So, migration is likely to remain in the news for rest of all our lives. And we may look back on the memes of Springfield’s dogs and cats with fondness, bringing humour to pretty humourless news stories.
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Gavin St Pier is a Guernsey politician. He previously served as the president of the island’s Policy and Resources Committee.
