WASHINGTON, DC — As recent election results in the United States, Germany and other countries have demonstrated, populist claims that migration is chaotic, unlawful and unfair are increasingly resonating — even with publics that believe some level of immigration is needed to maintain economic competitiveness. This backlash suggests that immigration, already blamed for everything from pressures on housing to the soaring cost of living, could be further instrumentalized in a volatile political landscape. Yet the fundamental paradoxes at the heart of immigration policy will endure: Fast-aging advanced economies are increasingly reliant on immigrants to sustain their workforces and potentially help mitigate rural depopulation. Businesses that need migrants’ skills are struggling to recruit these workers as restrictions on legal pathways grow. And migration to higher-income countries still holds an allure for much of the world’s population, even if the only routes available are costly and life-threatening. Despite these competing realities and short-term pressures, policymakers must engage in whole-of government thinking to articulate a vision for orderly, planned migration that serves national interests, occurs at a pace the public will accept and connects to other strategies around economic growth and productivity, workforce development and public services, a new policy brief from the Migration Policy Institute’s Transatlantic Council on Migration argues. In Migration Governance in Unsettled Times: How Policymakers Can Plan for Population Change, Meghan Benton, Natalia Banulescu-Bogdan and Kate Hooper suggest the future of migration governance must be contingent on clear, transparent and sensible policies that plan for: - Population change. Many countries are adjusting to population aging through immigration-related population growth, but governance has not caught up. Governments will need to coordinate across portfolios to alleviate critical pressures on overburdened infrastructure and public services — especially housing — and defuse tensions over immigration.
- Productivity. Immigration is only part of the answer to population aging. To keep economies competitive, governments should activate groups under-represented in the workforce and potentially raise the retirement age. Advanced economies should also plan for a smaller ratio of workers to residents, invest in productivity and prioritize skilled and high-growth-sector immigration.
- Predictability. As governments make tough decisions on reducing irregular arrivals, they can also build out regular legal pathways. Creating space for planning requires a greater degree of control in current admissions. Predictability, such as by setting targets for different admissions streams in immigration levels plans, will be more important than reducing numbers overall.
Above all, navigating the population and labor demands ahead will mean fixing migration governance by regaining the social license needed for thoughtful policymaking, a complex but necessary venture. “Immigration policymakers have the unenviable task of trying to plan for long-term needs while being graded primarily on how well they manage short-term frictions,” the authors write. “When immigration soars to the top of policy agendas, it is only the most visible pieces that attract public attention and therefore consume political bandwidth, to the detriment of the long-term issues crying out for more attention — such as how population growth can (and cannot) be used to combat demographic decline and sectoral imbalances. As governments work to regain control of immigration and public confidence in their ability to manage it, there is a risk they will focus only on deterring future arrivals rather than the more difficult and less headline-grabbing process of managing social and demographic change.” Read the policy brief here: www.migrationpolicy.org/research/migration-governance-population-change. For more of the Transatlantic Council’s work, visit: www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/transatlantic-council-migration. |
