Financial Times Editorial Comment: Menaced migrants

Financial Times Editorial Comment: Menaced migrants
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
Published: March 18 2009 19:12 | Last updated: March 18 2009 19:12
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/cc55b9a2-13ed-11de-9e32-0000779fd2ac.html


The countries at the heart of the boom, such as the US, the UK and Spain, attracted not just capital but also people from around the globe. The good times ended abruptly – leaving governments with the challenge of managing people who came for jobs that were once plentiful but that locals are now desperate to secure.

The boom pulled in workers at all levels, from finance experts to manual workers, to the benefit of all. Mexicans filled the ranks of a US construction sector in breakneck expansion. In Spain, rural Andalucians found better jobs in the city, leaving harvesting behind for Ecuadoreans, Moroccans and Romanians. Remittances flowed back to immigrants’ home countries.

Today immigrants are blamed for vanishing jobs and falling incomes. As frustrations mount, tensions are becoming explosive. Politicians must therefore tread very carefully. They have no choice but to take seriously the social troubles that can arise between locals and immigrants, but must not pour petrol on the fire of anti-immigrant attitudes.

Governments should be honest when there is little they can do. The European Union requires open borders with only limited delay. Even where the law limits immigration, restrictions are not fully enforceable. US nativists dream of an impenetrable border fence along the Rio Grande – a delusion when Mexicans prefer the perils of illegal immigration to continued misery at home.

But politicians seem compelled to conjure an illusion of control. As the FT reported this week, Congress slipped into US bank rescue laws a limit on banks’ access to visas for skilled foreign staff – discouraging companies from participating in the policies intended to end the crisis. Such pandering to nationalism helps no one. It deprives the US of talent, extinguishes some people’s dreams and fosters an illusion that the world is a zero-sum game. It may also provoke retaliation.

Collapsed labour markets flooded by unskilled migrants should be addressed with encouragement rather than force. With jobs scarcer, fewer will immigrate and more will go home; governments can support this process. Spain has offered monetary incentives for migrants to depart, for example.

Letting illegal immigrants formalise their status makes it easier to give them incentives to leave, especially if they are allowed to return when labour demand is again high. This would also be in the interests of host countries, which after all welcomed the immigrants in boom times. They should not now push the pain of the bust on to them in ways that cause suffering.