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companies make huge profits from the growing border security market. At the same time, they exert “significant influence in the development of European migration policies, by successfully pushing the underlying narrative of framing migration as a threat, a security problem. Challenging this narrative would be an important step [to] changing EU policies.”

most migrants come from the richest countries, not from the poorest (9% of Europeans emigrate while 2.6% of Africans do)

Over the past few years, the European political left has reacted to the rise of the extreme right by following in its footsteps in problematising and securitising migration. This is “a huge mistake,”

there is currently no migration crisis in Europe, even though politicians and much of the mainstream media will often have us think so. 

In order to match European labour demand and foreign labour supply, however, "we would need to ‘Europeanise’ the labour market," said Tineke Strik,

if the main issue is a lack of political will for a more humane and fair migration policy, how could that be changed?

the main driver of migration is labour demand: most migrants come to do jobs that are in short supply. This demand is in part shaped by the state. For example, he explains, many people travel to France, but not to The Netherlands to take up work as au pairs because of the highly subsidised child-care system in the latter. 

one question to ask policymakers and the public is: why do we need immigrants? What are the benefits? “This has paid off in terms of Canadians generally supporting our immigration policy,"

the “inconceivable political advantage” to the Canadian system is that immigration appears predictable for the broader public. It "calms" the debate, he said, “and increases the policy space for and trust in governments to implement more balanced migration policies.”

“The main driver of the heated debate about migration is the feeling of "loss of control" [...] Yet, the only political response to this feeling of loss of control so far seems to be increased restriction. This will likely lead to more irregular movements and hereby increase the feeling of control loss. A vicious cycle.”

move away from equating control and restriction, and towards a situation where control simply means that most people migrate within legal frameworks

At national or European level the migration debate is often heated and deadlocked, yet if we look at the city or town level, we see something completely different.It’s a more pragmatic level

What if instead, we talked about “health care, labour markets, education etc, and look at migration through the lens of these topics - not the other way round.”