Mediterranean tragedies remind us that migration is a very special problem (or maybe it’s not?)

On October 3^rd, 2013, a boat carrying hundreds of migrants shipwrecked not far from the Italian island of Lampedusa. 359 people died in the Mediterranean sea in the attempt to reach the southern European shore.

Seven days later, on October 11^th, 34 persons drawn in Maltese waters in a similar attempt to reach Europe. Recurrently, the tragedies afflicting Mediterranean waters remind commentators, politicians and public opinions of the total inadequacy of the migration policies of European countries and the European Union. But why are policy-makers incapable of designing good migration policies? Is it just that they are all bad in doing their jobs?

It is often assumed that migration is an especially complicated, intractable problem. It is; as are so many of the problems that governments try to address. We are not good in regulating migration, as we are not good in facing a variety of further challenges, from the economy to the environment. Obviously, there are many specificities which make migration unique – tragically unique indeed, given the human costs of bad migration policies. But the constraints to making good migration policies have much in common with other policy fields, when we look at them in general terms.

Obstacles to well-designed policies can be broadly grouped in two categories: technical and political ones. Take the regulation of the economy: after more than five years, the economic crisis is there to remind us that we still have much to learn in terms of regulating the economy. Problems are complex, ambiguous and multifaceted. Addressing the economic crisis requires the reduction of deficits and debts, but that will bring unemployment up. Clearly contradictory goals: where should you start from? Many recipes exist, and often it is unclear which one will work better – the proof is in the pudding.

Further than technical problems, however, it is political obstacles which often make policy design terribly complicated. There is some agreement that several European economies would need structural reforms to boost economic growth. But structural reforms impose costs and benefits to the society; and in a democracy, the bearers of both costs and benefits enjoy political representation, which can make the implementation of those policies very difficult.

If there is something special about migration policies, it is that the combination of the tensions inherent to policy-making is particularly evident there. It is when we look at those tensions, that we can understand the complexity of designing migration policies which are rational and effective, legitimate, and respectful of migrants’ rights. The point is that there are intrinsic potential contradictions between those goals. Let us see them in turn.

From an economic perspective, there is little doubt on what are good migration policies. If you ask economists if immigration is good or bad for the host economies, most of them will have few hesitations: immigration is a good thing. Migrants are an overall younger population when compared to ageing European societies. They help economic growth, and are net contributors to burdened welfare systems. So migration is good for European economies. True, immigrants commit more crimes than European citizens. But sociologists say that better integration policies would help with that. Immigrants are not anthropologically more inclined to commit crime: the share of poor and marginalised among them is higher, and poor and marginalised people commit more crime.

So if you want migration policies which are good – ‘rational’ – from an economic perspective, you want policies which are open to more immigrants, and help them settle within host societies. But here comes the key political problem: European citizens just do not want more immigrants. If you ask people what they want, a majority of them will tell you that what they want is less migration indeed. Many will also be sceptical toward integration policies, as they believe that having gentle immigrant policies would end up attracting more immigration.

What countries would need does not correspond to what citizens want: here is the tension between making effective policies and respecting the will of citizens. When we look at it from a larger perspective, we can see that this results in a broader problem: decision-making in migration incorporates some kind of paradox of democracy. It is extremely difficult to design policies which are democratic in both input (decision-making processes) and output (migration policies). If you want to make policies which are liberal with migrants and respectful of their rights (thus making the output more democratic), you need to insulate those decisions from the democratic process (thus making the input less democratic). If instead you want to respect the will of citizens, you will need to try to curb migration. And you will hardly be able to do that with liberal instruments: achieving less migration with gentle policies, when migrants are willing to put their lives at high risk to reach the European Eldorado, is by no means an easy task.

Indeed, until the 1970s migration policies were expansionist because they were decided behind closed doors, in venues where strange-bedfellow coalitions of business interests and pro-migrant groups could lobby together for ‘liberal’ policies. At that time, European citizens just did not care about migration. It is when citizens turned their attention turned toward the issue – and political entrepreneurs willing to capitalise from the problem had a great role in raising popular attention to migration – that policy-makers started to try and make those policies more restrictive – with limited success; but that is another story.

To make the picture even more complicated, migration is a rather ambiguous problem. We have good, reliable statistics on asylum-seekers and regular immigrants. But part of the immigration population – so-called irregular, or illegal, immigrants – can only roughly be estimated. Ambiguity distorts the perception of the problem. Boat peoples reaching the southern shores of Europe, and the tragedies associated to those arrivals, convey the idea of an undergoing ‘invasion’. Yet boat people account for a rather small portion of migratory flows. The OECD calculated some time ago that arrivals by boat contribute to some 15% of irregular entries: much of the rest is immigrants that arrive regularly – with a visa for tourism, or study, or work – and then overstay their visa.

Clearly a big challenge for European democracies; but also a threat to the EU integration project. Responses to migration vary within and across European countries. But if there is something that public and political reactions to migration share, that is a desperate call for more (or better) EU action. It is not clear, however, why the EU should be in a better position to address the technical and political contradictions outlined above, to which she adds the difficulty of accommodating the often conflicting interests of 28 member states. Calls for increased responsibility-sharing are unlikely to be met, if by responsibility-sharing one means creating automatic mechanisms for the relocation of migrants from the countries where they first arrive to other European states.

The EU also provides too tempting an occasion for blame-shifting games – which put it more simply means that if you are a policy-maker of one member state it will be just so easy for you to put the blame of your policy failures on ‘European institutions’. And yet, the EU actually proved a multiplier rather than a controller of migration. Southern countries joining the EU became more attractive as a closer gate to Europe – just think about Malta, and Spain before it. Whereas countries joining the EU from the eastern flank are representing an additional source of migration to western European countries. True, from a legal perspective, citizens of eastern European countries are not even migrants: they are European citizens enjoying their freedom of mobility. Yet many of the citizens of host member states are not that legally sophisticated; to them, new EU citizens are just migrants.

I have made a number of simplifications: things are more complicated than put here. To begin with, migration is a multidimensional problem, and its individual facets – such as asylum, labour migration, and irregular migration, among others – embodies distinct challenges and require different responses (though the boundaries among them are blurred: take the case of migrants that enter for study or labour, and then become irregular immigrants when their visa expires). Also, economists do not really say that all migration is good, but that only good migration is good (‘good’ simply being the kind of economic migration your country needs more). And in any case, if migration is good for a country as a whole, it places a larger burden on some – primarily the so-called ‘losers of globalisation’ – than on other segments of society.

However, even if you take its multidimensional nature and asymmetric costs and benefits into account, the key point holds: technical and political obstacles together make it hard for policy-makers to design good migration policies. Just as they make it difficult to design good responses to the economic crisis, which requires being able to reduce deficit and debt while also increasing the employment rate. Yes, migration is a unique problem indeed: just as many other political problems are, each one with its own specific set of technical and political constraints to good regulation.