Welcoming immigrants is right – and it makes sense

The economic and moral arguments in favour of immigration are compelling, writes Sholto Byrnes.

The Hungarians who voted in an immigration referendum overwhelmingly rejected EU quotas for refugees. Vadim Ghirda / AP

The good news first. The referendum in Hungary which would have authorised the government to reject EU migrant quotas failed. Next the bad news. It did so only because the number of voters did not add up to the 50 per cent necessary to validate the poll. Of those who did vote, an overwhelming 98 per cent cast their ballots against the quota – determined to shut their doors to the mere 1,294 refugees Hungary would be required to take under the plan.

It was a particularly nasty campaign, with posters declaring “Don’t put Hungary’s future at risk!” and politicians warning darkly that the 1,000 or so people would be just the beginning; soon “they” would be coming in the tens of thousands, threatening the country’s Christian identity and culture. And as the Hungarian opposition MEP Péter Niedermüller pointed out last month: “Particularly vile is the government’s argument about the refugees taking the jobs of Hungarians away, since we know precisely that the absolute majority of refugees arriving to Hungary do not want to stay here at all.”

But the referendum was just one instance of a tide of intolerance washing from continent to continent. In the United States there is Donald Trump’s putative wall to keep out the unsavoury characters he claims are pouring in from Mexico.

Britain’s Brexit referendum was won, unfortunately, at least in part by those who stoked fears of unstoppable waves of foreigners arriving to scrounge benefits, put locals out of work, and deprive British families of council housing and places at nearby state schools.

Singaporeans have grown resentful of mainland Chinese enlarging the population of their island state, accusing them of failing to respect their indigenous culture and norms. Deadly attacks on foreigners in South Africa reached such a peak last year that South Africans working in other countries on the continent began to suffer reprisals.

Anger at the inequalities exacerbated by globalisation is understandable and legitimate. Pointing the finger of blame at immigrants, however, is neither. Moreover, it flies in the face of both a moral imperative – our obligations to one another because of our common humanity – and the empirical evidence that immigration enriches, rather than impoverishes, societies.

Many studies have proven the second point. A report by the Manhattan Institute found, for instance, that if there had been no visa or work permit constraints between 2003 and 2007 in America, “an additional 182,000 foreign graduates in science and technology fields would have remained in the US. Their contribution to GDP would have been $14 billion [Dh51.4bn] in 2008, including $2.7 to $3.6bn in tax payments.”

America, the great melting pot, should be aware of these benefits above all. Bryan Caplan, professor of economics at George Mason University, agrees. “Like our ancestors, today’s immigrants come to swap their labour for our products,” he has written. Restrictions, he says, stop us unleashing the true potential of mankind’s skill, determination and ingenuity. In fact, he argues: “Letting anyone take a job any­where would roughly double global production. This isn’t trickle-down economics. It’s Niagara Falls economics.”

Time and again it has been shown that immigrants promote innovation, competition, diversity and productivity. This is not to deny that in the short term there can be difficulties associated with large-scale movements of people from country to country. Neither would it be fair to dismiss all those worried about influxes of newcomers to previously homogenous communities as knuckleheaded racists (although there are certainly plenty who are).

In the longer term, however, all the evidence points to the positive. As Jonathan Portes of the UK’s National Institute of Economic and Social Research puts it: “Reducing immigration by keeping out skilled workers, stopping students from staying in the UK and generally promoting, in the government’s own words, ‘a hostile environment’ for foreigners, is economic masochism.”

There are many possible models of how to facilitate and manage immigration. Freedom of movement, work and residence, as within the Gulf Cooperation Council, for instance, does not have to be accompanied by automatic access to the benefits due to citizens. Those may be withheld, or granted after a number of years or when certain conditions have been fulfilled.

But, it may be objected, what of those who are moving not to work, but to flee persecution and war? Firstly, those migrants have skills. The vast majority wish not for a life of idleness but of fulfilment, not least through the productive use of their labour.

And secondly, we come to the moral imperative. If Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban truly wants to protect his country’s Christian culture, he should remember the words of the Bible: “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat … I was a stranger and you invited me in … I was sick and you looked after me … whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

The Quran is equally clear about our mutual responsibilities: “Whosoever saveth the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind.”

There are no quibbles or equivocations to be made here. Leave aside the economic case: how will future generations view a newly super-connected world in which wealthy nations knowingly stood aside or excluded “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”, as the poem engraved on the Statue of Liberty puts it?

I cannot see how they could not look with astonishment at an age in which cruelty and callousness were so widespread, and in which so many disregarded not only the injunctions of their own religions, but also their own histories.

For what peoples on Earth have never, through the centuries, been immigrants?

Sholto Byrnes is a senior fellow at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia