EU:Kinder policies towards illegal arrivals can help avert future problems, a migration expert tells Ruadhán Mac Cormaic, Migration Correspondent.
European governments must learn to manage immigration if they are to reap its benefits and minimise any adverse effects, a leading expert in the field has said.
Dr Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington and adviser to over 20 governments, said proper management would require the harnessing of all arms of government and continual conversation between the state and its citizens. "When I say manage, I don't mean control. I mean that there is somebody that has a decision-making role, and then all of the other parts of the state work towards a common goal," said Dr Papademetriou.
Pointing out that Europe's native-born workforce will decline by over 16 million by 2025, and by almost 44 million by 2050, Dr Papademetriou predicted that the continent's largest sources of migrants in future would be Africa, India and China. Population movements from the newer EU member states would continue to increase in the short term but would slow once economic conditions in those countries made the need for emigration less compelling.
In an "age of mobility" where people were constantly moving between countries for short periods, successful immigration policies would rely on "constant conversation" between the state and its citizens, said Dr Papademetriou. "If you abandon an area and you do nothing, you surrender the area to people who have their own private agenda, whether good or bad. You have to bring your public with you.
"Tell them in advance what the objectives of the immigration programme are. Demonstrate to them that you have integration processes . . . Have a conversation with your public, then the public doesn't feel deceived or surprised and if the government becomes less believable, the country loses. These are essential features of a good immigration system - not a perfect system."
In almost all rich countries, immigrants and their offspring are well behind natives in educational achievements, economic benchmarks, and social and political engagement. These cumulative disadvantages can have "enormous implications" for the affected ethnic communities and arguably even greater implications for social cohesion.
Ireland was one of very few countries that experienced extremely high immigration growth in a very short time, he said, but there was now a need to shift attention to the integration of newcomers.
"It takes relatively few investments - in the English language, in recognising credentials - and those few investments in the overall scheme of things are tiny, in order to perhaps double the benefits that you get from migration," he said.
Dr Papademetriou said governments would have to deal with regularisation of the undocumented.
"Behind the scenes many of them do. The Germans went nuts over the Spanish [ amnesty] programme, and guess what they did in November of last year? They legalised the status of about 100,000 leftover people from the Balkan wars. They did it quietly. They just made a decision, they announced it, no fanfare, done." The Irish Government should consider regularising the status of illegal immigrants here as their numbers were likely to be relatively small, he said.