Immigration policy is the negotiation between what destination countries want immigrants to provide and what immigrants want entry to provide. The gap between these wants determines the quality of integration.
The Destination Country's Immigration Wants
Destination countries want different things from immigration at different moments and in different contexts, and the immigration policies they design reflect this variability. At their most expansive, destination countries want immigrants to fill specific labour market gaps that demographic or educational factors have created — the shortage of healthcare workers, the absence of engineering talent, the unwillingness of domestic workers to perform specific categories of work. At their most restrictive, destination countries want immigrants to remain temporally limited — to provide the labour that is needed and then return, without making permanent claims on the social insurance systems, the housing markets, and the political representation that permanent residents and citizens are entitled to.
The tension between these two wants — the want for immigrant labour and the want to limit the accompanying social and political claims — produces the structural incoherence of most destination country immigration systems. The temporary worker programme that is designed to fill labour gaps while preventing permanent settlement consistently produces permanent settlement, because the economic and social relationships that temporary workers form are not temporary, and because the destination country's enforcement capacity is inadequate to the task of requiring departure when legal status expires.
What Immigrants Want
What immigrants want from the destination country typically includes legal status that provides security against removal, economic opportunity that justifies the disruption costs of migration, social inclusion that makes the destination country a place where life can be built rather than merely endured, and eventually the permanent belonging that citizenship represents. These wants are not compatible with the destination country's interest in temporary, instrumental immigration at the population scale that contemporary migration involves.
Immigration policy is a negotiation between what destination countries want — the labour without the permanence — and what immigrants want — the permanence that the labour earns. The policy that pretends this negotiation can be resolved in favour of destination country preferences alone will produce either enforcement failure or the specific human costs that non-enforceable enforcement imposes on the people it nominally governs.
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