Across the world, a backlash to immigration is remaking politics. In election after election, voters have backed candidates who promise to do whatever is necessary to stop the flow of unauthorized arrivals and, in many cases, send millions back to their countries of origin, no matter how war-torn or desperate. Anti-immigrant politicians and activists spread disinformation to suggest that countries are being invaded by waves of undocumented migrants. Images of migrant caravans, rickety boats at sea, and chaos at borders suggest that authorities have lost control of the migration system as a whole. With these images repeated on social media and anti-immigrant views gaining traction with the general public, even politicians normally sympathetic to immigration have found themselves recalibrating and on the defensive.
These politics reflect the reality that, globally, irregular immigration—entering a country without prior authorization—is at historic levels. Americans are familiar with the record number of attempted crossings of the U.S.-Mexican border: nearly 2.5 million in 2023 alone, compared with less than half a million a year at the beginning of the millennium. But that surge is not unique to the United States. In Europe, the number of unauthorized border crossings climbed to 380,000 in 2023, the highest since 2016. In other areas of the world, even where hostility to immigrants is more pronounced and, in some cases, even violent, migrants continue to risk death and abuse to enter a country, often because they know work is available.
The fact that the phenomenon is so global also points to the problem with policy responses that aim to crack down on particular borders or in individual countries: today’s unprecedented levels of migration make plain that a decrepit, outdated system, built in the wake of World War II, is incapable of contending with today’s humanitarian needs, demographic trends, or labor-market demands.
States that focus on border restrictions, mass deportations, or the abrogation of legal protections for asylum seekers will fail to solve the problem. They will simply redirect it while creating a new host of problems that will, in the long term, feed the problem rather than solve it. They will empower criminal networks and black markets while leaving their own economies worse off. The system will continue to decay. Instead of short-term hard-line responses, the better and ultimately more successful route is to build a new system that can replace the old one and effectively address today’s challenges. That new system must start from the premise that migration is a permanent feature of human civilization—in fact, border management and standardized passports are relatively new phenomena—and that there is a way to manage the movement of people in a manner that is orderly, dignified, and advantageous to all parties. That would mean both supporting development in migrants’ countries of origin and making legal immigration channels accessible and efficient.
Failure to immediately begin work on this new system will mean more social unrest, more inequality, and more abuse and exploitation of the most vulnerable. A new system could reduce the sense of disorder and lack of border control that has upended politics, and it would also create more opportunities for migrants, as well as for citizens of destination countries. It could enable the refugee system to work as intended, restoring credibility to the asylum system. Contrary to much of the current public discourse, immigration does not have to be a zero-sum proposition.
WHO GETS IN?
For many high-income countries, the current approach to legal immigration that allows migrants to enter through family reunification and through labor visas is not only bureaucratic but also untethered to the evolving demands of their labor markets. Job openings that migrants could fill, especially in lower skilled sectors, are often not filled. There aren’t enough labor visas available to meet workforce demand, but the number of people who can seek asylum is not capped. The asylum process is easily accessible for those who make it to the border, so it should come as no surprise, then, that people are using asylum processes as a way to enter the labor force.
In the United States, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act established the type and number of labor visas available to employers. The act set the cap for H-2B visas, the main visa for low-skilled nonagricultural workers, at 66,000 per year. The demand for H-2B visas, however, has rocketed since the program’s inception, and the industries supposed to benefit from them have faced unprecedented labor shortages in the last several years. Yet the U.S. government has been unable to respond beyond allowing modest but temporary increases in the cap, creating legal employment opportunities for only a fraction of the foreign workers that U.S. industries rely on.
Even the process for acquiring the H-2A agricultural visa, which is not capped, has bureaucratic hurdles that limit its widespread use. With concerted, sustained efforts, the program has helped bring in more seasonal farm workers from Mexico in authorized rather than unauthorized ways, but it has proved to be challenging for farm workers from elsewhere to access these visas. A smarter labor-migration scheme would tie visa quotas to labor-market shortages and reevaluate those quotas frequently; it would also pair those visas to markets, extending beyond Mexico and into Central America, in which high numbers of migrants currently fill jobs. Yet political disagreements have prevented Congress from modernizing the 1965 legislation, allocating appropriate resources, and correcting this disconnect.
Many European countries have prioritized attracting high-skilled workers, with very few provisions to admit lower-skilled ones. Not surprisingly, many of these countries, such as Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom, now face labor shortages in service sectors such as construction, hospitality, and health care without clear pathways to meet those needs.
At the same time, nearly all countries grant wide-ranging access and protections for people classified as “refugees”—that is, those who are fleeing persecution because of “race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion,” in the words of the 1951 Refugee Convention, which counts 149 states as parties. Not only are refugees admitted to safer countries without any assessment of the skills they have or the needs of the country welcoming them but, as stipulated in the convention, they also have a right to jobs, housing, education, travel documents, and social protections. Accordingly, even people who cross a border without authorization can avail themselves of these protections if they request asylum and their refugee claims are validated.
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has estimated that more than 43 million people worldwide currently qualify as refugees. The definition of “refugee” as detailed in the convention and its subsequent protocol can be traced back to World War II, when millions of Europeans were displaced. Although modern refugee and asylum policy has evolved only slightly over the last eight decades, its foundational tenets remain relevant and essential. It has undoubtedly saved millions of lives.
The need for these protections is more critical than ever, and the right to seek asylum must remain sacrosanct. Yet under the current rules, many people who are forced by circumstance to relocate do not actually qualify as refugees. In 2023, climate-related disasters displaced a record 26.4 million people, more than those displaced by conflict. Many affected countries, such as those across the Sahel and the eastern Horn of Africa, are already economically and politically fragile, and there is little government support for families who must choose between moving and starving.
Likewise, the number of people who move to escape poverty vastly outstrips the number who qualify as refugees. Many migrants face acute, often life-threatening risks in their home countries but because of the current binary approach to individuals fleeing crises—you either qualify as a “refugee” under current laws or you don’t—hundreds of millions of desperate people are either ignored or demonized.
A BROKEN SYSTEM
For those on the move in search of stability, safety, or better opportunities, the legal channels available to migrate are few. The result has been a surge in irregular immigration and an overreliance on seeking asylum. The established systems for resettling refugees in safe countries are woefully inadequate to meet demand. Even the United States—which has the largest program, admitting more than 100,000 refugees in 2024—does not take in a fraction of the qualifying refugees who apply for asylum.
Over the last several years, growing numbers of people have been crossing borders—whether by land, sea, or air—and seeking asylum once they arrive in their destination country. Europe witnessed a dramatic surge in 2015 as Syrians fled their country’s civil war. Although applications decreased sharply in subsequent years, the number of applications is again on the rise. In the last 20 years, asylum applications in the United States have increased from less than 100,000 a year to more than 500,000 a year. Even at the U.S.-Mexican border, far fewer people are seeking to evade detection than in years past. Instead, they are walking up to the border, presenting themselves to border patrol officials, and requesting asylum.
Yet while more people are seeking asylum, less than half will qualify for it. But even if they fail to establish an asylum case, applicants often find a viable route to live and work in the destination country for years before immigration authorities make a final determination on their case. In the United States, the asylum backlog has now reached three million cases. Complicated cases have taken as long as seven years to be resolved.
Immigration does not have to be a zero-sum proposition.
Some countries, such as France, Germany, and Greece, have shortened asylum processing times. Still, an asylum seeker’s right to appeal can add years to the clock. In many countries, applicants can work, find housing, and put down roots while their cases wend their way through the system. Many of those who are not granted work permits simply disappear into their country of destination, finding work in the informal sector, where they are often underpaid and exploited. The success of so many applicants who enter and stay in a country of destination through this irregular pathway incentivizes others to attempt the same route, adding to the overburdened asylum docket and further slowing the adjudication of new applications.
This inefficient system also traps many applicants in limbo, preventing them from returning home for fear they will not be able to come back. Applicants with legitimate asylum claims can wait years before they have the status and stability they need to build a future. For those who start new lives but eventually do not qualify for asylum, deportation can be traumatic and destabilizing. It is also expensive and time-consuming for the deporting governments; as a result, millions stay unlawfully.
HUMAN RESOURCES
In addition to harming migrants, this broken migration system is fueling a political backlash. More and more governments are embracing restrictive policies. Some are rolling back asylum protections. In 2024, both Finland and Poland passed legislation that allows border officials to turn back asylum seekers at their land borders. The United States has also significantly restricted its asylum protections for those seeking refuge at its land borders. And South Africa is contemplating withdrawing from the Refugee Convention altogether.
Ironically, this anti-immigration wave is hitting at the same time that immigration is becoming more essential than ever. Global fertility rates have dropped from 5.3 births per woman in 1963 to 2.3 in 2021. When the asylum system was set up, in 1951, many of the most advanced countries in the world were experiencing a baby boom. Veterans flooded the workforce, and the demographic trend meant there were plenty of workers to meet economic needs for decades into the future. Today, many societies are experiencing the opposite trend. By 2050, nearly 40 percent of the population in Japan and in South Korea will be over the age of 65. Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain also have fast aging populations. Governmental efforts to encourage families to have more babies have largely failed, as have attempts to replace work often done by migrants, such as elder care, with artificial intelligence. Thirty of the largest economies in the world suffer from labor shortages, and those unfilled jobs cost an estimated $1.3 trillion in lost GDP in 2023 alone.
Because there has been little political appetite to modernize immigration systems to meet the demand for low-skilled labor, the shortages are being filled by people who migrate irregularly. In the United States alone, about five percent of the overall workforce is undocumented, and in industries such as agriculture, construction, and food service, the percentage runs much higher. These workers are contributing to economic progress, but they are also more vulnerable to abuse and exploitation and are more likely to depress wages and working conditions for workers who are citizens. In the agricultural sector, employers pay undocumented workers as much as 24 percent less than they pay authorized workers. These lower wages can incentivize employers who already face difficulties in recruiting workers to become overly reliant on those who are undocumented.
At tremendous risk, many migrants depend on smugglers to help them find work abroad. Since 2014, nearly 3,000 migrants have died trying to cross the U.S.-Mexican border, with hundreds more dying in the Caribbean and in the Darién jungle connecting South America and Central America. During that same period, more than 30,000 migrant deaths have been recorded in the Mediterranean, one of the most dangerous migrant routes in the world.
In the meantime, criminal networks are flourishing. There is a high demand for entry to more stable, economically prosperous countries, and the fewer legal pathways there are, the more profitable smuggling becomes. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime has estimated that as many as three million migrants are smuggled every year, bringing in as much as $10 billion a year for the smugglers, who charge up to several thousand dollars for a single client. In many cases, whole communities help foot the bill, knowing that some of these migrants’ wages will eventually come back as remittances.
GIVE ME YOUR TIRED, YOUR POOR
Given the current anti-immigration mood, revising the Refugee Convention to expand access and protection to a greater number of people is a political nonstarter. Worse, such a move could risk rolling back the refugee and asylum protections that remain critical for tens of millions of vulnerable people. Yet without a modernized approach to the movement of asylum seekers, increasingly negative public perceptions of immigration may cause governments to chip away at these protections. Governments need to adopt an approach that recognizes the link between development and migration: lack of development fuels migration, but migration also fuels development in source and destination countries.
The evidence is overwhelming that poverty is a key driver of the recent and unprecedented uptick in irregular immigration. As recently as 2008, more than 90 percent of the people stopped at the U.S.-Mexican border were Mexicans. Seventeen years later, as the Mexican economy has grown, only around one-third of the migrants trying to cross the border without authorization are Mexican, and there are many more families and unaccompanied minors. Today, those apprehended hail from more than 100 countries, with growing numbers from poor communities in places such as Bangladesh, China, and India. Many are fleeing poverty, which in many parts of the world has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and a changing climate.
Even those migrants moving from conflict-ridden Afghanistan, Syria, and Venezuela increasingly cite the lack of economic opportunity at home as their primary reason for leaving. One Venezuelan migrant I met in Mexico last spring told me that she had worked as an office administrator in a primary school and had survived the upheaval wrought by the economic collapse of the country in 2015. But as inflation and other economic pressures increased, she was no longer able to afford health care for her ailing mother. In 2024, she finally decided to leave Venezuela with her entire family, with the hope of reaching the United States. Her husband and her sons carried her mother in a bed sheet through the Darién jungle. Sadly, her mother did not survive the trip, dying shortly after reaching Mexico.
HELP WANTED
For the millions of people around the world suffering from the effects of poverty, climate change, and violence, the response of the aid community has been to rely on official development assistance in sectors such as health care, education, infrastructure, and agriculture. Legal immigration has been an underutilized tool. Migrants’ remittances already significantly boost developing economies; in 2022, migrants sent home over $831 billion. Creating opportunities for vulnerable people to migrate legally and secure formal work can empower them to rely more on their own capacity and less on aid.
That so many migrants who are undocumented find jobs in the informal markets of their destination countries signals an imbalance between legal immigration pathways and economic need, particularly in sectors such as agriculture, construction, hospitality, and health-care services. The United States, for example, relies on migrants entering irregularly to meet over 70 percent of its agricultural labor needs. Nearly one in five workers on dairy farms is an immigrant. During the early days of the pandemic, the share of meatpacking workers who were foreign born stood at 45 percent, 28 percentage points higher than the average share for all industries combined. Without migrant farm workers, the United States would not enjoy a stable food supply.
Similar but less stark trends have been confirmed in construction and health care, sectors in which the demand for labor will likely only grow. In Spain, for example, a baby boom that lasted from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s created a generation of Spaniards who are now nearing the end of their careers. Over the next 20 years, some 14 million people in Spain will retire, and there are not enough workers to replace them. Boosting GDP enough to provide pensions for these retirees will require expanding immigration. Spain’s central bank has estimated that filling the projected labor shortfall will require around 25 million immigrants over the next 30 years.
Restrictive immigration policies empower criminal networks and black markets.
There are some promising programs that demonstrate how to address labor shortfalls through immigration. Since 2021, India has signed bilateral migration deals with Australia, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. These accords create legal immigration channels, aligning visa quotas with workforce needs, especially in high-demand sectors such as agriculture, health care, and construction. They also include provisions for skills training in the countries of origin for migrants, so they are better prepared for those key industries.
Another forward-looking approach comes from, of all places, the right-leaning government of Italy. In 2023, despite having campaigned on a hard-line approach to immigration, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announced adjustments to the country’s immigration policies to allow in more foreign workers to address labor shortages. Over the next three years, Italy will admit more than 450,000 new workers to meet demand in various sectors, including agriculture, health care, and caregiving, in exchange for the origin country’s agreement to accept back migrants who entered the country irregularly and do not have a legal right to stay.
The EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, an unprecedented effort by European countries to share responsibility for the union’s external borders, presents another promising model. In addition to improving border management by protecting security while preserving the safety and rights of those crossing borders, the agreement calls for the recruitment of foreign talent to meet the EU’s labor-market needs.
WIN-WIN
With the right systems in place, all parties—migrants, their countries of origin, and their host countries—can benefit. To get there, high-income countries should direct development funds toward skills training for workers that will prepare would-be migrants for high-demand industries. Such targeted aid would benefit the country receiving the aid by boosting the skills of its own workforce, in addition to ensuring that a migrant is also ready for work in a destination country.
The first step is for destination countries to analyze their own labor-market gaps and, if needed, change their policies to ensure a better alignment between skills shortages and visas, as Italy is now doing. They should also map current trends in irregular migration and share this information with aid agencies, which should use it to prioritize skills training in source countries.
The development arms of governments must then work with organizations on the ground to ensure that the most vulnerable communities have access to regular migration opportunities. Bangladesh, for instance, is now home to many technical schools where would-be migrants learn how to fix cars or take care of children, helping them build skills they can use in Bangladesh and elsewhere. Since 2013, Germany has had an initiative to train and recruit nurses in other countries. The program doesn’t just benefit the nurses; it also fills labor gaps in the German health-care sector and creates much-needed additional skilled workers in the origin countries.
Long-term strategies on the part of rich destination countries should focus on training or retraining workers from poorer source countries. Collaborative projects between the imaging company Planet Labs and the International Organization for Migration are helping identify agricultural and pastoral communities most likely to be displaced by climate change. This data-driven approach enables governments and aid organizations working in vulnerable communities to take proactive measures, such as improving water management and teaching more efficient agricultural techniques, that help people succeed and remain in their home countries while also imparting new skills linked to future job opportunities for those who will choose to move.
In places where jobs are scarce, development organizations must ensure that workers who have been trained in new skills are able to access employment abroad through legal channels. The market works reasonably well in connecting high-skilled workers to job opportunities around the globe. Low-skilled workers, by contrast, are not able to land jobs as readily through ethical, safe, and legal pathways. But there are some promising fixes in the works. In 2023, for example, Australia and Tuvalu, an island north of Fiji, established a pilot labor-mobility program that addresses the threat of rising sea levels in Tuvalu while easing labor demands in Australia. Australia committed $110 million to Tuvalu for various infrastructure projects, including coastal adaptation and telecommunications, and established a special visa pathway allowing up to 280 Tuvaluans per year to live, work, and study in Australia. Such efforts could be scaled up around the world by using data analytics to identify at-risk communities before large-scale displacement occurs.
High-income countries should also invest in apprenticeships and temporary or seasonal migration programs. Such efforts can foster innovation and progress in migrants’ home countries far more effectively than can traditional assistance projects. For countries that have diaspora communities across the globe, encouraging the diaspora to invest in development programs and skills building can enhance local skills training and services. Finland, for example, has an initiative that temporarily deploys Finnish-Somali health-care professionals to Somalia.
The world needs workers to be trained in their country of origin so that they can readily access jobs in host countries, send home remittances, and eventually bring their skills back home to fuel development there. And vulnerable migrants need to be able to access safe and legal immigration pathways when necessary. Officials should not assume that the labor market, left to its own devices, will protect migrant workers or support the communities that host them. Governments must make investments in migrant protections, empower civil society organizations and unions to play a monitoring role, and enforce labor laws.
Likewise, local officials, community leaders, and the private sector in destination countries must ensure that there are sufficient services to meet the demands of a growing population—and that migrants receive the support they need to integrate successfully in their host country. When immigration is poorly managed, communities feel the tension. Yet when local officials receive the support and resources required to manage immigration, they are often the first to express their support for newcomers.
Finally, to make the regular pathways to immigration more attractive than the irregular pathways, countries must enforce their borders, including by deporting migrants who do not qualify for asylum or other protection; immigration authorities should process these deportations quickly and carry them out quickly, treating deportees with dignity. By encouraging migrants to rely on regular, legal pathways, current asylum systems will be able to help fulfill their original purpose by responding to refugees more effectively.
THE PROMISE OF MIGRATION
In recent years, it has become evident that public perceptions of migrants are often as outdated as the regulations that oversee immigration. By restricting immigration, countries across the globe, rich and poor alike, are missing critical opportunities to boost economic growth and social unity. The world’s most vulnerable people, meanwhile, are left unprotected.
To realize the promise of migration, policymakers need to overhaul the system. Every country has the right to manage its own borders and decide who can remain in the country lawfully. But rather than spending tens of billions of dollars annually exclusively on border enforcement, which has limited effectiveness (particularly when migrants seek asylum and do not try to evade detection), governments must invest in an approach that links immigration trends with labor-market needs and development gaps.
Migration can work for all. States must build a system that takes advantage of the global marketplace and empowers people to connect with opportunities for security and prosperity. Newly skilled individuals must be able to take advantage of safe and legal immigration opportunities and then reinvest their resources into fueling development in their communities of origin.
The politics of migration seem almost impossibly fraught. But countries must pursue strategies to address their looming labor shortages. Doing so will also help address some of the world’s most persistent development and humanitarian challenges, taking pressure off the desperate people who now see irregular immigration as their only way to survive.