The whole truth
Debunking myths about border crossings
One of the most memorable photographs of migration may be that of Alan Shenu, the Kurdish-Syrian toddler whose body washed up on the shores of southwestern Turkey in 2015. His family, who had fled northern Syria during the war and settled in Turkey, had boarded a boat bound for the Greek Island of Kos with the hopes of eventually reuniting with relatives in Canada.
Soon after their departure, the boat capsized in the Aegean Sea. Alan, his brother, and mother drowned. In the iconic photo, Shenu, sneakers still on his feet, lies face down on the sand.
Images like this are powerful. But without a rigorous understanding of the circumstances surrounding them, they can fuel reactionary and ineffective immigration policies, which may exacerbate the very catastrophes they aim to avoid.
Hein de Haas, a professor of sociology and founding member of the International Migration Institute (IMI) at the University of Oxford, leaves no stone unturned in his new book, “How Migration Really Works: The Facts About the Most Divisive Issue in Politics.” In it, he meticulously exposes 22 myths about why migration happens and how migrants fare in their new homelands.
De Haas focuses on patterns of immigration into the United States and Europe from the post-World Wars era to today using several sources: the United Nations’ 2017 Trends in International Migrant Stock, the Determinants of International Migration project at IMI, the World Development Indicators database from the World Bank, as well as data from three decades of his own primary research.
If there is a singular message in “How Migration Really Works,” it is that there is no migration crisis, only laws and policies that claim to address a fictional one. “Migration is not spinning out of control. No massive waves of desperate migrants are about to crash onto our shores.”
The migration anti-fact propaganda machine is deliberate and compelling. Misrepresentations abound. And they are scaffolded, de Haas warns, by a large array of officials and institutions across the political spectrum. These include governmental agencies; candidates who cultivate fear about migrant invasions to win elections; trade unions and lobbyists who characterize migrants as either saviors of a nation’s economy or threats to stable wages and job opportunities; as well as humanitarian organizations who pepper their annual reports with stories of migrant despair to persuade potential donors.
Take this jarring example. According to the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR), the number of displaced people across the world skyrocketed from 1.8 million in 1951; to 20 million in 2005; to 62 million in 2018; to 89 million in 2021; and to 100 million in 2022. Yet de Haas and his colleague discovered that the statistics fomenting this narrative initially only involved 22 countries. Over the years, as the UNHCR added more countries to their survey (there were 216 in 2018), naturally, the number of displaced persons increased.
De Haas also found that the UNHCR had included internally displaced persons in its analysis — an entirely different kind of migration than international refugees and asylum seekers. “Most of what appears to be a spectacular increase in refugee numbers,” de Haas concludes, “is the artificial result of a rather misleading presentation of data.”
Labor, according to de Haas, is the primary driver of migration — not climate change, not trafficking, and not violence. People want to work to support their families, and, despite the risks inherent in crossing, will seek higher wages on the other side of an international border. Despite rampant portrayals of migrants as victims, they make these journeys willingly, and of their own accord. The commonly held belief that migrants are incapable of weighing the pros and cons of what could lead to a treacherous outcome, de Haas contends, is patronizing, presumptuous, and not supported by the research.
Case in point — many migrants take on significant debt in order to migrate. They must pay back this debt, usually to smugglers, through wages from their newfound employment. This onerous arrangement can be extremely stressful, yet it is also one that migrants vastly prefer over the bleak alternative — remaining in their origin countries. After conducting extensive interviews, de Haas found that most migrants do not regret migrating. Despite their concerns or fears, they would do it again.
What’s more, securing borders does nothing to slow migration. In fact, the opposite is true. Robust borders cut off circulatory migration (the migration back and forth between countries), and force migrants to settle permanently in their destination country. Enhancing borders, de Haas argues, only makes migration more dangerous.
De Haas also undermines the myth that migrants fail to culturally, socially, or economically assimilate. “[T]he evidence shows that the vast majority of immigrants — including those from disadvantaged or entirely different cultural backgrounds — have been remarkably successfully in ‘pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps’ within one or two generations through education and hard work.”
Subverting this particular myth, however, bolsters the belief that a country’s value system, no matter how discriminatory or hegemonic, is worth assimilating to. It also props up the stereotype of the model migrant whose hearty work ethic assures success. Which is to say, by disproving the assimilation myth, de Haas unintentionally reinforces other equally harmful ones.
“How Migration Really Works” steers clear of solutions — that’s not its goal. But it boldly and exhaustively investigates the trends of migration and demands a more truthful and far more holistic conversation.
“Any real debate on migration,” de Haas writes, “will therefore inevitably be a debate on the type of society we want to live in.”