This Land Is Our Land

by Suketu Mehta

  Canada’s per capita immigration rate is three times that of the United States. In 2016, it welcomed 320,000 immigrants. One out of five Canadians today was born somewhere else. And the Canadian public loves it. Eighty-two percent (and rising) think immigration is a good thing; two-thirds also love multiculturalism, the idea that there isn’t, nor should there be, a uniform Canadian culture. Ninety-five percent think someone born abroad will be as good a citizen as someone born in Canada. Even working-class white voters for populist parties like Harper’s Conservative Party, which held power from 2006 to 2015, are in favor of immigration; those who describe themselves as most strongly patriotic in polls are also most likely to support immigration and multiculturalism.

  As the authors of a 2015 survey noted, “What the findings do tell us—through empirically grounded facts—is that, amidst the noise of global ethnic conflict, grim warnings about domestic terrorism and a lethargic economy that is failing many, most of us are keeping the faith in Canada as the most welcoming multicultural society on the planet.” The Canadian experience shows that the more you experience immigrants firsthand, the more likely you are to want more of them.

  * * *

  As the populations of the developed countries get older, they need the vigor of immigrants all the more, because they are young. Four out of five immigrants to the USA are under forty, and the work they do will support the half of the country overall that is over forty. It’s going to be a nation of geezers as the baby boomers retire. And most immigrants don’t come here with their parents, so their social security taxes go toward paying for others’ parents. Immigrants also have more children than the native-born, so their children will also continue subsidizing both the graying native-born and their increasingly less fecund children.

  Americans are retiring in larger numbers, and they’re living longer. In 1960, there were about five workers paying social security taxes for every retiree or disabled person receiving benefits; by 2013, there were fewer than three. And Americans aren’t making enough babies. In 2016, the U.S. fertility rate fell to an all-time low of 1.8 babies per woman; the replacement rate is 2.1.

  In 2018, for the first time in thirty years, the federal government gave out more money in social security than it received in payroll taxes: a shortfall of $2 billion, which meant it had to dip into the social security trust fund. At current levels, this fund will run dry by 2034. After that, social security recipients will only get 79 cents for each dollar they’re owed.

  One way this financial Armageddon can be averted, according to a report by the trustees of the Social Security Administration, is to increase immigration, illegal as well as legal. Immigrant workers are younger, and therefore will work longer and pay more into the system. Immigrants, both legal and illegal, will pay half a trillion dollars into the social security trust fund over the next twenty-five years. Over the next seventy-five years, they will pay $4 trillion. “The numbers get much larger for longer periods,” explained the Social Security Administration’s chief actuary, Stephen Goss, “because that is when the additional children born to the immigrants really help.”

  The issue is particularly acute when it comes to undocumented immigrants, most of whom pay into the system but are ineligible for benefits. According to the Social Security Administration, undocumented immigrants paid $13 billion in payroll taxes in 2010 and received only $1 billion in benefits. The rest of the money went into shoring up the social security trust fund.

  Immigration reduces the social security deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars; the greater the number of immigrants that we let in to work and pay into the system, the more likely retirees are to not have to open cans of dog food for their dinner. America’s problem, in the years ahead, isn’t going to be that too many people are coming here. It’s going to be that too few might want to.

  But this is not just an American problem. By the middle of the century, a quarter of the worldwide population outside Africa will be sixty or older. By then, there will be fewer than two workers for every retiree in twenty-four European, seven Asian, and four Latin American countries. Japan already has the lowest number of workers—two—for every person over age sixty-five. African countries, by contrast, have thirteen.

  Europe is actually shrinking, in real numbers. Fertility rates in every European country are below the replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman. Today, there are 740 million people in Europe and Russia combined, and 1.2 billion in all of Africa. Africans are younger, more able to work; 60 percent are under the age of twenty-five, while only 27 percent of Europeans are.

  By 2050, the population of Europe and Russia will shrink to 700 million, while Africa’s will double, to 2.4 billion—a quarter of the global population. By the end of the century, almost 40 percent of humanity will be African. The future of our species, like our past, is African.

  * * *

  After Brexit, the U.K. is looking toward its former colonies, the other fifty-two nations of the Commonwealth, to save itself. Some have suggested making a trade agreement with them, to replace the one Britain had with the European countries. But some of the former colonies, such as Singapore, have surpassed their former master in per capita income, and many others, like India, have vastly bigger domestic markets. Why should they make a deal with a cold, windswept bunch of islands in the North Sea?

  In 1968, the Conservative Party parliamentarian Enoch Powell made his notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech, warning against taking in brown- and black-skinned people. It was partly aimed against people like my mother—East African Asians who had migrated to the country of their citizenship. He forecast doom for a Britain that would be foolish enough to take them: “It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre … As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’”

  A half century later, the Thames is not foaming over with blood. It’s actually the opposite. The East African Asian refugee community—Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, and Sikhs—is one of the wealthiest communities of any color in the U.K.; their educational achievements eventually outran those of native-born whites. Even though the biggest factor in the Brexit vote was fear of immigrants, it is immigrants and their descendants who will help their new country in making the deals it seeks with their ancestral countries. They are ambassadors, each one of them.

  The Hudson is not foaming over with blood, either, because of all the new Americans on its shores. The analyst Ruchir Sharma points out that immigration is a crucial factor in U.S. economic growth. “The United States now relies more than ever on demographics to defend its economic power. In the past decade, population growth, including immigration, has accounted for roughly half of the potential economic growth rate in the United States, compared with just one-sixth in Europe, and none in Japan,” he says. “If it weren’t for the boost from babies and immigrants, the United States economy would look much like those supposed laggards, Europe and Japan.”

  Further, he notes, “Immigrants make a surprisingly big contribution to population growth. In the United States, immigrants have accounted for a third to nearly a half of population growth for decades. In other countries with Anglo-Saxon roots—Canada, Australia and Britain—immigrants have accounted for more than half of population growth over the past decade. Those economies have also been growing faster than their counterparts in the rest of Europe or Japan.”

  For many countries, immigrants are, literally, the future of the nation. As the Swedish government puts it on an official website: “Sweden needs immigration to compensate for the decline in numbers of babies being born here.” Even as anti-immigration sentiment is on the rise in Sweden, because of fears of the strain it would impose upon its generous welfare state, the government recognizes that a certain level of immigration is also essential to that same welfare state’s survival.

  For Germany to maintain its current balance of working-age people to retirees, says Sharma, it
would have to attract 1.5 million new immigrants on top of the 1 million that came there in 2015—and would have to keep letting in 1.5 million migrants a year until 2030. “That is not to suggest that Germany can or should simply accept more than a million refugees a year, because the challenges of integrating that many people into the economy quickly are real,” he says. “It is only to dramatize the scale of Germany’s aging problem, in which the imbalance between old and young is unfolding even faster than the refugees were arriving in 2015. This situation is typical for many industrial countries: Even a huge increase in the number of migrants they accept will only partially offset the depopulation bomb.”

  Under 2 percent of Japan’s population is foreign-born—in nearly all other developed nations, that number varies from 10 to 15 percent. For Japan to maintain its population balance, it would have to let in ten times the migrants it does now—from fifty thousand a year to half a million per year.

  Japan, particularly in the rural north, is becoming a country without people. The young have moved to the cities, and the old are dying out. By 2050, 40 percent of Japan will be over the age of sixty-five. Where humans are absent, other animals step in; in some villages, wild boars outnumber people. There is no one to tend the rice paddies, and so the boars move in, aggressively, trampling the fields, eating everything they can. Some of them, weighing up to 280 pounds, attack humans, running through the village streets, barging into stores and schools. “The lack of manpower here is a real problem,” an official in charge of the anti-boar campaign explained to The Washington Post. “We need farmers to protect their own land and to take action against the boars, but it’s difficult for them because most of them are old.” The average Japanese woman will give birth to 1.44 babies in her lifetime, well below the replacement rate. The average boar has 4.5 piglets a year; and those piglets start breeding at the age of two.

  Japan can’t afford to remain a fortress, it is clear, but what is the alternative? A new vision of immigrant integration is needed. Imagine if the Japanese let in whole families—from Asia, Africa, Latin America—and the immigrant parents worked and paid taxes that would support the pensions of the elderly Japanese; and the elderly Japanese took care of the immigrant kids while the parents went to work. Everyone would have something to do, everyone’s lives would be enriched.

  António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, has proposed “global skill partnerships,” which are voluntary agreements between two countries—the one sending migrants and the one receiving migrants—to train migrants before they emigrate so they arrive with skills that are in short supply in their new country. If you can’t beat ’em, train ’em.

  UN figures, cited by Sharma, show that the number of countries that have publicly announced plans to increase immigration to fight population decline went from ten in 2010 to twenty-three in 2013. Countries that we think have been swamped by migrants have actually benefited from them. Turkey, which has seen its birthrates fall in recent years, gave residence rights to more than a million refugees, most of them Syrian, in 2014. That year, a quarter of new businesses were started by Syrians, and the places where they settled had the fastest growth in the country.

  * * *

  Just as America mines bauxite or copper from foreign countries, it has, until Trump, been good at recruiting the skills it needs. Take India, for instance. The USA isn’t directly implicated in India’s plight, where levels of malnutrition among its children exceed those in sub-Saharan Africa. But it benefits, like the British did, by having Indians move here. We are the second-largest immigrant group after Mexicans—there are almost 4 million of us here. From 2013 onward, more Indians have been entering the country each year than Mexicans. We are recent arrivals; only 13 percent of us were born here. But we made up for lost time. In 2017, India sent more immigrants to the United States than did any other country on the planet.

  Indian Americans are the most successful group of any kind in the United States: we have the highest per capita incomes, the highest educational attainment, and the lowest crime rate. Seventy-seven percent of us over the age of twenty-five have a college degree (which is two and a half times the American average); more than half have a postgraduate degree. We are 8 percent of America’s doctors. Around a fifth of all start-ups in Silicon Valley were founded by Indians.

  As a minority, we are the model. But it’s not because Indians are some sort of master race; if that were the case, what explains India? America skims off the “creamy layer,” as we used to call the elite of the lower castes in India, from other nations. Most of the immigrants who come here are substantially better educated and richer than the countrymen they left behind. We do not come empty-handed, mine host!

  18

  IMMIGRATION AS REPARATIONS

  Ta-Nehisi Coates has written about what America owes its black citizens: “Now we have half-stepped away from our long centuries of despoilment, promising, ‘never again.’ But still we are haunted. It is as though we have run up a credit card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us.”

  Globally, too, a giant bill is due. But the poor countries aren’t seriously suggesting that the rich send sacks of gold bullion or bitcoin every year to India or Nigeria. They’re asking for fairness: for the borders of the rich to be opened to goods and people; to Indian-made suits as well as Nigerian doctors.

  If the rich countries don’t want the poor countries to migrate, then there’s another solution. Pay them what they’re owed. Pay the costs of colonialism, of the wars you imposed on them, of the inequality you’ve built into the world order, and the carbon you’ve put into the atmosphere. Settle the account, and the creditors will have no reason to come to your house. Reparations or migration: choose.

  Some 12 million Africans were enslaved and carried across the Atlantic by European powers. Should not 12 million people from present-day Africa now be allowed to live in the countries enriched by the labor of their ancestors? For each African forcibly expatriated to make money for a rich country, should there not be an African now who’s allowed to migrate to that same country, to make money for himself as well as his hosts? Both will be better off: the African still suffering from what slavery has done to his country, and the rich country, which will now get more benefits from African labor, but this time without enormous pain and for a fair wage.

  Migration today is a form of reparations. But the countries that are paying aren’t necessarily the ones that are directly linked with the people they are absorbing; the vast majority of migrants move from a poor to a less-poor country, not a rich one. Fair immigration quotas should be based on how much the host country has ruined other countries. Thus, Britain should have quotas for Indians and Nigerians; France, for Malians and Tunisians; Belgians, for very large numbers of Congolese. The Dominican Republic, for instance, where the United States propped up the homicidal dictator Rafael Trujillo for three decades until his assassination in 1961, should be high on the American preference list.

  Michael Gerrard, of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia, proposes a just response to climate change in the title of his 2015 Washington Post op-ed: “America Is the Worst Polluter in the History of the World. We Should Let Climate Change Refugees Resettle Here.”

  In the text, he points out,

  Climate change results from the cumulative emissions of greenhouse gases all over the world, because the gases stay in the atmosphere for a century or more. International law recognizes that if pollution crosses national borders, the country where it originated is responsible for the damages. That affirms what we all learned in the schoolyard: If you make a mess, you clean it up. The countries that spewed (or allowed or encouraged their corporations to spew) these chemicals into the air, and especially the countries that grew rich while doing so, should take responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

  He proposes a formula for migrati
on as compensation: assuming 100 million climate refugees need to be resettled by the middle of the century, the United States takes in a quarter of them, since it’s contributed at least a quarter of the excess carbon in the atmosphere; Europe takes in another quarter, China takes in 11 percent, and so on.

  Just like there’s a “carbon tax” on polluting industries, there should be a “migration tax” on polluting nations.

  * * *

  The anti-immigrant French writer Alain Finkielkraut is an exponent of the theory that European countries have some sort of ur-culture that incoming immigrants should be expected to follow, rejecting the culture they brought with them (particularly if it’s Islam). But he unwittingly put his finger on another issue when he whined in an interview to Der Spiegel, “Some say that France was a colonial power, which is why those who were colonized could not be happy. But why has Europe been subjected to this massive immigration from former colonies over the past half a century? France still has to pay for the sins of colonialism and settle its debt to those who vilify it today.”

  Indeed, a huge bill is coming due to the West. And it is one that the West is not only morally obligated to pay, but one that it should also look forward to paying.

  In almost every case, as we have seen, immigrants make the countries they move to better. They work and contribute to the economy. Their social security taxes pay the pensions of the rapidly increasing ranks of old people in the rich countries, who’re living longer than ever. The fastest way to make the world a better place may be to ease barriers to migration. According to Michael Clemens, “The gains from reducing emigration restrictions are likely to be enormous, measured in tens of trillions of dollars.”