Illegal immigration getting worse

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): On July 23, 40 Guatemalans were found sprawled across a highway near Villahermosa in southern Mexico, having managed to escape from the broken-down truck that was supposed to carry them, hidden among sacks of corn, to the U.S. border and a new life.

Seven were hospitalized for severe dehydration and one died. They were still luckier than the 22 Guatemalans whose bodies washed up on Mexico's Pacific coast last week after the boat smuggling them to the United States sank in a storm.

The 82 Chinese emigrants arrested on July 19 near Dalian as they headed for a ship to take them across the Pacific certainly didn't think themselves lucky, nor did the 20 Afghans caught by Czech police last week as they scrambled into the back of a truck to cross the border into Germany.

But maybe they were lucky, for once you are locked into that truck or container, your life is in the hands of ruthless people. One hitch, and they leave you to die.

Lethal accidents happen to illegal immigrants all the time. Think of the 58 young Chinese men and women who suffocated in the back of a truck on a ferry to England last month, or the 39 Chinese who died in the freezing waters off Vlore, Albania last New Year's Eve when the boat smuggling them to Italy sank.

On the most dangerous route of all, the crossing from Morocco at the Strait of Gibraltar, the Spanish police estimate that 3,000 have drowned in the past five years.

Illegal immigration, driven by the stark poverty that afflicts so much of the world, is getting bigger by the day. The destination countries are staggering under the burden of so many "illegals" -- in the United States, the numbers are so great that they even threaten the country's basic identity -- and yet they cannot stop the flood. Besides, they need this inflow of young workers, for their own populations are aging so fast that they will soon be unable to care for themselves.

These are the terms in which the new pattern of international migration is discussed every day, so they probably sound familiar. But every single statement in the preceding paragraph is either grossly misleading or simply untrue.

First of all, this global movement of people is not driven by poverty. The very poor cannot afford to move at all. The families of the young Chinese who died on the Dover ferry paid 250,000 yuan (about US$30,000) each to have them smuggled into Britain, and even the Guatemalans being trucked across Mexico paid $1,500 each for the privilege.

"Economic migrants" are typically ambitious people who already have some resources, and often highly marketable skills as well. It is estimated, for example, that more of Sierra Leone's doctors are practicing in the United States than in their own country. (You can hardly blame them, given the horrors that occur daily in Sierra Leone).

Many migrants are genuinely fleeing intolerable conditions at home, but even that is not true, for example, of the wave of illegal migrants from China's southern provinces. Guangdong, Fujian and Zhekiang provinces are among the most prosperous parts of China, but they also contain entire counties where the idea of emigrating abroad, with the intention of one day "returning in silken robes" (as the saying goes) is a tradition 150 years old.

Secondly, the total number of migrants is not rising sharply. The routes they must take, as the richer countries shut their borders ever more tightly, are simply getting more devious and dangerous. But even the risk of a miserable death does not deter the truly determined.

Are the destination countries being overwhelmed by this new style of immigration? Hardly. The annual number of people trying to sneak into the European Union (population 375 million) is estimated at only around 200,000: an additional one-nineteenth of one percent of the population if they all made it. Even counting legal immigration, Europe's total annual intake is not much more than a million.

The United States similarly acquires around 800,000 legal immigrants and about 200,000 permanent illegal residents each year, in a population now nearing 275 million. Alarmists believe that this will turn half the country Spanish-speaking in a generation, but in fact the cultural and linguistic assimilation of second-generation immigrants has never been faster. Television now does half the job before they even reach school.

But don't collapsing birth rates, falling work-forces and the need to care for soaring pensioner populations in the developed countries mean they need all the immigrants they can get? No, not at all.

The myth of too many retired people and too few workers is partly caused by a failure to understand that people in their 60s in the developed countries today are on average fitter than their grandparents were in their 50s. "Old age" is a cultural construct, not an immutable fact.

If so many older people are now forced into an inappropriate early retirement, it is because many employers prefer younger, more insecure, less well paid and more easily bullied employees. Illegals immigrants are the extreme end of that phenomenon, but the propaganda about an "old age crisis", pervasive in all the developed countries, everywhere serves the same broad agenda of keeping wages down.

A bold and well-run immigration policy enhances domestic demand, productivity and even creativity. The best-performing industrial economies today are all countries that regularly take in lots of immigrants. But the illegal immigrant racket is merely an ugly sideshow.