Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [46]
The second reason why village-origin migration will continue is political. Immigrants, and their children and grandchildren, become citizens and voters and politicians and cabinet ministers and leaders, united across parties and ideologies by the overweening issue of having access to their families and fellow villagers. The sociologist Christian Joppke, in a study titled “Why Liberal States Accept Unwanted Immigration,” noted that the only countries that have managed to control levels of immigration have been those with authoritarian governments—communist, fascist, autocratic. Everywhere else in the world, on every continent over a period of decades, he documented “the gap between restrictionist policy goals and expansionist outcomes,” meaning that almost all policy efforts to restrict or end immigration had failed because the purported subjects of the laws were already active citizens, using the arrival city as a platform for its own self-preservation.12
During all the periods in which such countries as the United States, Germany, and France have supposedly had zero-immigration laws, millions of low-skill migrants have entered those countries, using arrival-city-based networks to create paths of entry. Walls and policing regimes have done little to reduce the numbers. In most cases, governments come to realize that millions of potential taxpayers are living below the radar, earning incomes but not paying taxes, and creating gray-market families and awkward legal paradoxes as their deracinated children come of age; the result is usually a mass amnesty. The United States has granted post-facto citizenship to millions of illegal immigrants in recent decades (most recently in the early 1990s); similar amnesties, involving hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants, have been granted in Spain, Italy, France, Britain, and Germany. More such amnesties are almost certain in the future.
A typical example is the U.S. Immigration Reform and Control Act, or IRCA, which began in 1986 as a congressional effort to stop, once and for all, the movement of Latin American villagers across the southern border. And yet, by the time it was passed, pressure from the Chamber of Commerce and agriculture lobbies had transformed it into a mass amnesty that provided legal citizenship to almost three million “illegals,” combined with a new program allowing low-skill migrants to enter under a guest-worker program demanded by agricultural industries in the western states. This guest-worker program eventually led to its own mass amnesty. An effort in the next decade by the conservative House of Representatives, led by Newt Gingrich, to reverse the effects of the IRCA, this time backed by widespread public pressure against “illegals,” had a similar result: The 1990s saw more immigration to the United States from Latin America than in any other decade in U.S. history, a surge of legal and illegal migration totalling 31 million people. The economy needed people, and it got them.
When they do recognize that labor shortages will be a long-term reality, many countries have tried a second option: weeding out the less educated, less skilled, and, generally, rural-origin immigrants from the stream. Australia and Canada were the first to do this, introducing “points-based” immigration systems, in which only those applicants who score the highest for linguistic aptitude, post-secondary education, specialized skills, or pledged investment savings are admitted entry. This has indeed created a more middle-class, acculturated group of immigrants, but it has sidestepped a serious problem. Labor shortages often tend to be in low-skilled and semi-skilled