The Link Between Migration, Globalisation and Development Report Novib Expert Meeting Noordwijk a/d Zee, The Netherlands March 13-14, 2003 Content Novib Mission Statement Introduction   1. Presentation day (March 13, 2003) 2. Discussion day (March 14, 2003) 3. A preliminary agenda for action Annexes 1. Expert meeting working paper expert meeting (Novib) 2. Presentation paper D. Bagasao 3. Presentation paper H. Entzinger 4. Background paper P. Emmer 5. Presentation paper P. Stalker 6. List of participants Acknowledgement      Related Information

Annex 4. Presentation paper

The Impact of Migration on Development
in the Countries of Destination

by P. C. Emmer


Is immigration a good thing? That is a difficult question to answer, and I am grateful to the organisers that they invited me to address this question, or at least part of it. It enables me to bring in some of recent work that I have been doing, together with several colleagues, in composing and editing a European Migration Encyclopaedia. That Encyclopaedia will contain more than 300 entries on migrating groups within Europe and to Europe starting around 1500. In doing this work, I realised that migration was very much a phenomenon of past centuries when we were poor. Not moving is a luxury. People started to move as soon as they left Paradise. In order to survive they had to move from area to area in order to collect and hunt and when agriculture took root more people were able to remain in one place. However, farms were usually too small to feed everyone and that meant that the eldest son was able to inherit and that others had to move elsewhere.

Here starts the story that I will use as an introduction to my subject today. The organisers of this conference have asked me to speak about the effects of immigration on the receiving country. It is a bit of a tall order, but the best I can offer is the following. Today, migrants are able to contribute to the development of their home countries by working in the developed world and by sending some of their savings home. Whether migration can contribute to global development will depend on the immigration policies of the rich countries. Only they can provide the jobs and the salaries that will allow the Third World migrants to transfer money to their home countries and by so doing they will increase consumption and investments. However, at present virtually all the rich countries have very restrictive immigration policies in spite of the fact that additional labour would be of benefit to their economies. The fear of immigration is, no doubt, based on the negative immigration experience over the past 30 years. I will take the Netherlands as an example and I hope that you will agree that other countries in Europe had similar immigration experiences. First, I will discuss the effects of immigration during the last centuries until the 1960s. In the second part of my talk, I will discuss the last three decades separately as the immigration history of that period is relevant for the present discussions in the Netherlands and in Europe.

Migration until 1960

Before the Second World War, however, immigration seemed much more beneficial then it has recently become. A country could be proud of receiving immigrants. They enable the economy to increase as immigrants usually created more jobs than they demanded. The phenomenon allowed employers to staff labour intensive industries such as shipping (and transport in general), defence and farming. Between 1500 and 1800, the Dutch economy was one of the most dynamic of the time and attracted perhaps as many as two million foreigners working away on Dutch ships, in Dutch armies and navies and on Dutch farms, especially during harvest time.

Let me introduce one of them in order to give all these nameless immigrants a face: Peter Hansen Hajstrup, born near Flensburg in 1624. He was one of seven children and when he turned twenty, three or four of his brothers and sisters were probably still alive. That was a problem because the family farm could only feed one family, Hansen’s parents were still alive when he was 20 and his oldest brother would inherit. That meant that he had two options: he could either marry a farmer’s daughter who would inherit her father’s farm or he could move to town in order to seek employment. He chose the second option and walked to Copenhagen, where he worked at a bakery. Whether we should believe his diary or not, he intimated that the baker’s wife took more than the usual interest in him and in order to avoid trouble, Peter Hansen left in a hurry, found a ship that was to sail to Amsterdam where he arrived in 1644. He could have remained a sailor, but he decided to take his chances and to find employment in Amsterdam, where thousands of young, poor, unmarried men and boys arrived every year. In order to explore the layout of the city he started exploring the streets of Amsterdam with a fellow Dane and soon found himself in what seemed to be a pub in order to quench his thirst. The girl, who served the drinks, however, seemed kind, set next to him and started to make sexual advances. Five hours later, he found himself down and out on the streets without a penny and blind drunk. The next day, he realised, in spite of a splitting headache, that he had to get some money as his landlady had asked for payment of past and future nights spent in her house. She mentioned that there was a way to get money quickly by visiting the offices of the Dutch East India Company. Should Paul Hansen be hired by the Company (and they needed 4,000 men per year on average!), he would be given an advance to tie him over until his ship would leave for Asia. Our hero went to the offices of the East India Company, found out that they were not hiring at the moment, but he heard from other disappointed men that the Dutch West India Company was in need of soldiers to fight a war in Brazil against the Portuguese. The next day Hansen signed up as a soldier, and sailed to Brazil. The rest of the story does not need much time to be told. Hansen went to Brazil, where he remained for 10 years as a soldier in the service of the Dutch West India Company. His diary is full of interesting details about the Portuguese enemy and the Brazilian Amerindian population. The territory held by the Dutch West India Company was rapidly shrinking, and for the last 6 years mainly consisted of Recife. After the final defeat Hansen was repatriated via Martinique to Amsterdam. There he met with a big disappointment: the Dutch West India Company was unwilling or unable to pay the remainder of his wages. He was told that the Company had already lost a lot of money in Brazil. Without a penny, Hansen returned to Denmark, where he became a schoolmaster in Flensburg. Now he had some luck, as at the age of 31 he was able to marry the daughter of a well-to-do ship captain. He died in 1672 at the age of nearly 50,having fathered 12 children. He had gone back to Amsterdam once more in order to claim his wages, but he never received them.

This story is very typical of the migration to the shores of the North Sea, attracting millions of young, unmarried males. I mentioned that the Dutch East and West India Companies hired no fewer than 4,000 to 5,000 thousand men each year and we could easily double this amount if we were to add the demand for labour in the Dutch merchant marine in Europe, the Navy and Army in times of war as well as that of farmers, who were in need of thousands of men to help them harvest. During the 17th and 18th centuries, more than half the crews of Dutch ships and a considerable percentage of temporary farm hands were non-Dutch.

In addition to these economic migrants, Holland was also flooded with asylum seekers such as the sefardi and Ashkenazi Jews from the Iberian Peninsula and Eastern Europe respectively, and Huguenots. In contrast to today, few of the political refugees received state or city support and most brought some capital to set up business in their new host country. In any case, those who could not survive had to depend on the philanthropy of their own group rather than on help from the host country.

In sum, Hansen seems to personify all the positive effects immigration could have. He and millions of other migrants enabled the Dutch to expand overseas and to profit from a niche in the world economy: the trade in tropical products and slaves. By attracting so many men, the Dutch were able to remain the premier European trading nation in Asia for almost two centuries. In addition, immigrant labourers made Dutch agriculture more efficient in that they provided the Dutch economy with more consumers (and the Dutch girls with more grooms) than would have been the case without migration.

Immigration continued during the 19th and 20th centuries. In that period the Dutch conquered Indonesia and about half the soldiers in their colonial army were of non-Dutch origin. During the 1920s and 1930s, the Netherlands experienced another wave of immigration, this time German girls who escaped the poorly performing German economy and usually served as housemaids in Dutch middle-class households. That migration ended when employment in Germany increased after the nazi take-over in 1933, but that in turn triggered a flow of political migrants trying to escape fascism.

I mentioned that the migration experience of the Dutch was only one of many. The “North Sea System” also existed elsewhere, albeit under another name. Paris was a magnet and so were London, Rome and Madrid. All in all there were seven migration circuits in Europe in which millions of migrants participated hoping to escape hunger and disease and to resettle with a higher income or to return with money to make life easier in their place of origin.

If we examine the period after 1945, the situation continued. Most migrants were interested in improving their economic prospects or those of their children. There was one exception: the returnees of the process of decolonisation. After 1945, more than 7 million people moved to Europe because they could or would no longer live in a decolonised part of the world. When they moved, they envisioned a social and economic decline in income, not a rise, but the unprecedented growth of the post-War European economies helped them to overcome their original setback

Migration after 1960

Why did migration change? Until now, I have demonstrated that is was better to live in a country with immigration than in one with emigration. Emigration areas were usually in decline or were unable to provide similar prospects of economic growth as other areas in Europe such as the Ireland, parts of Italy and most of Eastern Europe during the 19th century. In the classical immigration continents such as North and South America, Southern Africa and the Maghrib, and Australasia, as well as in the classical immigration centres such as the Midlands, the Ruhr, Alsace-Lorraine, immigration usually improved the incomes and living conditions of the migrants, albeit not always immediately.


Those beneficial effects more than compensated the negative sides of immigration. Immigrants could flood the labour market and drive down wages, immigrants could introduce an alien religion, increase house prices and put an extra burden on the environment. They would be a drain on the existing school as well as on the public health systems. I quote from two American newspaper comments when discussing the influx of immigrants in the US at the end of the 19th and the first decade of the 20th centuries.


“The question to-day is… protecting the American rate of wages, the American standard of living, and the quality of American citizenship from degradation through tumultuous access of vast throngs of ignorant and brutalised peasantry from the countries of Eastern and Southern Europe”. And: “More than a third cannot read or write: generally speaking they have been very difficult to assimilate”.

To summarise, immigration has usually had beneficial effects on the receiving countries. Why has this changed? Why have we become afraid of more immigrants rather than proud, in spite of the fact that the developed world needs additional labour, both skilled and unskilled. It would be a mistake to think that either increased demographic growth or an extension of the compulsory retirement age would alleviate the situation. The welfare state has created its own dynamics and allowed considerable number of people to withdraw from the labour market completely. Those who advise us to force more welfare recipients on the labour market never acknowledge that cultural change. Even if unemployment and disability benefits were to be severely limited, more than half of the recipients would not go and find a paid job on the regular labour market. We should come to grips with the fact that in every society there are groups that cannot and will not participate in the economy. That is nothing new. This happens even when there is no welfare state, as was the case in 17th century Holland where thousands of native Dutchmen were unemployed while – as we have seen before – many thousands coming from abroad were given a job. At the time, most immigrants were usually in a better physical condition than Dutch proletariat. Today, there are other handicaps in addition to physical ones that keep many from obtaining a regular job. In fact, virtually one million Dutchmen seem unable to enter the labour market due to the fact that they cannot accommodate themselves economically in the most complex society in history, while their employers are afraid of hiring anyone who will endanger the highest labour productivity we have ever known. In addition, we have created a cultural barrier, as some jobs are no longer attractive to western Europeans. These two factors explain why there are so many unemployed while at the same time employers are crying out for additional labour in such economic sectors as unqualified or semi-qualified nursing, cleaning, construction, truck farming, cable construction, just to mention a few. I realise that our elaborate system of social security laws has not been set up in order to keep more than a million people away from the labour market. However, that is what is happening. And to put it harshly, if we really force all of these people to become employed again, it might well be that we lose more because of declining productivity than we gain by saving on the payment of benefits. You should not misunderstand me. I am sure that this will not be the case for the first one or two hundred thousand or so. But we have to come to grips with the fact that the majority of the unemployed, either on welfare or on disability benefits, have created lives of their own and that they no longer meet, and will never meet, the demands of the labour market with the highest productivity in the world.

All the more reason, you would say, to remember the positive effects of immigration, and to allow for a resumption of selective labour immigration. You should not believe the graphs indicating that immigrants will replace large numbers of native workers. Immigrants usually enable those economic activities that would not have been there without them. Research indicates that wage levels and unskilled native workers are hardly affected by immigration. Usually, native workers and immigrants try to avoid one another. Yet, most European countries seemed oblivious to these research findings and are dead against future immigration of any kind, except when unavoidable, as in the case of asylum seekers, family reunion and ex-colonial immigrants. What has happened since the 1970s that allows us to explain this strange dichotomy: a strong demand for labour in certain segments of the economy and a complete ban on legal labour immigration.

Obviously, after the early 1970s the drawbacks of immigration outweighed the advantages. Calculations have shown that in the Netherlands, the average immigrant from a non-western country received 50,000 Euro in subsidies and a family of for about a quarter of a million. That situation cannot continue.

We must improve the chances of future immigrants by barring asylum seekers from entering the EU. Asylum seekers are admitted because of humanitarian reasons, not because they can contribute to the labour market. There seems no other way as to separate aid from admission to the EU. That means that asylum seekers will be housed and given food and protection in the region where they originate. Admission to the EU asylum camps can be more liberal than admission into the EU. It would enable poorer refugees to profit from asylum and it would end the practice of criminal “travel agents” who transport asylum seekers and advise them about the country in which they should ask for asylum as well as about the most effective story to tell the admission authorities.

Secondly, we should turn our attention to those who have a right to enter Europe: migrants from the former colonies and family members of immigrants already residing in Europe. These are unselected immigrants and both groups are not admitted because they will contribute to the economy of the host country. It is imperative that we make access to those state benefits more difficult to which they have contributed little. Interestingly, more than 70 percent of legal immigration into the US also consists of family reunion immigrants. By selecting their family members, the US immigrants do a better job - economically speaking - than the immigrants in Europe as the family immigrants in the US rely much less on public assistance than in Western Europe.

Thirdly, the European Union should come to grips with the fact that high-wage countries always attract illegal labour immigrants and will continue to do so. Most of these illegal immigrants go back. If we were to develop a system of selective legal labour immigration, I feel we should try to find of way of admitting those illegal immigrants who have proven to be successful.

But should we start opening a second door in addition to the asylum entry to allow for labour immigration to begin with? Some see future labour migration as a punishment for our “sins”, such as low mobility in the European Union, as only 2 percent of all Europeans work in countries other than those they were born in. In the US that percentage is at least double if we substitute “countries” for “states”. However, should we feel guilty? Why should Europeans not be allowed to have a preference for not moving? Another “sin” is the fact that our populations are declining.
Again, should we feel guilty about the fact that we have a preference for not investing much in rearing children? Third, we have a liberal system of financial compensation for avoiding the labour market or for doing work we do not like. Should we feel guilty about this? Last, but not least, we would like to balance paid work and leisure. That means short working weeks and workers being pensioned off at a relatively early age. Of course, we could change this state of affairs. But why should we? Why should we feel guilty about retiring early as long as we can afford it?

We should realise, however, that the price for our preferences is either economic stagnation and decline or immigration. In due course labour intensive industries are bound to disappear and the Third World could profit from this. That is why we should aim to open our markets to those products that the Third World can produce competitively.

Let the market decide what is to be produced in the West and in the rest of the world. However, I will have to disappoint those who believe that the development of the Third World will automatically stop migration. Income differences will continue to exist even within the developed world and migration is there to stay.

I want to skirt round the problem of integration and increased migrant criminality. Everything has its price, including migration. These problems have had a long history and one of the topics I dodged is the discussion as to whether the “new” immigrants are fundamentally different from those migrating in history. I already pointed out that similar observations were made about the “new immigration” into the US at the end of the 19th century, when the immigrants from Germany, Scandinavia and Ireland were replaced by those from Southern Italy and Eastern Europe.

My opinion on the matter is no other than that of a former alumnus of my university, John Quincy Adams, who became the sixth President and later Secretary of State of a nation that has some experience in making one out of many, the United States of America. When writing two hundred years ago to an acquaintance in Germany who had asked about the future prospects of his countrymen he wrote:

“The government of the United States has never adopted any measure to encourage or invite emigrants from any part of Europe… Neither the general government of the union, nor those of the individual states, are ignorant or unobservant of the additional strength and wealth, which accrues to the nation, by the accession of a mass of healthy, industrious, and frugal labourers…. This is a land not of privileges, but of equal rights… Emigrants…. are not to expect favours from the governments. They are to expect… the means of obtaining easy and comfortable subsistence for themselves and their families. They come to a life of independence, but to a life of labour- and, if they cannot accommodate themselves to the character moral, political, and physical of this country, with all its compensating balances of good and evil, the Atlantic is always open to them to return… To one thing they must make up their minds, or, they will be disappointed in every expectation of happiness as Americans. They must cast off the European skin, never to resume it. They must look forward to their posterity rather than back to their ancestors; they must be sure that whatever their own feelings may be, those of their children will cling to the prejudices of this country, and will partake of that proud spirit, not unmingled with disdain, which you have observed is remarkable in the general character of this people…”.
 

Summary


Prof. P. C. Emmer of the Department of History, Leiden University, spoke on the effect of migration to the receiving countries in Europe. Citing the positive effects that used to characterise early migration, Prof. Emmer contends that the quality and trends of present day migration have given rise to a big demand on the resources of the receiving country in terms of welfare, housing and the high costs of enforcement relative to the criminality that is believed to accompany the presence of migrants. The presentation invites new discussions on whether future migration should be based on the traditional selective process, such that state resources should be made accessible to those who are able to contribute an economic benefit, and in proportion to their contribution. Europe should not refuse help to those who need it for their legal protection and economic well being, such as refugees and asylum seekers, but the help should be given in their places of origin. On the other hand, he also advocates that trade practices should be reviewed so that the comparative advantage of countries could be maximised to the benefit of everyone. The case for selective admission is argued by presenting an unexpected though realistic view of migration’s impact on the receiving country.


Some issues emerging from the discussion

• The idea that only migrants are welcome who can be beneficial to us was viewed as very calculated. According to Prof. Emmer, the issue of costs is important here. In his view, such a calculated approach will save tax money, which is at present being spent on people who are not needed here. The issue of remittances was also mentioned as not being taken into account. Moreover, the contribution of migrants to the economy in the countries of destination should be considered. By way of a response, it was stated that the group of highly skilled migrants will not be a problem and will resolve itself despite there also being a large group of unskilled migrants.
• Furthermore, the idea of taking care of refugees in their own regions led to a discussion. Not all countries in the region can be regarded as safe. Besides, it is very expensive to set up such camps. In response, Prof. Emmer stated that such camps are no more expensive than taking care of refugees in Western countries. Besides, it might be a much better solution than turning refugees out onto the streets of Western countries.