THE AGE OF MOBILITY

Here is an article from the Migration Policy Institute about THE AGE OF MOBILITY, How to Get More Out of Migration in the 21st Century. It is an international perspective on internation migration and what other countries are doing about the influx of immigrants.

http://www.migrationinformation.org/transatlantic/age_mobility_032307.pdf

(If you click on the title above (THE AGE OF MOBILITY) will take you to the pdf article.

Below is a summary of the article.

The first is the weight of earlier policy choices with regard to immigration and integration. Some European governments and societies, most notably Germany, chose to deny for far too long the permanence of immigration and its embeddedness in the host society’s “life”—thus delaying essential efforts to have immigrants become members of the German polity and society. Remarkably, alternative policy choices, whether officially “welcoming” (the Dutch and Nordic models) or ones of “splendid neglect” (the French one), seem to have had similar outcomes. In fact, in virtually all cases, immigrants and their offspring are well behind natives in educational achievement, in economic benchmarks (employment rates, earnings, quality of housing, etc.), in access to opportunity, and in social and political engagement. These cumulative disadvantages translate into varying degrees of economic, social, and political marginalization. Marginalization, in turn, breeds mutual wariness: Many immigrant communities see themselves as aggrieved, while many natives view immigrants and their children with impatience, if not mistrust and suspicion.

Very often, educated foreigners take jobs that require few skills—a function of very consciously restrictive occupational entry barriers (a pernicious but extremely common form of protectionism), lack of sufficient language skills, a temporary inability to negotiate the relevant bureaucracies, lack of adequate information about the local labor market, or, in some instances, personal choice.

The old system blithely and mostly unquestioningly extends to foreigners the full array of social welfare benefits European society has to offer without making such access conditional upon a commensurate set of behavioral expectations—and then bemoans the fact that many non•citizens become dependent on such largesse and that citizens resent the costs associated with this gesture.

• The new system cannot remain the captive of the by now completely unproductive debate about more or less immigration, or skilled vs. unskilled workers, but will forge ahead with a policy conversation about the workers that the economy needs and the society is prepared to accept and treat properly. • The new system can no longer be held up by abstract or ideological debates about permanent or temporary workers but will move on with the recruitment of workers that fill real needs, regardless of their ultimate immigration status. Only then can one move beyond the straightjacket of existing entry categories and allocate visas on the basis of the characteristics of both the job in question and its occupant, and the expected duration of the task.

The policy question then becomes how to protect oneself, and one’s country, from the threat terrorism presents. This is not an easy thing. Intelligence and police work will have to be the frontlines of protection, as will much deeper international cooperation than is either the case today or appears likely in the immediate future. The effort must also include a thorough review of the developed North’s foreign political and economic relations with an eye toward identifying policies that fuel hatred toward it.

Whether or not the age of mobility is already upon us or just over the horizon, the only projection one can make is that mobility in all its forms will only increase. There are four choices: we can hide our heads in the sand about it; we can resist it; we can ratify it; or we can shape it so that we can gain most from it. The thrust of this essay is that there is, really, only one choice: shaping it.

Thanks, Milo