SA should be embracing immigrants, not castigating them

As every scholar knows, the roots of what we know now as civilisation and democracy derive from huge strides made in the city-state of Athens around 2,500 years ago. “Civilisation” is, of course, a loaded term: the amount of uncivil behaviour exercised in the name of civilisation is as legendary as the pillars of the pantheon. But to the extent the world has embraced the notion of the ‘demos’, the citizenry, and ‘kratos’, the power or rule, the people responsible are the Greeks.

So how is it possible that with such an enormous head-start on every other place on earth, the economy of Greece is so dismal. In the early 1990s, German GDP per capita was a short head higher than that in Greece. It’s now almost double.

There are lots of reasons, causes and explanations. But one topic dominates; immigration. There have been three waves of emigration from Greece, all associated with economic strife. The first was between 1903 and 1917 and involved mainly working-class people who moved to the US, Australia and southern and eastern Africa. In the second, from 1960 to 1972, during the dictatorship years, mainly young people in the service sector tried to escape social disruption. The third began with the financial crisis in 2010 and is continuing. Worrying is that it mainly taking place among young professionals.

It’s estimated that since the beginning of the 1900s about 1.7-million Greeks left, seeking a better life elsewhere. For a country with a current population of around 10-million, that is a thumping number. Greece is not the only EU country with high levels of immigration – Bulgaria has seen the largest level emigration over the past decade. The Greeks have recognised the problem and are trying all kinds of mechanisms to reverse the flow, with some success.

But it’s a long haul. Emigration is a largely unseen economic phenomenon because often it’s so gradual. But the long-term effect of emigration can be dramatic, and it takes the Greek case to demonstrate that. The effect is similar to going bankrupt: Ernest Hemingway was asked once “How did you go bankrupt?” He answered: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

The dangers of emigration are hard to recognise. Surely if you have a given set of economic resources, if some people leave there’s more to go round? If only economies worked this way. The effect is the opposite: emigration hurts and economy and immigration helps.

The best example is the US. For all its current problems, the US constitutes 5% of the world’s population but 25% of its wealth. One of the obvious reasons is that until current president Donald Trump, it was welcoming of immigrants. But for existing populations they seem an extra burden – and sometimes they are for a while. Existing populations regard them with prejudice and suspicion. Consequently, they make excellent fodder for unscrupulous politicians.

South Africa has its own emigration and immigration crisis. It’s hard to know the exact number of migrants to and from SA. The census does keep a tally, but the last was in 2011. The United Nations tries to estimate it in the UN International Migrant Stock database. But for southern Africa, the numbers are hopelessly wrong. It claims there are about 1.2 million people born in SA living outside the country, and there are about 300,000 foreign-born people living inside SA in total. Most, the report claims, are not Zimbabwean but Mozambican.

You have to sympathise though; collecting this data is impossible. Migrants move for all kinds of reasons, and many intend moving back to their homelands. Zimbabwe is the big problem: many Zimbabweans live in SA, how many we don’t know. But it’s possible they don’t want to give up their citizenship in the hope of going back, or at least to visit.

Contrary to SA’s xenophobic social media, the problem is not inflow but outflow. SA’s growing emigration problem coincides with a recognition that immigrants generally add value to the destination countries, and governments are responding with investment immigration options.

In SA, it’s a lucrative business for lawyers. The emigration of SA’s youth and some of the most skilled and richest South Africans does seem to have increased, if these legal practices are reporting honestly. If that is true, SA should be doing much more to attract immigrants as opposed to threatening, intimidating or castigating those that come. DM168