Be honest with the public: mass migration is going to continue and grow

I’ve heard tell the UK government is going to ‘smash the people smuggling gangs’ and ‘stop the small boats”. Ok. Let’s do the maths.

The Italian government says that in the 12 months up to June of this year, 113,500 people (mostly men) arrived in Italy via an ‘irregular route’ – see Lampedusa for details. In the previous 12 months, the figure was 56,000. Will these figures continue to rise?

The population of Africa is currently around the 1.4 billion mark. Most estimates suggest that by 2050 it will be 2.4 billion. In Nigeria for example, the current population of 225 million is expected to be 400 by 2050. To its north is Niger which has the highest fertility rate in the world at an average seven children per woman.

If the continent can create one billion jobs within 27 years, train the professors, doctors, nurses, and teachers, and build the houses, hospitals, and schools required for an extra billion people, while at the same time improving living standards, then the numbers of people leaving may not grow. If it cannot, it is logical to expect the numbers to grow.  Add on the flows of people into Europe from other places, for example the Middle East via Turkey, and the numbers grow even more quickly as people seek a better life for themselves and their families.  

Rapid and rising migration is driven by climate change, poverty, and conflict. A sharp reduction in these three push factors is not on the horizon.

Now factor in the job losses predicted in Europe due to the impact of Artificial Intelligence. According to pwc, 30% of jobs are potentially at risk by automation within a decade. Men will be slightly more affected than women, and less educated workers will be the most vulnerable.

It adds up to a problem. Given the abject failure of successive governments to stem the flow of people arriving illegally in the UK, and the figures cited above, it seems unlikely the small boats will not continue to set sail. The figure of 45,700 people arriving on boats in 2022 was a 60% increase on 2021. More people arrived by other means.

Our politicians are either unaware of the population forecasts, in which case they are woefully ignorant of the world, or they are aware of them and are lying. All the major parties should be honest with the public and tell us that mass migration is going to continue and grow. They can then either put forward ever more drastic measures to manage the situation, and/or start building the homes and schools we are going to need. They also need to prepare for a rise in support for what most of us in the UK regard as extremist politics, but which have become mainstream on the European continent over the past 20 years.

In France support for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (formerly National Front) hovers around the 35% mark, the party has dozens of MPs, and a recent poll suggested Le Pen would beat Emmanuel Macron if a Presidential election was held this year. In Finland, the far right is part of the governing coalition, in Germany the AFD polls at around 20%, and in Italy the government is dominated by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party. The UK is an outlier in, to date, mostly ignoring siren calls from the far right and left, but the inherent British suspicion of extreme politics will be challenged if migrant numbers continue to rise rapidly.

There is already support for measures which a decade ago would have been beyond the pale. The Illegal Migration Act 2023 allows for indefinite detention (upon awaiting deportation) as the home secretary can decide how long it is ‘reasonably necessary’ for a person to be held. Whether it is deemed to be a justified stricture or not, the fact remains that it is a reaction to calls for tougher action.

The current home secretary is one of the toughest talkers we’ve had. However, she has yet to venture as far as Italy’s transport minister Matteo Salvini who, reacting to 11,000 migrants arriving over one weekend said: “If we go on at 6,000 migrants a day, it means the fall of Italian society…what is happening in Lampedusa is the death of Europe”. 

Italy can now hold someone for up to 18 months, is building new detention centres, and restricts the activities of charity rescue boats. Last week, Salvini joined Le Pen at a rally to garner support for the far right ahead of next year’s EU elections. In a speech, Le Pen said: “We are defending our traditions, our gastronomy, our identities, our landscapes…. our people against the flood of migrants”.

Such talk might go down well in Saudi Arabia where, according to Human Rights Watch report, published last month, the authorities have murdered hundreds, possibly thousands, of illegal migrants coming in across the Yemen border. The report says Saudi border guards watch as columns of mostly Ethiopians are guided across by people smugglers, then they open fire with mortars and rifle fire. Survivors are held in conditions which makes the Bibby Stockholm barge look like a palace, before being deported. Smaller scale killings take place elsewhere, for example Syrians crossing into Turkey have been shot, and the Egyptians have gunned down migrants trying to reach Israel. India has killed well over 1,000 Bangladeshis trying to get through the 3,000-kilometre fence New Delhi has put around Bangladesh.

The UK Border Force is not about to resort to such measures, but a hardening of attitudes seems likely to continue. We have never experienced such rapid demographic change before simultaneously involving such a myriad of different cultures and languages. In the 1970s the foreign-born population of the UK grew by about 100,000. In the 1980s, this went up to about 400,000. Between 1990 and 2000 the numbers increased to about a million, and in the following decade climbed rapidly to just under three million.

In Sweden, one in four people living there was not born in the country. The pace of demographic change, in what was formerly one of the world’s most liberal countries, is why the previously ostracised far-right Sweden Democrats party came from nowhere to win 5.7% of the vote in 2010, and now polls at 20%.

How we handle what will be an ongoing issue over the next decade will influence voting patterns here. A long-term potential solution to the migrant crisis is to work with the government in the countries from which people are coming. But that would be a generational effort and require massive investment. In the shorter term, we need our political leaders to be straight with us and come up with policies which both satisfy the electorate and hold on to liberal democratic values.

In maths, you can’t square a circle, but this is politics, and as Bismark said “politics is the art of the possible, the attainable – the art of the next best”. At the moment we don’t even have that, we have an absence of honesty about the scale of the challenges.

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