Can wealthy modern countries avoid immigration-driven demographic transformation?

Immigration to the UK is running at extremely high levels and has been for two decades, with Brexit making no difference other than to its composition. If this continues the country will inevitably complete its transformation (already far advanced) into a deracinated demographic ponzi scheme officially held together only by Davos-brand liberalism.

However, to critically assess current policy one has to dispense with various unsound propositions about the causes of these high levels historically used by tabloid newspapers and parts of the Brexit campaign, for example those that overemphasise asylum seekers (actually a small percentage of total numbers) or immigrants’ desire to abuse the benefits system¹. These are arguments to sell newspapers and gain votes, not to explain reality.

Rather, the vast majority of immigration to Britain is for work (277,069 visas issued in the year ending March 2022) and study (466,611 visas), with the study path also turning into a work path for many via the ability to stay on after graduation; compare this with only 15,451 asylum grants. All these paths offer an eventual route to citizenship (via the 5 year residence requirement), with there being 196,085 grants of British citizenship in this same year.

Broadly then, the reason we have such a high immigration level is because supply and demand of labour favours it from poorer countries, and because successive British governments since 1997 are economically and socially liberal; they have wholeheartedly embraced the global market in labour (and education) and have no particular concern with preserving the historic identity of their nation into the future.

The economic and demographic drivers of immigration are common across the rich world

The economic and demographic drivers here are not unique to Britain or the West, but are common to all wealthy countries. These countries no longer have a large pool of low skilled native labour to draw on, and the native workers that are in this pool will seek the most attractive jobs, leaving the least attractive ones (agricultural labour, elder care etc.) to immigrants who have fewer options. The same dynamics are also at work in more skilled sectors such as healthcare and IT, these sectors are not unattractive per se, but there is more demand than supply among the native population. And at the same time, technology and globalisation has reduced barriers to the movement of people.

No wealthy country, not even an ethnonationalist one with comparatively high birth rates like Israel, has abstained from taking advantage of labour migration. In 2018, Israel issued permits for 65,800 temporary labour migrants mostly from South/East Asia and Eastern Europe, which would be equivalent to half a million in the UK by proportion of the population, and as in the UK, the real number is significantly higher due to people working illegally. In 2003 it was estimated that there were 300,000 migrant workers in Israel (which would be equivalent to 2.25 million in the UK), of which 200,000 were illegal.

South Korea had 1.425 million foreign workers in 2016, Japan had 1.72 million in 2020, while even countries like Hungary, Romania and Poland have seen large influxes of foreign workers in recent years. The idea some Westerners have that these are countries without immigration is false, the numbers are lower than the West, but they are still unprecedented, and growing, compared to a few decades ago. At the more extreme end, Singapore had 1.2 million foreign workers in 2021, making up about a quarter of its population, while in Saudi Arabia they make up around a third, and in the UAE about three quarters.

The path from immigration to citizenship is specific to the West, mostly

The difference between the Western and non-Western models of immigration is not really in the numbers, but in whether there is a path to citizenship. As the Migration Policy Institute describes labour migration to Israel:

“Labor migration in Israel is temporary in nature and based on contractual labor, with no path to permanent settlement or citizenship. In order to prevent extended stays, the government does not allow workers to remain for more than 63 months. Furthermore, labor migrants are not permitted to enter with their spouses or any other first-degree relatives, to prevent them from establishing permanent residence or starting a family in Israel. Employers, not migrants, are the ones who receive work permits, thereby maximizing employer and state control over the migrants. The state does not allow residence without a work permit and has a stringent deportation policy permitting the arrest and expulsion of irregular migrants at any time by administrative decree.”

Israeli policy is, unsurprisingly, an extreme example, but it is not that different to the way other non-Western countries handle labour migration. South Korea’s policy is not much different, having had an employer-led guest worker program called the Employment Permit System since 2004, with a maximum stay limit for migrants of 4 years 10 months (i.e. just under the 5 year requirement for naturalisation). Like Israel, migrants are not allowed to bring their families, however there are some limited options available for naturalisation. Japan also had a similar policy (until recently), which made it very difficult for immigrants to acquire permanent residence and naturalise, and the same restrictions are mostly in place for the gulf countries.

Will the illiberal world turn liberal?

So far I have presented a contrast between an illiberal non-Western world which welcomes temporary labour migrants but discourages or prevents them entirely from gaining citizenship, and a liberal Western world where labour migration offers a clear path to citizenship. However many Western countries also started out with the intention that migration would be temporary. Pakistani migrants who came to Britain in the 50s and 60s to fill labour shortages were never intended to become permanent residents; they came as single men intending to return home. Immigration acts in the 60s and 70s restricted this primary immigration, but allowed family reunification, causing the migration to become permanent.

The same process happened with Turkish Gastarbeiters in Germany, with the initial 2 year work permit system inaugurated in 1961 being changed to allow longer stays in 1964; it being too expensive and time consuming to constantly hire and train replacements; later changes allowed workers to bring their families too. Due to the early 70s recession, the program was stopped in 1973, and in the years afterwards the German government tried quite hard at various points to encourage the repatriation of guest workers, via financial incentives, restrictions on family migration etc; in 1983 German chancellor Helmut Kohl wanted to halve the number of Turks in Germany. But none of these measures had the desired effect, while many Turkish immigrants are still not German citizens, they (and their children) are clearly a permanent feature of the country.

In both the British and German cases, the yawning economic disparities between the Western and non-Western worlds provided continuing strong incentives both for employers to push for the labour and for the migrants to stay once they were here. While there was government pushback, the incentives on this side were outweighed by those on the other, and enough migrants ended up staying to have a large impact on demographics.

Many non-Western wealthy countries are only one or two decades into their guest worker programmes, will they follow the same path? There are signs that Japan, despite often being used as the paradigmatic example of a non-immigrant country, may be shifting (reluctantly, and self-deceivingly, like the West did), towards the Western model. Japan avoided a postwar guest worker programme as it still had surplus rural labour to draw on to drive industrialisation. However in more recent decades this source dried up and as the country’s birth rate dropped it started to look towards foreign labour. This began in 1993 with the 'Technical Intern Training Program’, a disguised guest worker scheme. Then the government started adding more professions to the scheme, for example elder care in 2015, at the same time denying they were developing an open door immigration policy and citing problems that existed with immigration in European countries. In 2017 it created a fast track to permanent residency, and in 2018 an official guest worker program that included a path to permanent residency. The number of foreign workers doubled from around 700,000 in 2013 to 1.4 million in 2018. Recent changes in 2021 allow more categories of foreign workers to stay indefinitely and bring families. Noah Smith, a stalwart pro-immigration liberal, sees Abe Shinzo’s administration as having made a decisive change, opening up Japan to diversity in order to avoid economic decline.

While not to the same extent as Japan, many immigrant receiving countries have become somewhat more open to the acquisition of permanent residence in recent years. In South Korea, naturalisation was historically rare but is rapidly becoming more common, with the cumulative numbers reaching 100,000 in 2011, and 200,000 in 2019. Even the gulf states have in recent years started to allow naturalisation, with Saudi Arabia introducing introducing 'Premium Residency’ in 2019 enabling foreigners to live and work in the country without needing sponsorship, and the UAE launching its ‘gold card’ permanent residency scheme in the same year. These countries are still very far from the Western model, but they are following a similar direction of travel, the current immigration system in many Western countries would have been unimaginable 50 years ago.

Conclusion

The key contest then is whether a commitment to maintaining the historical identity of a country is stronger among elites than the countervailing economic incentives to allow levels of immigration that result in demographic transformation. In all Western countries that initially tried to maintain the distinction between temporary and permanent migration, it eventually broke down, and they have now largely abandoned it. For the countries opening up to labour migration now, some like Israel seem likely to maintain the distinction going into the future, while others like Japan are showing signs of shifting towards a blurring of it.

Given the current economic and demographic situation of wealthy countries, the most plausible path to reimagining an immigration system that does not lead to drastic demographic change is to strictly maintain the distinction between temporary and permanent migration. This solution makes both economic and moral sense: the vast majority of migrants come because they want to earn more money than they can at home, not because they desire to change their nationality. However it requires the aforementioned strong commitment to avoiding demographic transformation among elites, something that would need a true revolution in values to ever happen in the West.

1. There is a more valid, related argument that immigrants from some parts of the world (non-EEA especially in these studies) represent a net fiscal cost, but considering one of the main points of immigration is to bring in low wage workers, who are inherently likely to be a fiscal drain, this is hardly surprising.