The future of immigration: rational v emotional response

People use emotions and rational thinking in parallel. There is a clear role for each. Emotions create a driving force towards a goal, and rational thinking works best to figure out the best strategy to achieve it. So, you see a delicious cake that you’d very much like to eat, emotional bit complete. Your rational thinking kicks in and works out that you need to enter the shop, indicate your choice, hand over some cash and then take the cake and bite into it. Your rational thinking also interrupts with some possibly relevant queries – is it good value compared to the one next to it that looks just as nice? Do you have your best suit on and is it likely to ruin it? How many calories might it be? That sort of thing is a typical everyday challenge we all face and a well-developed brain allows emotions and rationality to work in perfect harmony to add pleasure to our day within our means. Emotions and intellect should also work in harmony when we are faced with danger or unpleasant situations such as seeing others in danger or suffering.

This last few months, we’ve all seen the trauma suffered by millions of refugees from tribal and religious wars in the Middle East and Africa, and most of us want to help them. The photo of the drowned toddler this week made lots of people suddenly very emotional, but in response to their resultant wave of competitive emoting and sometimes quite sickening sanctimony, the rest of us might reasonably inquire firstly why these people didn’t care beforehand like the rest of us and secondly why they think that the best way to respond is to switch off their brains. People have been suffering years, not just this last week. One toddler death is very sad but so are the many thousands of deaths beforehand that didn’t get photographed. And the way to avoid future deaths isn’t necessarily to do the very first thing that pops into your head.

UK Rational Response

With its well-established values, the UK was culturally-emotionally driven to help and has done more to actually help so far than any other European country, including giving 50% more to help refugees so far than Germany. Cameron often makes idiotic decisions, but he is right this time that the best way to help is not to let everyone into Britain but instead to contribute heavily to making effective safe havens and refugee centers near the refugee sources, e.g Syria. This is by far the best policy for a number of reasons.

Doing that helps genuine refugees. The inhabitants of refugee camps are far more likely to be genuinely fleeing from danger and in need of protection, far less likely to be economic migrants.

They are also far less likely to be ISIS terrorists trying to get entry to Europe to cause trouble, or criminals fleeing from justice than those fighting their way through train stations and disobeying police.

Better still, the UK policy helps the most vulnerable refugees – the old and the frail and the too young or too afraid to make the journey all the way to Northern Europe. Some of the most vulnerable will be allowed to come to Britain from those refugee centres.

The UK policy also helps genuine refugees without contributing to ISIS and the other likely destinations of the people traffickers fees. Each migrant squeezed onto an unsafe boat is another £2000 to a terrorist or criminal group, making the problem worse.

Using refugee centers and safe havens near to their own country avoids some of the long term problems associated with immigration to a foreign land, such as cultural conflicts.

Best of all, the UK policy of taking people from the camps and refusing those that have made the long and perilous journey to demand entry discourages people from taking that risk and therefore reduces the problem. Fewer toddlers will drown if people realize that it is best for their family to stay put than to take a huge risk to travel to a closed door.

Emotional response

Contrast this with the policy advocated by those sanctimonious emoters screaming about how wonderful and loving they are and how heartless everyone else is – that we should let everyone in. If we adopted that policy the result would be increased death and misery:

More and more people would want to come if they realize that the door to a better life is wide open.

The number of deaths would sharply increase as more and more criminal gangs and terrorist groups start trafficking.

Greater revenue would flow to ISIS and other terrorist and criminal groups, increasing their power and consequent problems in the countries people are fleeing from.

Allowing in those that made the journey might look charitable but actually it protects the strong rather than the weak. The weak could not come. Why allow a fit young man entry and deny a pregnant mother who wasn’t able to make the trip? Surely the young man should have stayed to fight to protect his vulnerable compatriots instead of fleeing for his own safety?

The number of terrorists and criminals entering among ordinary migrants and refugees would greatly increase (ISIS has already stated its guidance to followers try to enter the UK to commit terrorist acts here) leading to greatly increased security problems here, and resulting in probable backlash against genuine refugees, making it worse here for genuine refugees as well as the rest of us. Levels of crime and terrorism would increase greatly. (One of the reasons Saudi Arabia and some other Middle Eastern countries have stated why they won’t accept refugees is because terrorists and criminals are likely to try to hide in their midst.) I have previously estimated the likely scale of ISIS type terrorism in the UK and it is a big potential problem indeed. Increasing the numbers of supporters, recruits and even actual terrorists won’t help.

The numbers of economic migrants would also greatly increase. If the sheer weight of numbers of migrants coupled to political pressure from emotional activists means that no clear distinction is made between genuine refuges and all the others, then most people in the developing world might soon consider Europe an attractive option. There is no upper limit to migrant numbers until Europe is reduced in attractiveness to levels similar to migrant countries of origin.

Low-paid workers in host countries would find even greater downward pressure on wages, resulting in greater unemployment and poverty. Homeless people would find it harder to get homes. Sick people would find it harder to get access to medical care. All citizens would see greater pressure on public services and infrastructure. There are already significant conflicts throughout Europe between immigrant communities and host societies due to resource competition, and these would increase greatly as immigrant numbers put high pressure on infrastructure, public services and welfare. Cultural conflict is increasing too, especially with Islamic immigrant communities. Racial and religious conflict would increase.

The result would be a broken society, with increased poverty, increased crime and terrorism, decreased safety and security for everyone, increased social conflict, greater racism, and the inevitable rise of extremist groups on both sides.

Managed Immigration and Asylum

We need immigrants. We don’t educate enough doctors or engineers (or many other worker groups) so we need to fill posts with people from overseas. That need won’t go away. However, with very limited spare capacity in our already overpopulated country, we should limit normal immigration to those people we need and just a few others.

On top of that, humanity demands that we do our best to help people in need elsewhere. Obviously we don’t have enough resources to make everyone in the world wealthy so we must do what we can using our foreign aid budget and personal donations to whatever charities we think do a good job. Where people are displaced due to conflict, we should do what we can to give them safe havens, preferably without building instability and making future problems worse. Using our own and allied military to provide no-fly zones can make swathes of a country safer. UN peacekeeping forces could also be used if need be to protect people in those zones. That allows people to stay in their own country or an adjacent one with similar culture. Costs of providing and managing safe havens could be shared across all the rich nations, reducing unwillingness of potential host nations to offer them.

It is not always necessary to offer full immigration to people just to give them safe haven. Asylum should be reserved for those who genuinely cannot stay where they are, and where a problem is temporary, such as conflict, asylum could also be temporary. There is no reason to confuse short term and long term solutions.

A refugee stops being a refugee once they have found a safe refuge. If they carry on beyond that because another country offers a higher standard of living, they become an economic migrant and should only retain refugee status in that first safe country. It is good policy to ensure that refugees register in the first safe country they come to and Europe should enforce that policy and Europe should choose where to house them, not allow or encourage people to shop around for the best deal. It is entirely possible for the costs of providing them with safe refuge could be distributed among richer nations, wherever they are actually placed. Where asylum in another country is appropriate, asylum seekers should be welcomed as far as socio-economic capacity allows. Few people object to hosting and welcoming genuine asylum seekers.

Economic migrants should apply for immigration according to normal procedures. Those trying to jump the queue by forcing their way in, demonstrating and resisting police, clearly have little respect for the laws and well-being of the countries they wish to enter and should be returned to where they came from and barred from future entry. Looking at the very high proportion of healthy young men among the occasional refugee family, women and children, it is clear that this group represents most of the number currently migrating. Most are not genuine refugees but economic migrants. It is easy to understand that they want a better and wealthier life, hard to see why they should be preferred as an immigrant over a law-abiding and highly skilled alternative. Queue-jumping should result in being put to the back of the queue.

With properly managed policy, safe havens would protect refugees. Those in need of asylum could be provided with it, the rest protected where they are, or even returned to safe havens if they do not properly qualify. With economic migrants turned away and barred from future entry, the numbers attempting the journey would reduce, and with it the number of deaths and the support for terrorist groups.

In closing, I don’t think I have said much that hasn’t been said many times, but adding to the weight of such comment offsets to a small degree to over-emotional and counter-productive sanctimony I see every night on the news. In short, we should do what we can do to help people in danger and distress, but we won’t do that by creating problems in our own country.

Knee-jerk emotional responses that are socially, economically and even militarily unsustainable such as tearing down national boundaries and letting everyone in who has made the journey to our door will make things a lot worse for everyone.

Open your heart and your wallet and help, like the UK has, but don’t switch your brain off, as Germany and others advocate. Germany is not for the first time making Europe a more dangerous place, ironically due to a national guilt trip on account of the previous occasions.