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By Root 1648 0

sent out sizable populations of urbanites during troubled times, and the United States and Canada, in recent years, have seen a boom in Latin American and Caribbean rural-to-rural migration, in which Central American peasants come to work on farms. But these are notable precisely because they are exceptions. When people move across oceans and international boundaries—a far more difficult and permanent enterprise than moving within one’s own country—the destination of choice is usually a city. And in the list of cities whose populations can claim more than a million foreign-born people, most are located in the wealthy and fully urbanized quarter of the world: Melbourne, Sydney, Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, Riyadh, Mecca, Medina, Moscow, Paris, London, Toronto, New York, Washington, Miami, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.8

Our debates about immigration are too often concerned with questions of what should happen, what ought to be allowed; we devote far too little to planning for what will occur. It is perfectly reasonable for governments to limit or stop immigration, or to restrict it to a limited group of skills, for political or economic reasons, during periods of high unemployment or out of a public sense of cultural disharmony or simple crowding. But we should recognize that such measures will not be permanent, that Western countries will continue taking in unskilled immigrants in the long term, and that, no matter what is done, a sizable proportion of these immigrants will be the sort of people who form arrival cities. Countries like Canada and Australia, which have managed to restrict the number of rural-origin migrants temporarily, will not be able to do so for much longer, and probably will not want to. The villager will be a feature of the Western city throughout this century.

There are two important reasons for this. The first is economic: the countries of the West will experience severe labor shortages during this decade and throughout the century, in both skilled and, importantly, unskilled fields. This shortage is caused by shrinking family sizes leading to a fast-aging population. Most Western nations have seen their reproduction rates slip below 2.1 children per family, the level needed to keep the native-born population stable, so the proportion of pension-earning, government-service-consuming seniors in the population is increasing. This itself is an expensive problem, which is most easily solved by bringing in new working-age immigrants whose taxes can cover spiraling state expenses. Alternatively, governments can raise taxes, cut services, or raise retirement ages, but, without immigration, the standards of living will decrease and governments will be unable to afford crucial services and policies.† As it is, the fiscal cost of paying for the credit-crunch bailouts of 2008 and 2009 is expected to consume between 2 and 4 percent of the GDP in Britain and the United States for more than a decade. So, while immigration is not a mandatory solution to labor shortages, the combination of cash-starved governments and higher demographic costs will make it the least painful and most voter-friendly solution.

According to a 2009 study by the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, the United States will require 35 million more workers than its working-age population can provide by 2030, Japan another 17 million by 2050, the European Union 80 million by 2050. Canada, even if it continues to take in 250,000 to 300,000 immigrants a year, will be short a million workers by the end of this decade.9 Even the high levels of unemployment that struck the West after the 2008 credit crisis only temporarily mitigated this long-term demographic problem. During the worst months of the downturn, there were substantial labor shortages in many countries. Australian business leaders were calling for a rapid increase of immigration in late 2009 to fill hundreds of thousands of semi-skilled vacancies in Victoria and Western Australia and warning that the shortage would increase to 1.6