Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [48]
As the cultural conflicts of immigration became acute in the early twenty-first century and arrival cities became focal points of religious and political hostility, governments began trying to crack down on family-reunification immigration as a way to keep villagers out. Britain, France, Canada, the Netherlands, and Germany tried to restrict family-class entrants. None of it worked for more than a brief period. France’s attempts, launched by President Nicolas Sarkozy as a 2007 election pledge, were among the toughest, requiring DNA tests to prove that applicants were immediate blood relatives. Within two years, the attempt had been abandoned; Immigration Minister Eric Besson declared the idea “stupid.”
Such restrictions failed partly for the economic and political reasons described above, but also for a third reason: When immigrants are brought over without their networks of relatives and village neighbors, they are more likely to become isolated and unsocialized, to fall into criminality or social conservatism. This happens when family-reunification migration is restricted or when countries rely on temporary guest-worker programs to attract low-skilled workers without their families, as Germany did in the 1970s and Canada and Australia are attempting today.
When settlement of families is restricted, arrival cities and their supportive networks are unable to take shape, and behavior changes. A study by Dennis Broeders and Godfried Engbersen at Erasmus University, in Rotterdam, examined immigrants forbidden to bring over relatives: Without family networks to support them, the migrants were forced into a “dependence on informal, and increasingly criminal, networks and institutions.”19 Arranged marriages, often to a cousin from a distant village whom the primary-immigrant spouse hadn’t met, became commonplace, even when the migrants are from countries such as Bangladesh or Turkey, where these practices are dying out. So, in the West, successful attempts to prevent the arrival city from forming have actually created waves of religious conservatism, sexual oppression, and organized crime. Such practices are the products not of arrival but of failed arrival: When we invest in the arrival city and give it a chance to flourish, it acts as an antidote to such extremes.
THE SUBURBANIZATION OF ARRIVAL
Herndon, Virginia, and Wheaton, Maryland
At the traffic-light intersection of two four-lane roads on the far outskirts of the U.S. capital, nineteen brown-skinned men, some young and some old, variously stand, sit, and lean against a low brick wall in the entrance to the parking lot of a vacant Pentecostal church. The Salvadoran, Honduran, and Mexican men stand out as the only signs of non-vehicular activity in this long expanse of gas stations, mini-malls, and one-story government buildings. For long minutes they are motionless. Then a mini-van slows, some words are exchanged in rudimentary English, and two of them get in. It is a moving job, what appears to be a home foreclosure, a half-day’s work at $10 an hour. Twenty minutes later, the remaining men hunch beneath shrubs and walls as a police car passes: Standing and looking for day work, a rite of passage for new arrival-city residents and a vital source of start-up income, is now illegal and dangerous in Herndon, Virginia.
As recently as 1980, the suburban town of Herndon was 96 percent white and English-speaking, a lower-middle-class bedroom enclave close to the light-industrial jobs around Washington Dulles International Airport. Like so many