foreign born populations

some thoughts

The daily publication, Semafor, had a fascinating piece this morning on immigration. Yes, I know, regardless where you are, you probably have heard enough on the topic (and here) but it was the graphic that caught my eye becausewe know the United States is the nation most under threat of overbearing immigrants, right?

Depends how you look at it as true of so many things.

While we are the third most populated country, behind India and China, at 340ish million, we are down the list according to the percentage of immigrants making up our nation. Really? Seriously? Semafor provided these percentages, culled from the OECD, of foreign born in the countries listed:

Australia 29.9%

Switzerland 29.7%

Sweden 19.5%

Ireland 17.8%

Germany 16.1%

United Kingdom 14.5%

United States 13.6%

France 12.8%

Denmark 10.5%

Hungary 5.8%

Turns out, upon considering data, the movement of people particularly to Europe is a relatively important but not all encompassing issue. Please understand my remarks are definitely NOT intended to criticize any other governments, except Vlad who deserves it every single day he has troops in Ukraine.

Know also I am not, repeat not ignoring those of you—and you know who you are—who have responded to prior columns about immigration to tell me in no uncertain terms you resent people “cheating” to get here. That is a completely different issue. Whether we tar and feather, accept, or exile through the end of the world those who come to the country illegally is a public policy question resolved through publicly accountable institutions.

What got my attention about this chart was the reality versus the perceptions at work.

Over the past thirty years, each of the nations on this list has struggled with whether to encourage or tolerate immigration. Some of the conversations rested on the question of legal versus illegal, as true here, but much of it focuses more generally on whether a nation should willingly evolve from what began often as a somewhat singular and homogeneous heritage to a broader, more diverse, and mixed ethnography. Race, that underlying issue around the globe, rears its head in this debate as so many others, since race often becomes the measure by which we see someone as “different” or “not like me”.

As I consider the actions and consequences, we get four baskets of sequences. Please understand these are not hard and fast so of course exceptions to any of my categories are appropriate. And, I welcome any of you explaining why I am misunderstanding these generalizations.

Australians, a society born originally of the rejected in Britain due to their convict status, have long tried to work through how to populate and best utilize this vast, largely vacant land area. The Aboriginal people sadly suffered major displacement when Europeans arrived in the late eighteen century but their population was likely fewer than a million as they confronted the colonists. That remained a small number in a country roughly the size of CONUS.

Australia, like the United States, Argentina and Canada, have invited immigrants through so much of the country’s history. This choice was not without costs for the Aborigines who continue in a secondary status, as true for the Native Americans and Canada’s First Nations. Argentina had the smallest native population when the Europeans arrived five hundred years ago, resulting in far less focus on their experiences than in the other three countries.

Immigrants came for a better life in all of these cases while the welcoming countries sought to fill out their land and labor force. The United States particularly operated on the concept of “manifest destiny”: filling the land from coast to coast because we were intended to (or so we thought) but the other nations frequently sought workers for vast farm acreage in highly agriculturally desirable lands. All four economies evolved, with agriculture less the focus of any of them as industrialization and service jobs play more prominently in each country, but some less technically skilled work still requires what is generally immigrant labor.

In the other countries on the list, immigrant resulted from three primary strains. Sweden and Denmark, both societies new to struggling with this question, historically welcomed refugees as often as for economic reasons. Immigration fatigue, however, has struck these two traditionally fairly homogenous Scandanavian societies as the world’s crises proliferated in the post-Cold War world.

Britain and France historically had colonies from which many of their immigrants arrive. Whether in the Sahel of North Africa where France governed Algeria as Metropolitan France (rather a weird concept when on thinks about it a century later) or South Asia which was the Jewel in the British Crown for centuries, the complex interaction between the colonial power and the affected people left a long legacy drawing many immigrants to Europe much as their ancestors came for better education before Independence. Personal socio-economic advancement for offered thousands from the colonies the option to establish themselves in unique networks linked to London, Paris, or smaller cities; this offered a model for later generations to improve their lots as well.

Britain and France were the governors for decades in a raft of countries which became independent members of the “Global South” following World War II as decolonization efforts accelerated. Even though these newer nations cast off their colonial bonds long ago to become supposedly equal, sovereign societies, the economic and social opportunities even today rarely equate to those in the former colonial centers. This reality encourages aspiring folks to move to Europe where they often confront a weary reality of deindustrializing economies and unequal social distribution. The result is anything but a warm welcome, as we see in Britain this week where assumptions about immigrants played a significant role in massive upheaval following the murder of young girls in Southport last week. Ultra-right parties in these two countries seek to erase any possible colonial links as if they never happened.

Finally, the third strain of immigration to Germany, Ireland and Hungary again has a decidedly economic emphasis as the demographics of the native born in these societies drop substantially. Turkish immigrants went to Germany frequently in the later 1950s and 60s as the former West Germany struggled to find workers to meet its reindustrialization. The reunion of the two Germanies in 1990 has long cast that need in a different light as Turks struggled to keep their toehold while the two rather unequal portions of Germany worked through socioeconomic matters. But many immigrants arrived so long ago that they truly cannot grasp returning to a homeland long abandoned. As demographics began declining over the past two decades, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland, and Hungary constantly weigh the need for workers against the political preference in many quarters to prevent the poorer from coming to live or benefit from state systems for which they do not pay. It is a constant reminder of our evolving world.

Perhaps my hypotheses and memories of historic developments are wrong; these are my assessments of this ten countries and why their numbers of foreign born are as high as they are.

Why does we discuss this so much? I am pretty confident on that score with three distinct changes since 1989. During the Cold War as we saw a bifurcated Soviet bloc versus the west, a number of global conditions remained frozen for forty years. People found it far harder to move from place to place because technology and transit were less common and considerably harder . Yes, immigrants came to the United States, for example, or went to Israel but these tended to be Europeans or Americans. Russia stopped exits and who wanted to go there except Lee Harvey Oswald (and he didn’t even last)?

Second, international commerce and overall transit is much more common today, even for those poor or marginalized, because incomes around the world have increased over the past thirty-five years (notable exceptions like Somalia, Sudan, or the DPRK exist). This means movement north south, or east west or anything else raises fewer eyebrows and costs are far lower than before. Sure, a family in El Salvador must pay a bundle to a coyote once they get to the U.S. border for hoped for “expediting” but they have been able to accrue those assets over time. Without the Soviet-U.S. split, this movement is no longer odd.

Finally, the earlier sense of optimism about the post-World War II expanding global opportunities faded beginning around 2000. I believe historians will note the 1999 World Trade Organization riots in Seattle as a pivot point we did not appreciate, much like 2008 domestically. Globalization no longer served as the panacea with non-native born seen as a reminder of outside (and outsider) threats.

After it’s all said and done, race and ethnicity retain a role in human behavior. Many of us appear most comfortable with people who remind of us our selves, according to social science research. We often (but never exclusively) marry people sharing some of our characteristics, we tend to live in communities with our characteristics, and we thus become less comfortable with those who are different, likely for fear someone else’s experience will challenge our own or undermine our positions.

But race, whether it’s skin tone, eyelid shape, or some other characteristic, can be fear-inducing when we are anxious. Different religions can do the same and certainly have been unifying and dividing factors for immigrants arriving in any community. And, of course, an arrival without following the rules that prior generations had to adhere to can leave a distinct belief of someone’s lack of interest in being a fully responsible member of society.

In Viktor Orban’s Hungary, the sense of separation driving all of these factors builds on a deep-seated hostility that echoing ethnic cleansing. Vlad the Impaler, hardly one welcoming immigrants and certainly not on the Semafor list, also stokes those racial divisions with a false narrative to drive his society apart from Europe but that is another topic.

I wanted to highlight this chart because it also offers a redeeming view of western societies as places where displaced can still find shelter. These ten countries do still have significant foreign born populations—and are likely to see them continue to grow. That still allows those in need to have hope for refugee status when needed or for finding a better life if they gain admittance. Compare this to the de facto closed nature of many Asian societies that will never welcome “others”. This is not meant to condemn Asian decisions but to note the differences between cultures.

People rarely relocate or abandon their country of birth without taking painful decisions and often fearing a lack of alternatives. Humans tend to be homebodies when it comes to our love of our birthrights even if we don’t like a particular government. Look how often people go home when a heinous government departs a scene, often after decades of mistreating their own (cue those still hoping the relics of the Castros disappear nearly seventy years later).

Or perhaps I have this all wrong. Perhaps the foreign born numbers Semafor presented as mere curiosities. I welcome your thoughts and observations. In an era of anxiety and almost paralysis as we await the future in the United States as we see a change in administration ahead. We are, of course, not alone but certainly the biggest country bound to confront at least leadership change, if not dramatic policy revision.

Thank you for reading Actions today or any other day. Thanks for reading regularly or once in a while as you are most welcome in my humble attempt to expand our measured, civil discussion of the challenges we confront while recognizing our actions in fact play a role in all of this. Thanks especially to those subscribers who support Actions.

For the occasion, a Mandarin duck in St. James’s Park seems appropriate, no?

Be well and be safe. FIN

Jerónimo González, Semafor, 8 August 2024, retrieved at https://www.semafor.com/newsletter/08/08/2024/semafor-flagship-this-is-democracy-manifest