The anger over immigration expressed in Europe deserves to be understood, not simply dismissed. Unlike in the United States, foreign nationals in Europe are genuinely overrepresented on a population basis in recorded crime, including violent crime: in Germany’s latest statistics, non-Germans were 35% of all crime suspects and 43% of violent crime suspects. Yet when the data are examined more closely, much (but not all) of the gap dissolves once age and sex are accounted for (migrants in Europe skew toward being young and male), and part of what remains is exacerbated by social exclusion and the denial of the right to work. (The proof is across the Atlantic: in America, where immigrants have historically been more readily absorbed into the labor market, they are incarcerated at lower rates than the native-born.) Europe has admitted people and then forbidden them to belong. And where opposition has grown, some governments have answered not with better policy but with the policeman, arresting citizens by the thousand for “offensive” online messages.
Nor is the familiar image of a continent fleeing deepening misery quite true. By almost every measure, African life is far better than a generation ago: since 1990 extreme poverty has fallen from 55% to below 40%, life expectancy has risen nearly thirteen years, child mortality is down nearly 60%, and access to electricity has more than doubled. There is an apparent paradox: development, in the short term, does not stem migration—it fuels it. The poorest cannot afford to leave; it is rising incomes that fund the travel and communication. Emigration often climbs with development until a country reaches middle-income prosperity, and only then subsides.
China, a leading advocate of the proposition that development is the cure for migration’s “root causes,” maintains firm control over its own borders. Beijing officially hosts a few hundred refugees in a nation of 1.4 billion and even forcibly returns North Korean escapees to Pyongyang’s tender mercies. But it has poured more than a trillion dollars into building up the developing world, building domestic markets and productivity where western nations have been more likely to seek out resource extraction. The world’s rising power treats the answer to migration as development, not resettlement.
