But it is not just doctors whom countries in the rich world lack. Canada, amid an excruciating housing shortage, needs skilled construction workers. Italy needs welders and pastry cooks. Sweden needs plumbers and forestry workers. As for the United States, it is hard to imagine how profoundly people’s lives will change as Trump attempts to carry out his promised mass deportation program. What Americans eat, how they care for their children and elders, how many homes get built — all will be transformed with powerful effects not just for the economy but also for how people organize their lives, on where they set their sights and ambitions.
The right has no real answer to this problem and continues to argue for harsher restrictions. Centrists the world over have broadly capitulated to the right’s framework, turning away from the postwar commitments to asylum and promoting technocratic solutions like “skilled migration,” arguing that the rich world will be able to sluice through the rivers of humanity, discarding the pebbles and selecting the nubs of gold.
But they do so at their peril. Restrictive policies, once imposed, tend to last a very long time and have far-reaching, unforeseen consequences. People turned away from one country, or offered a place on unattractive terms in an unwelcoming environment, will find a way to build lives elsewhere, bringing their ideas, talents and drive to other places. That’s because of a powerful and often ignored force: the agency of migrants.
The pull of remaining in the place of your birth is one of the most powerful and enduring human impulses. It is easy to forget that even in this age of mass movement of people, where vast distances can be crossed more quickly than ever before, more than 96 percent of the world’s people live in the countries in which they were born. Most who flee disaster don’t go very far, traveling to relative safety within their own country or one next door, hoping to return home as soon as the catastrophe has passed.
Migration to another country, especially one a fair distance away, isn’t undertaken by people who are truly destitute or who lack ambition. It requires resources, documents, connections. Having the will to leave, to seek out something new and leave everything and everyone you know behind, is a profound act of self-creation.