Economic migration, where individuals and entire families leave the land of their birth to live and work elsewhere is fast giving way to labour migration, which involves developed countries competing to attract skilled immigrants. The two seem alike, except that in the former instance, the people pick the country and travel there to settle. In the latter case, the country chooses the people usually opting for the brainiest of the lot. However, there have been and still are numerous cases where the lines are blurred.
For example, it is estimated that there are upwards of 10 million Hispanic illegal immigrants in the US, the majority of whom are hard-working farm or other menial labourers. For these people, who travel to the United States from Mexico and Central and Latin America, the objective is the opportunity to earn money, which they seem unable to do in the impoverished countries they come from. For their US employer, it is a way of solving their immediate labour problems. However, for the government, 10 million undocumented people pose a huge problem. As menial workers, they are very often cheated with regard to wages, because of their illegal status. They are therefore unable to afford adequate housing and health care and education for those who take their children along with them.
Temporary migration, which allows seasonal workers, such as crop harvesters, to return to their country of origin in the off-season, has been employed and not just in the US, but in other developed countries, but seems not to have worked efficiently. Even among temporary migrants, illegal migration has been steadily growing over the years, although countries have been just as steadily deporting illegal immigrants, as well as legal ones who would have committed crimes.
However, as the world shrinks in the face of technological advances and globalization, it is becoming more obvious each day that a way must be found to make migration work. Right here in the region, Barbados’s Prime Minister David Thompson has just revealed a plan to revamp that country’s immigration department (referring to the personnel who interface daily with visitors and immigrants to the island). Of course, Barbados being a tiny island physically would face massive problems if it were unable to control migration. Guyana on the other hand, with its wide open borders and huge untapped potential in the interior has not really gone after illegal immigrants and many live here for years unregularised unless they find themselves on the other side of the law.
Nevertheless, neither Barbados nor Guyana, as diverse as they are, can be compared to North America, from where illegal immigrants are routinely sought out and deported. On the other hand, global statistics for 2006 revealed that the United States alone received one third of the total legal immigrants in the world, an average of about 1.3 million people. The United Kingdom ranked second with 340,000 people, followed by Spain, Canada (about 250,000) and Germany in that order.
It is unlikely, even with a new president in office, that the US would drastically change its migration policy; nor would the UK or for that matter most of Europe.
However, countries which woo skilled immigrants, such as Canada and Australia, are going to find that the demand for unskilled labour will rise proportionately as there will be concomitant gaps in other sectors, such as agriculture, home care, food processing and construction. The constant retraining of personnel, which makes temporary migration inefficient and economically irrational will mitigate against it. Meantime, given current trends, more retiring former immigrants will opt to remigrate as long as the circumstances permit. Countries now losing young skilled and unskilled personnel must begin to better prepare for the influx of older though not always infirm retirees as the world turns.
