Migration started in the world under the worst circumstances; people fled persecution, war, and hunger. Then they became strangers in a foreign land, treated like threats or enemies due to our animal instinct to fear that who is different.
In our need to survive, we took advantage of their plight and during the 18th century, we even forced Africans out of their homes and traded them for goods. This is better known in history as the start of slavery, a searing reminder from our past of our innate abilities to be cruel.
Let’s take a look at the United States of America. Most of the slaves were traded into America but when Congress abolished slavery, the Europeans and the Chinese followed the migration path into the land of the free due to opportunities for work and gold.
The Irish also took shelter in the United States when they were escaping famine, then the Jews, then the Russians, then the Armenians.
Ships were then built, making it easier and cheaper to migrate. This allowed for a rush of people that created the America we know today, where one in every eight American is an immigrants and almost all citizens come from a descent of immigrants.
In 2015, there were 244 million international migrants in the world, a 41-percent increase from 2000.
Migration is a global phenomena that may have had an ugly past, but today, it is a phenomena that comes to mankind as natural as procreation.
Using data visualization on migration flow from the International Organization for Migration (IOM), let us attempt to paint a picture of the world we live in today in the context of this recent political trend of clamping down immigration.
Migration flow
For example, the United States may have played generous host to millions of migrants over the years–around 47 million migrants in the last 15 years, to be exact–but the world has also been returning the favor.
In 2015, there were nearly 3 million US citizens living outside their birth country, which is nearly a percent of the country’s population. Where are they? Mexico, interestingly enough. There are 12 million Mexicans living in the United States today but if Americans want to stop that flow and seal the borders, they would be closing their doors on over 800,000 of their own.
The next biggest chunks of American migrants are in Canada, England, and Australia.
The United Kingdom, which has just voted to leave the European Union to keep migrants at bay, has sent 7 percent of its citizens to live elsewhere, mostly in the United States, Canada, and Australia.
There are big pockets of them in Spain, France, and–would you believe it–South Africa. Yes, 315,ooo former citizens of the United Kingdom live in South Africa, making them the fourth largest group of migrants there next to Zimbabwe, Lesotho, and Mozambique.
We know of the Philippines’ diaspora; Filipinos have to find another country for gainful employment and it has become less of a labor trend and more of a culture over the years.
But when you compare the Philippines and the United Kingdom, which differ in population by only around 30 million but are oceans apart in economy and quality of living, you’d be surprised to know that while 7 percent of UK citizens left their home, only 5 percent of ours chose to do so.
On the surface, this data would force you to ask: Is the United Kingdom a less liveable place than the Philippines? Economically, of course not, so you would go on to ask what it is about a first-world country that it sends away a bigger part of its population than the Philippines, a developing nation that actually relies on overseas labor for its survival.
Changing stories
There is no answer needed, only a change of narrative.
We have to scrap our ancient notion of migration as a story of poor people coming to leech the rich, and of rich people protecting its resources.
People migrate for different reasons now. And, as in the case of rich countries’ overseas citizens, people migrate simply because they want to, or that life has taken them there.
In the case of Europe, it has in recent years become the chosen destination for refugees, and this has reawakened nationalist sentiments that Europeans are now pushing boats back to sea.
Europe is made up of countries with the world’s strongest economies and social security systems, so it is not difficult to guess why refugees would feel secure finding home in the continent. These benefits they are after come with a price, however–discrimination and, in some countries, the trickling of anti-migrant policies that, when left unchallenged, could blow up into institutional racism.
But the predicaments of refugees now— war, famine, poverty — were the same problems that plagued Europe in the late 1800s to early 1900s. Europeans sailed mostly to South America and for many centuries, they contributed to the surge of population in the region.
So it is not only a changing of stories but also, for Europe, a reversal of fates.
As former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fisher pointed out, it would not only do Europeans well to pay their dues but also to “view immigrants as an opportunity to grow their labor force” without which “they cannot have economic prosperity, a high level of social security, and a population in which pensioners place a growing burden on the economically active.”
Defining immigrants
So how do you define an immigrant now? In multiple ways.
There is a migration crisis, we cannot ignore that, but in the current scheme of things, migration simply means the building of human resource, and that is a benefit that will be shared throughout the world if we just continue to allow free movement.
Take Canada for instance: 21 percent of their population are immigrants, and they want more. Atlantic Canada is losing their young people either to other countries or to the Western provinces. For fear of an aging population, they are on a hunt for immigrants.
They even implemented a program: the Provincial Nominee Program (PNP), which fast-tracks citizenship for immigrants. Recently they added more consular offices in some countries, including China, out of a desperate need to double their number of immigrants, even visitors or foreign students.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau even has a human spin to it: A lax immigration process would mean it is easier to keep families together in Canada and that, he believes, is “an important help and driver to the middle class.”
In the United States, migration activist and journalist Jose Vargas likes to point out that immigrants can also be defined as job creators. They own businesses that gives jobs to “native” Americans. In Vargas’ case, he owns two organizations that employ US citizens.
For today’s generation that is now more culturally aware and economically able, migration also means educational exchanges that result in a trade-in of knowledge.
In the United States alone, there was a 500-percent increase in the number of international students from the 1950s to the present.
The United Kingdom, meanwhile, remains the top destination for foreign students. Its higher education institutions attract more international students each year than any other country and recorded a 5-percent growth from 2013.
What does this mean besides knowledge trade? It means money. By estimates of the British Council, international students bring in about £10 billion to the country each year.
It is such a significant contribution that although enrollment numbers look excellent for the United Kingdom, they are not being complacent. They recognize that countries like China, Singapore, and South Korea are upping their game, and they wouldn’t want to lose foreign students to their competition.
One of the United Kingdom’s solutions is even to continue sending their own students abroad, so that they may expand UK connections in the global educational arena.
So what does it mean to be an immigrant in the 21st century?
It means you play an integral part in the building of societies. It means you are a cog in a global economic machine. It means you are a precious resource.
It means that you can no longer be placed in a dichotomy of being one’s loss and another’s gain, or, worse, an excess to one and a liability to other.
Being an immigrant in this day and age means that you bring with you endless benefits to your birth country and the country of your choosing.
It means that, as of this moment, you are a part of this ever-flowing movement of people that is as important and as necessary as the world is turning.
