# Immigration

Immigration is the movement of people from one country to a foreign country. While human migration has existed throughout human history, immigration implies long-term permanent residence (and often eventual citizenship) by the immigrants.

## Quotes

* If foreigners were allowed to meddle with the affairs of a nation as soon as they arrived, many dangers might occur, since the foreigners not yet having the common good firmly at heart might strive for certain goals in opposition to the people
** Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1-2.105.3
* You know, one of the reasons why our economy is growing is because of you and many others. Why? Because we welcome immigrants. We look to – the reason – look, think about it – why is China stalling so badly economically? Why is Japan having trouble? Why is Russia? Why is India? Because they’re xenophobic. They don’t want immigrants.
** Joe Biden, “Remarks by President Biden at a Campaign Reception”, Whitehouse.gov, (May 1, 2024)
* The economic impact of immigration is a complex issue and one that simple models of supply and demand do not address very well.
** Susan B. Carter and Richard Sutch, “The Immigration Debate: Studies on the Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Effects of Immigration”, ch.8, “Historical Background to Current Immigration Issues”, (1998), p.290
* In 2010, more than 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants and their children. This includes 90 companies founded by immigrants and 114 companies founded by children of immigrants. These companies employ more than 10 million people worldwide.
** “The Facts on Immigration Today: 2017 Edition“, Center for American Progress, (April 20, 2017)
* Across the globe, a record number of people are being forced from their homes. The number of forcibly displaced individuals worldwide has increased from 33.9 million in 2010 to 65.3 million in 2015. Of these, 21.3 million are United Nations-recognized refugees; 37.5 million are internally displaced within their home countries; and 3.7 million are stateless.
** “The Facts on Immigration Today: 2017 Edition“, Center for American Progress, (April 20, 2017)
* Solo voy con mi pena Sola va mi condena Correr es mi destino Para burlar la ley Perdido en el corazón De la grande Babylon Me dicen el clandestino Por no llevar papel Pa' una ciudad del norte Yo me fui a trabajar Mi vida la dejé Entre Ceuta y Gibraltar Soy una raya en el mar Fantasma en la ciudad Mi vida va prohibida Dice la autoridad.
** Alone I go with my grief Alone my curse goes Running is my destiny To get around the law Lost in the heart Of the big Babylon They call me the clandestine For not carrying papers To a northern city I went to work I left my life Between Ceuta and Gibraltar I am a line in the sea A ghost in the city My life is forbidden Says the authority
** Manu Chao, Clandestino, Clandestino (1998).
* Increasingly, I believe that the issue of migration will be seen by future historians as the fatal solvent of the EU. In their accounts Brexit will appear as merely an early symptom of the crisis. Their argument will be that a massive Völkerwanderung overwhelmed the project for European integration, exposing the weakness of the EU as an institution and driving voters back to national politics for solutions.
** Niall Ferguson, "The EU melting pot is melting down", Boston Globe, June 18, 2018.
* European centrists are deeply confused about immigration. Many, especially on the centre-left, want to have both open borders and welfare states. But the evidence suggests that it is hard to be Denmark with a multicultural society. The lack of social solidarity makes high levels of taxation and redistribution unsustainable.
** Niall Ferguson,"The EU melting pot is melting down", Boston Globe, June 18, 2018.
* Perhaps we should seriously consider whether we can continue to admit so many immigrants.
** Mike Harcourt according to Douglas Todd: Vancouver's housing crisis four decades in the making December 31, 2016
* “Strangers at the gate” was the alarmist cry heard in the wake of 1989 and all that. “The Economist” (March 15, 1991) showed a ramshackle border guardhouse being overrun by a giant US bursting with all sorts of foreign-looking (and strangely cheerful) characters. Such hyperbole has since disappeared, partially as a result of tightened procedures for asylum across Western states. But there still seems to be a gap between a restrictionist control rhetoric and an expansionist immigration reality. An influential comparative volume of immigration control argues: “[T]he gap between the “goals” of national immigration policy . . . and the actual results of policies in this area (policy “outcomes”) is growing wider in all major industrialized democracies.” Why do the developed states of the North Atlantic region accept more immigrants than their general restrictionist rhetoric and policies intend? The phenomenon of unwanted immigration reflects the gap between restrictionist policy goals and expansionist outcomes. Unwanted immigration is not actively solicited by states, as in the legal quota immigration of the classic settler nations. Rather, it is accepted passively by states, either for humanitarian reasons and in recognition of individual rights, as in asylum-seeking and family reunification of labor migrants, or because of the states’ sheer incapacity to keep migrants out, as in illegal immigration.
** Christian Joppke, “Why Liberal States Accept Unwanted Immigration”, World Politics, Vol. 50, No. 2 (Jan. 1998), p. 266.
* Nobody ever leaves his homeland for good if he is not to some extent déraciné. It is an idle illusion to think that the most courageous and enterprising Europeans came to America; the truth is that an overwhelming majority of all immigrants who crossed the Atlantic were either a personal failure in Europe and hoped to make riches quickly in the New World or that they belonged to a political, racial, or religious group which had failed collectively in the struggle for power and survival. It is difficult to imagine somebody leaving his fatherland because he was too happy and too successful.
** Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, The Menace of the Herd (1943), p. 230
* The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.
** Leviticus 19:34 NIV
* Regarding assimilation theory, assimilation often refers to the tendency for immigrants to adopt the cultural and social values of their host country, particularly as their amount of exposure to the country’s social and cultural context increases. The term “assimilation” has been critiqued in recent years, but the general findings regarding the tendency of immigrants to gradually look more like the native citizens of their host country over time remain. In particular, one persistent finding in criminology is that first-generation immigrants tend to be less crime prone than their native peers, whereas second- and third-generation immigrants look more like their native peers in their criminal behaviors. Another common finding in the literature is that immigrants brought to the United States as younger children tend to have higher rates of adolescent and adult criminality than those brought as older children. In a criminological context, assimilation theory suggests that as immigrants become more assimilated to the US culture, they adapt to the criminal behaviors of native citizens. Since undocumented immigrants are, by definition, first generation and, on average, have fewer years of residence in the United States compared to legal immigrants, assimilation theory would predict lower crime rates for undocumented immigrants.
** Michael T. Light, Jingying He, and Jason P. Robey; “Comparing crime rates between undocumented immigrants, legal immigrants, and native-born US citizens in Texas”, PNAS, (December 22, 2020) 117 (51) 32340-32347; first published December 7, 2020
* Our findings are also consistent with research on the selective nature of migration, which suggests that immigrants tend to fare better on multiple social indicators than would be expected by their level of socioeconomic disadvantages. In addition, many undocumented immigrants are driven by economic and educational opportunities for themselves and their families, and the decision to migrate necessarily requires a considerable amount of motivation and planning. As such, undocumented immigrants may be selected on qualities such as motivation to work and ambition to achieve, attributes that are unlikely to predispose them toward criminality. The consequences of criminal sanctions due to their precarious legal status may also be relevant. Far more than legal immigrants, undocumented immigrants have strong incentives to avoid criminal involvement for fear of detection and deportation. In this regard, lower rates of crime for undocumented individuals are consistent with a deterrence-based argument, whereby undocumented immigrants face considerably harsher sanctions (mainly deportation) for criminal wrongdoing compared to their citizen and legal immigrant counterparts. Taken together, these perspectives—assimilation, selection, and deterrence—help us understand why the observed crime rates for undocumented immigrants were considerably lower than those for legal immigrants and native-born citizens. Each, in turn, offers a fruitful avenue for further research on undocumented immigration and crime.
** Michael T. Light, Jingying He, and Jason P. Robey; “Comparing crime rates between undocumented immigrants, legal immigrants, and native-born US citizens in Texas”, PNAS, (December 22, 2020) 117 (51) 32340-32347; first published December 7, 2020
* We have problems with illegal migration, we have the problem of the Caucasus, we have a problem of ethnic crimes... the fact that our authorities hypocritically pretend that such problems do not exist leads to people discussing them only in the street, at the Russian March.
** Alexey Navalny as quoted in Moscow nationalist rally hears attack on Putin party BBC, (November 4, 2011)
* I maintain that the primary approach to solving the housing problem in the Greater Vancouver area lies in the immediate reduction and future control of immigration
** Art Phillips according to Douglas Todd: Vancouver's housing crisis four decades in the making December 31, 2016
* Economic historians examining trade and migration during the nineteenth century have offered compelling evidence that migration, both high- and low-skilled, provided higher gains than trade alone and have also suggested that migration may be a necessary condition to receive the overall economic gains of openness to trade and capital flows, due to total specialization or locational economics of sale (Hatton and Williamson 1998; O’Rourke and Williamson 1999). A neoliberal approach to global economic efficiency would call for unrestricted migration, allowing labor to move freely to the country where it earns the highest return and where its marginal product is the highest (Chang 1998).
** Christopher Rudolph, “Security and the Political Economy of International Migration”, The American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 4 (Nov 2003), p.604
* I think many times the way immigrants — people look at immigrants with such a sense of diminishment, as if this person is less than I am because they’ve left their country. Well, I actually think they’re more than we are, because they’re braver. They’ve gone some other place. They have to operate in another language. How easy would that be? If I had to go to China today and start living in China and doing everything in Chinese, it would be very, very hard. So you think about the bravery of these people and the desperation with which they’re trying to find a realm of safety for their families and — just the basic safeties that we take for granted, every day we get up. And I don’t know; I don’t know how a world with so many resources and so many religious traditions and good hopes — how we can keep doing these things to one another in the world that create refugee populations. It just seems outrageous. Why is that happening so much?
** Naomi Shihab Nye Interview with On Being (2016)
* In my view, the theme of the twenty-first century is immigration. Everything rotates around it: climate change, Covid-19, populism from Trump to other “aspirational” dictators, global finance, etc.
** Ilan Stavans Interview (2021)
* Immigrant life in general is miserable, as one sees in the literature produced by those who experienced the journey.
** Ilan Stavans Introduction to Yiddish South of the Border: An Anthology of Latin American Yiddish Writing edited by Alan Astro (2003)
* Far be it for me to question a decision my father might have made in the late-1970s, but we’re on a track to welcome more immigrants over time as our population ages.
** Justin Trudeau according to Douglas Todd: Vancouver's housing crisis four decades in the making December 31, 2016

### “Changing Sovereignty Games and International Migration Changing Sovereignty Games and International Migration” (Fall 1994)

Aristide R. Zolberg, “Changing Sovereignty Games and International Migration Changing Sovereignty Games and International Migration”, Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, Volume 2 Issue 1, (Fall 1994)
* [I]n the first centuries of the modern State's existence unauthorized emigration was tantamount to treason and was punishable by death or enslavement. The resilience of this concept is confirmed by its persistence, in more recent times, as the hallmark of the "totalitarian" States.
** p.155
* The nationalization of the State-its transformation into a community whose members share a common origin and a common fate, coupled with the idea of sovereignty residing in the "peoples" into which the world is divided-further enhanced the character of immigration as a disturbance. In relation to a self-representation, in which exists considerable and growing differentiation based on occupation, residence, class, and the like, fictive kinship is perceived as the major determinant of identity. Those coming in from outside are "others." The official U.S. designation, "aliens," indicated this as well. This is further confirmed by the distinction that has arisen in the laws of many countries between such "others" and outsiders who are members of the national tribe by reason of their ancestral origin-ironically, a distinction most explicitly espoused in recent times by Germany and Israel, but also acknowledged by the United Kingdom ("partials") as well as Italy and Spain.' Despite contentions that U.S. nationality is conceptualized on a political rather than ethnic basis, this sort of concern underlies not only the racist conception of citizenship noted earlier, which prevailed until the mid-twentieth century but also the "national origins" system established to regulate immigration in the 1920s. Somewhat similar policies prevailed in Canada and Australia. Today, these policies persist in Canada, where within the "point" system positive weight is given to language competence in one of the two languages of the "founding" nationalities, British and French.
** p.161
* States' aspirations to achieve control of population movement were substantially achieved only in the wake of World War I, with the establishment of a worldwide system of border controls based on "zero immigration." It is a reflection of this that Hannah Arendt observed in The Origins of Totalitarianism that "theoretically sovereignty is nowhere more absolute than in matters of 'emigration, naturalization, nationality and expulsion."'
** p.162.
* Since the end of World War II, the right to leave has been forcefully asserted, most notably in article 13 (2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and more recently in the Helsinki Declaration. Furthermore, decolonization has also entailed its extension to many millions of former colonial subjects whose movement was previously limited. Moreover, preliminary investigation suggests that this right to leave has also been broadened steadily to mean not only physical departure, but the right to relinquish one's obligations to the State of origin-that is, the right of expatriation. If the above analysis is correct, this amounts to a very extensive and unprecedented qualification of sovereignty, which is by now close to universal.
** p.163.
* Instituted for Europe by way of the Geneva Convention in 1951 and expanded to encompass the whole world in 1967, the international refugee regime was originally grounded in a narrow construction of the notion of refugee as a person outside his or her country and deprived of protection from the State of origin because of reasonable fear of persecution. Among the western liberal democracies, in practice, refugee status was attributed mostly to persons originating in Communist countries. Although "persecution" is still the prevailing core of the refugee regime at both the national and international levels, in recent years a number of international lawyers, notably James Hathaway, have argued that the status of "refugee" should be grounded in the more expansive concept of "deprivation of human rights," as operationalized in existing legal instruments.
** pp.166-167.

## Dialogue

    V. M. Varga: In the favelas of Brazil, there are six-year-olds with Glocks. They roam in packs, stealing whatever they can find. Mexican lowlifes stream into this country like wolves, eyeing our women and children. In the Congo, a family of six live on 10 cents a day. You turn on the TV, what do you see? Boat people. Mass migration. You're living in the age of the refugee, my friend.
    Emmit Stussy: Look, if you won't take back your money, well, I can't make you!
    V. M. Varga: You see it, don't you? Millions of people bought houses they couldn't afford, and now they're living on the streets. 85% of the world's wealth is controlled by 1% of the population. What do you think is gonna happen when those people wake up and realize you've got all their money?
    Emmit Stussy: Hey! I just charge for parking!
    V. M. Varga: Oh, you think they're gonna ask questions when they come with their pitchforks and their torches? You live in a mansion. You drive a $90,000 car.
   * V. M. Varga as interpreted by David Thewlis and Emmit Stussy as interpreted by Ewan McGregor in “The Narrow Escape Problem”, Fargo, (May 10, 2017); written by Monica Beletsky

## See also

* Immigration to the United States