Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [47]
Not only will many countries be forced to admit large numbers of low-skilled and semi-skilled immigrants, but they will soon have to compete for them. Demographics are fast reducing the global supply of labor in all categories: eastern and central Europe have sub-replacement birth rates that will cut off the supply of workers, and, as of 2010, China was experiencing large-scale labor shortages in all areas. India’s rapid economic growth and fast-shrinking fertility rate mean that it will cease to be a reliable supply of workers. China has already initiated programs to import workers from sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent, putting it in competition with the Gulf states and the West for workers. Rather than trying to stem a flood, North American and European countries may well find themselves engaged in active recruitment.
To bring in only urban, university-educated elites to fill these vacancies is a waste both of human potential and of foreign policy, since the immigrants often get their degrees at universities in their own countries that have been funded by foreign governments to help create medical, legal, and technical knowledge in the developing world. If the products of these programs all become hotel desk clerks and roofers in Western cities, the entire aid agenda is wasted.
This is exactly what is happening in Canada, Australia, and other countries that have emulated their points systems (as Britain began doing in 2005). In Canada, in 2008, an extraordinary 60.1 percent of immigrants with university degrees were working in occupations that required an apprenticeship or less—1.5 times the over-qualification rate of Canadian-born workers.14 A significant number simply weren’t fitting into an economy that needed physical skills, not professions. Of “chronically poor” immigrants in Canada, 41 percent have university degrees.15 In other words, countries like Canada have been bringing in the wrong sorts of workers for a generation.
So it is a source of both social frustration and economic relief that these countries have all discovered that large numbers of villagers are still managing to enter and settle legally, forming arrival-city enclaves. For the fact is that a “skilled” migrant is often a single, village-born urbanite from the developing world who brings an entire network of spouses and relatives from the root village or foreign arrival city. Canada, with one of the toughest points-system programs, is a typical example. Officially, 57 percent of its 250,000 annual immigrants are “economic class”—mainly highly skilled workers and “business immigrants” willing to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars. But in 2005, of the 133,746 immigrants in this category, only 55,179 were principal applicants—that is, those with the skills or money. The remaining 78,567 were their children, spouses, parents, or other dependants, who in many cases do not speak the language and are drawn from villages. And an additional 62,246 immigrants every year—more than the total of points-based entrants—were “family class” immigrants: parents, spouses, and other relatives of settled immigrants who are brought over from the home country to reunite families; anecdotally, a high percentage of these have rural backgrounds. (Another 39,832 immigrants were refugees or other humanitarian cases, themselves often rural.) The result is that only 23 percent of Canada’s immigrants are those who are selected through the points system,16 the rest hewing much closer to the arrival city.
Even larger proportions of village-born relatives enter other countries. In the United States,