The Case for Immigration
Can rich countries accept migrants without jeopardising their democracies?
By L.S. and E.H.
In his novel “Exit West”, Mohsin Hamid describes a world very like our own, but which is suddenly changed by the appearance of mysterious doors. A dark-skinned man falls out of an Australian woman’s wardrobe in Sydney. Filipino women emerge from the back door of a bar into the alleyways of Tokyo. As the incidents multiply and scores of people from poor countries walk through the doors into richer ones, rich-world inhabitants respond with violent resistance. Governments crack down hard on the new arrivals. But it is not long before they are overwhelmed by their sheer number and abandon efforts to repel them. The world settles into an uneasy new equilibrium. Shantytowns emerge on the slopes of San Francisco Bay. Conflicts in war-torn places burn out for want of civilians to kill and exploit.
Few things have caused citizens in Western liberal democracies more angst in recent years than borders and migration. In the United States, voters chose a president in 2016 who promised to build a wall to stem the flow of migrants from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, and who has since sought to ban people from several Muslim-majority countries from travelling to America. In many European countries, right-wing parties…
