Vídeo: Hein de Haas: migrações não é assim tão simples

🗣️ Transcrição automática de voz para texto.

a [Music] hello and welcome to a special edition of it’s not that simple from the Francis Manel Sant Foundation delighted to be here recording this episode in front of a live audience in Lisbon and it is a special occasion because we’re also addressing a very important topic which is migration and I’m delighted to welcome our host hin theas H welcome thank you fantastic to have you on board I’ll give a quick introduction even though most people here and uh most people watching probably know who you are that’s why they’re they’re here and tuning in um you’re from the Netherlands a renowned sociologist geographer professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam also founder and co-director of the international migration Institute at the University of Oxford um you’ve obviously also been writing various books about the topic of migration and you’re launching the most recent work how migration really works so that has to be my first question to try to uh uh start breaking down this topic and explaining why it’s not that simple how does migration really work well perhaps we’ll start with stating how migration does not work um when you hear politicians you often get the impression that migration policy is like opening and closing a tap and that’s typically not how migration Works migration is part and parcel of Who We Are are as human beings as societies so migration is literally of all times as long as Humanity exists people have been moving around and what you see in the debate is that you get this Framing and that is really the biggest problem of pro and anti- migration and that is a very silly way of talking about a topic like migration uh you wouldn’t hear a person or a journalist asking a journalist whether she or he is against or in favor of the economy and that of course makes clear how simplistic and how damaging it is to approach immigration topic like that so in a way migration is a natural part of who we are we need to normalize the way we talk about migration not a prior as a problem to be solved or as a solution to problems but as it is in the first place and I think the B basic lesson is that migration is something normal that humans have always been trying to do do and what we see that a lot of policy and debate is based on the presumption that we can wish it away or organize it away and that typically leads to policy approaches that are either ineffective or completely counterproductive so migration is not like a tap you open and and close because and that typically leads to the kind of policies that don’t seem to be very effective I think politicians use that tap uh at strategic moment when they want to I think also tap in to some fears or some emotions that can lead to votes yeah uh and can get people on their side or against a particular opponent and we’ll delve into that a little bit later I think what’s Curious and what’s pertinent as well to be having this conversation why I was so much looking forward to it is that I I’ve lived abroad for 20 years you’ve lived abroad for several years as well you lived from the Netherlands like I mentioned but you you’ve lived in the UK you live in in Morocco so we also have different perspectives right about what it is to be a migrant because we went through that that that process so I think it’s important also to try to define a little bit of the different types of of of migration that happens because I think too many times everybody gets kind of painted with the with the same brush we tend to pathologize migration particularly when it’s migration from the so-called Global South to the global North and there is this idea that when we see images of boats across the Mediterranean or so-called Caravans through Mexico mhm and and when we talk about illegal migration we get this impression there is this big difference between us Europeans moving you know we are the experts moving to other countries and then we frame the other coming from non-european countries as the desperate victim fleeing all sorts of misery and I think that is a misconception because also when we look at migrations within Africa for instance or from Africa the large majority of them are not a por of the poorest for them for most migrants also wherever you go to the world migration is an investment in the better future it doesn’t mean it always works but all all and so we have this idea that even in the word term of language many students when I asked them are you a migrant International students they would say no I’m not a migrant or if you ask a professional migrant no I’m not a migrant I’m an expert and this is how we divided the world up because we know very well well if you’re higher educated the higher educated move way more than the lower educated but it is true for Africa too of for Latin America because migration is expensive migration requires a particular mindset and that typically comes with education so migration is development uh one famous migration scholar that inspired me a lot Ronald skeldon wrote this whole book about migration and development and he said we have to reverse ver the way we think about it migration is part of development as societies evolve people have always been a moving and with the whole experience of modernization people have been on the Move we talk about urbanization people moving from rural to urban areas that is the most the biggest form of migration we’ve witnessed over the last two centuries for instance there are more people migrating within China than International migrants in the world wow and it is part of the process so you may not like modernization you may not like capitalism you may not like urbanization but it is part of the process so we cannot think it away in a way and the same for rich countries in the west they have Labor shortages that draw in people so to imagine a wealthy open market economy like we have in Western Europe and at the same time not wanting to have immigration that is two things you cannot have at the same time so you cannot have your cake and eat it too no it’s interesting because I remember specific cases of the uh uh uh perception of of of of the Immigrant when I was in the United States and and I went there for the first time I was studying there when I it was in the ’90s and then I was there right before September 11th and after September 11th was a completely different story I’ll just share a couple of them with you because when my name was was Pedro the first first and I was studying there everybody assumed I was Mexican okay right and when I said I was from Portugal first of all they were confused because they didn’t know where Portugal was second of all their their uh uh opinion of me changed instantly okay and I always found the Mexican community in the United States to be incredibly hardworking and then we’ll we’ll get to the to the perception and how some politicians have have used obviously the the immigration and and and the image of of Mexicans to to their favor and then after September 11th I specifically Ally remember uh being in a in a shopping center and and uh my mother was there visiting at the time and we were speaking Portuguese and the the I was in Atlanta Georgia and they they kind of mistook the the language we were speaking for Arabic and we actually have had a security guard following us around because of of the tension that was built up in in the country and I was in the Southeast so uh there it’s it’s it’s particularly intense and again when when I actually had an an interaction with him and I said we’re from Portugal we from Europe then he kind of relaxed I think it’s so difficult isn’t it to educate people on the way we should receive migrants and it shouldn’t be uh uh automatically different on on on where they’re coming from and have these prejudices of why they’re here and what they’re trying to do to us yeah and that is something you see throughout modern history if you go back a century to the United States or actually over a century ago the ultimate scare migrant group in the United States were Germans initially and there was a big fear in the late 19th century in the United States that German would take over English as the main language of communication totally unimaginable right now the next group that was targeted were Italians there was serious discussions in the United States where Italians more specifically Sicilians were actually white and there were very racist discourses by very established intellectual leaders that said we need to clean this the the the the scum of the Melting Pot literally they talked about populations later Eastern European Jews that came to the United States so and Catholics more in general there’s been a very long time until the 1960s that many groups in the United States wanted to define the us as a Protestant nation and saw Catholic immigration as potentially undermining the US society and Catholics for a very long time have been the same in England have Irish migrants to to England have been seen as potentially being more loyal to the Pope in Rome than to the nation the fact that this is completely unimaginable now reminds us of the fact that what is now seen as the enemy or being constructed by the far right often as the enemy that is more loyal to some other thing the same with Jewish conspiracy theories and what we now see with narrative towards Muslim migrants are fairly modification or or a copy almost of of those kind of theories so the what we now called the replacement conspiracy theory is not so different from these other theories about Catholics or Jews undermining the nation so it is history repeating itself and again politicians jumping on then bent wagon as one way of winning the next election I wanted to get into the myths that you kind of break down in in your book because I I always like to say numbers don’t lie uh sometimes they’re they’re uh a a a tool that that’s that’s used selectively to to benefit one side or another but I think what’s particularly interesting in your book is you look at the facts these are the facts this is what they tell us about about immigration and so let’s let’s let’s get into that what are the biggest myths that you think need to be debunked and need to be broken down and how does your book aim to do that I think the the most important apart from the one we already discussed about migration it’s not being a tap you’re open and close is this idea that we live in times of unprecedented Mass migration that we have more and more refugees more and more illegal migration it’s the sort of global crisis this is actually shared across the ideological Spectrum um although it’s represented differently but the idea that because of an combination of factors like poverty inequality oppression conflict climate change and in combination with the greater ease of transport and moving around that we see This Global surge of migration and this idea that the West is potentially going to be overwhelmed with waves of migrants coming across the border whether from Africa to Europe or from Latin America to the United States and it is actually shared across the board the interesting thing is that if you look at the left and the rightwing sort of sides of the political Spectrum the kind of solutions which are also problematic are different on the right you’ll hear more often more borders more control on the left you may hear stories about we need to prevent conflict we need to prevent poverty to decrease migration but the underlying assumption and that is one of the discoveries I made doing the background research for my book that some of those myths are actually shared although the kind of responses in terms of policy may be quite different but the idea that there’s this growing mass of people moving around now when we look at the data we get a little bit more calmer if we look for instance at the numbers of migrants in the world yeah there has been an increase so the number of people living not in their country of birth but the world population has increased as well so if we would Express levels of migration in relative terms nowadays three three and a half% of the world population is an international migrant that percentage was roughly similar 50 years ago and almost certainly was actually higher as century ago because it was a time of transatlantic movements of Europeans to the Americas what has changed is a direction of migration particularly from a eurocentric perspective because it were of course Europeans who for centuries were the ultimate immigrants who colonized other nations who settled in other nations who Moved people around the earth think about the slave trade but also about the kie movement so the indentured workers from from Asia who were brought by the British and the Dutch and the French to work in the Caribbean so it was European colonialism that drove migration but it was not a migration that was directed to Europe that pattern has completely changed of the last 50 years because of decolonization because of the fact that Europe has become so wealthy our populations have been Aging in increasing levels of education and all these Factor combined meant that there was a growing demand for labor in Industries and services and that has been the single biggest cause for this reversal I call it the global migration reversal which for Europe has been a complete GameChanger because Europe has transformed from the ultimate continent of out migration to a very important destination of world migrants so it is not about world migration getting out of hand it is Europe’s place geopolitical place but with that also it’s place on the global migration map has completely changed around and that is a real change so more of our European countries are receiving more and more migrants from non-european countries that is of course a real change that of course triggers reactions and anxiety and exitement and political debate so that is completely understandable but that is a eurocentric perspective on the world but from a world perspective you cannot really maintain that migration is running out of hand or this is big acceleration it’d be fair to say that over the last 15 years the f c Foundation has tried to um bring facts bring figures bring data uh to Portuguese people and obviously your book is is is based on a lot of of facts across the landscape in this in this uh topic um nowadays uh it seems that at least in my lifetime I find people are more resistant to facts than they ever have been do you agree with that and what are some of the the facts that you find people don’t want to hear or they don’t want to see from from the messages in your book um I’m not sure whether people are not open to facts uh I think the quality of the public debate is very poor okay we see a growing disconnect between the knowledge we have in the Academia and the public debate I think it is too simplistic to only put the blame on politicians and media I think it is also also up to academics to in a way get out of the Ivory Tower and communicate those insights because we’ve become so specialized and also if you look at the way how academic careers are being made it’s very much l the idea of you know talking to your own constituencies in terms of other researchers but I think it is really important to create that connection between the public debate and and and what we know in terms of knowledge but the problem is primarily not one of facts I believe the problem is one of discourse and narratives facts don’t speak for themselves because if I say only 3% of the world population is a migrant if you live in a neighborhood where 40% of the people are an immigrant it’s not relevant to you so if you are not able to connect with how people experience these things in very different ways in concrete ways then of course you get a more mixed picture and if you look at opinion polls about migration most people have quite ambivalent views on migration the number of people who really against any form of migration is very small the number of people who are totally in favor of open borders is also quite small most people understand that to a large degree if you just look at who is working in restaurants hotels who’s cleaning houses who’s taking care of people who’s delivering food who’s driving taxis in most Western countries you know that migrants do all sorts of useful jobs or indeed High skilled migrants working in high-skilled jobs at the same people people may be worried about things they see on television if people drown in the Mediterranean that’s a real cause for concern obviously if there is segregation happening and real problems happening these problems are real too so we need to get rid of that pro- anti- good bad framing of migration we need to tell real stories but just facts that doesn’t work because then it becomes very generic if I would say to a person concerned about changing environment in their neighborhood uh lots of migrants coming people not being able to speak their own language and there may be tensions around it then of course it’s up to governments to do something about that to address those problems uh and then just put a figure like oh only 3% of the world population is a migrant and it was the same a century ago that is not a way to communicate knowledge you need to relate in a way so I think we need better stories and what I really hope is that politicians but also journalists and and and writers and and any other leading figures in the public debate will get it the courage to tell a different story about migration but you need to ground that story in knowledge and I think that was the problem with migration that the debate has so spun out of control that it has no relation to facts anymore and I think that’s the problem it’s so difficult nowadays as well when we consume information a lot of us do it on social media or certainly digit itally and it becomes increasingly difficult to tell the difference between an opinion and a fact because you’re constantly bombarded with with so many things and I think it’s so important what you said about whether it’s scientists whether it’s researchers whether it’s Specialists being able to get those facts and turn it into a story so people can also consume it like they’re consuming a lot of the other narratives that are being pushed in our face sometimes through propaganda and through paid paid uh Ventures as well um we were both in the UK uh uh when U uh the kind of brexit wave started uh we saw migration be a crucial Topic in the elections in the United States that eventually led to to Donald Trump’s Victory um uh uh two mandates back how much are politicians making this an issue uh you mentioned right and left are are kind of using uh this this uh this topic in in different ways but that it is there it’s present there how much are they using nowadays from your experience in Europe and do you continue to predict that this will be a very emotional uh uh issue that will be used for votes and does it worry you it definitely worries me what wor me in particular is that the more Centrist parties in many countries start to take over the farite narratives and the fire right narratives that obviously represent migration as an invasion and that scapegoat migrants for all sorts of real problems s that exist growing inequality declining job security declining purchasing power of the poorest problem with access to health care and affordable housing uh no longer being sure whether you get a job whether you have an University education these are real problems and things people are worried about and it’s very attractive for the same generation of politicians that have pursued all those reforms those economic reforms that have led to Growing inequality that have led to growing economic insecurity of lower income earners or even the middle classes to put the blame on migrants it’s very attractive because it diverts the attention away from the fact that those socioeconomic insecurities that people feel that they’re in a way not as good of as their parents were or if that their kids may be worse of than them those anxieties um are real in a sense but it is very attractive for politicians who don’t want to change those policies after 30 to 40 Years of what is often DED as neoliberal economic policies there’s big interest not to reverse those policies so in that setting it becomes very attractive to suggest that migration has caused all of these problems to divert the attention away and the second political mechanism is is fearmongering because we know that the best vehicle to come to power and r support is to create fear because it creates for politicians an opportunity to portray themselves as saviors who’s going to win the war against the external enemy now if you don’t have a real external enemy I mean w Waging War is the best way to win an election in many cases then you invent an external enemy and this is where the Invasion rhetorics come from but those same politicians that tell those stories don’t provide any solutions to the issue and a good example is uh money in Italy Who Rose to power on an anti-immigration platform which is allowing more migrants in than any former prime minister in in Italy and has proposed to legalize half a million undocumented migrants because she is also under pressure of business and she also understands that there are real economic interests and labor shortages that are very real so what we see right now that in the political scene and I recently wrote an upad for the Wall Street Journal talking about the American Border crisis I say it’s a real crisis but it’s a political crisis that’s been going on for the last 30 to 35 years as in Europe we haven’t been able to fix it because the more money we’ve pumped into border controls the problem hasn’t been solved and a good definition of insanity often ascribed to Einstein is trying to do the same over and over and over again and expect different results Fortress Europe has been a massive failure that whole idea why because we don’t address the elephant in the room because because if you look at the political narrative in the United States or in Europe on the left you’ll hear things like these are all victims and economic refugees we need to provide protection and this sort of victim narrative on the right it’s more this Invasion narrative you know they come to take our jobs or Worse they’re like Donald Trump kind of narratives about they are rapists and criminals or they are indeed into a conspiracy to to take over our societies nobody talks about the real issue which is that both in Europe Western Europe and in the United States we have higher labor shortages than ever particularly for lower skilled migrants we don’t have legal channels to accommodate that demand and the result is people keep on Crossing Borders illegally because they know there going to be a job for them when I was in El Paso uh at the US American Border last year and we interviewed migrants who were waiting in SES on the other side everybody was talking about work and a very Illuminating statistic is the following in the United States the number of employers that get prosecuted on a yearly basis for employing undocumented migrants is somewhere between 10 and 15 a year without any zeros added that is about a chance to be hit by lightning and I thought you were going to say percent after the 10 15 in absolute numbers and in Europe it’s not much in Europe it’s not much much better in Britain where there was this whole narrative created by both labor and conservatives about a hostile environment towards illegal migration similar numbers and it shows the huge hypocrisy politically that of course if you would really be serious as a politician like they always I want to combate smuggling I want to combate Illegal migration if you really want to do that you better punish employers because you can punish migrants that makes migrants worse of if migrants are afraid to get deported it makes it easier to exploit them for employers if employers don’t face any consequences they will keep on doing that but the employers is not just big capitalists it’s also families that hire a domestic worker or families that hire somebody to take care of their elderly parents uh to clean their house so it’s not just a matter of capital versus labor the middle classes are involved in that so there’s a huge political hypocrisy around this issue that the very migrants who are so important we saw it in the co crisis who was delivering the food who was the whole food chain in a way who’s picking the vegetables who is slaughtering the animals who’s processing the food who is cooking the food and who was delivering the food to the houses of the middle class almost in all cases migrants often without papers so when we talk about essential work it’s exactly the migrants are often portrayed as unnecessary migrants unwanted migrants are the ones doing actually very essential work there is no political recognition of that fact so there’s a total lack of credibility if politicians say I want to have less immigration or I want to combate Illegal migration because people will find a way to cross borders if they know that’s going to be jobs and even a perfect fence is not going to prevent that because we also know from research that most undocumented migrants came legally for instance took a from Brazil to Portugal on a passport and just stay longer than you’re allowed to stay so even the perfect fence will not be able to prevent this I’m glad you brought up Portugal because I actually wanted to uh address um our small country in the way that it has uh received uh migrants historically um and even though I lived abroad for for for many years I’ve obviously been coming back all the time the attitude towards migration has changed somewhat and I notice it in my community Portugal has been traditionally a very friendly country uh to expats um the the type of immigration has CH changed uh uh somewhat over the last decade first of all as far as numbers it’s it’s increased drastically and the kind of immigration has always has also been focused on Labor uh and a lot of service uh uh uh uh jobs um in your opinion and and taking into account your expertise and and your experience maybe this is a naive question but I want to get into it is what’s what’s the perfect immigration policy or what’s the advised immigration policy for a country like like Portugal uh We’ve expanded a lot from a tourism perspective obviously we have a lot more hotels a lot more restaurants popping up everywhere so there is a need for labor there is an increase in migration what’s what’s the policy that a country like ours should have when it comes to accepting people legalizing people um and making sure that there is a smooth transition and these people are integrated as well just to acknowledge I mean there’s a very long and complicated answer there is a simple answer in a sense of a sort of principle where it often goes wrong is when we don’t acknowledge that migrants are people migrants too often are treated like production factors work that come in handily we don’t realize that the social dynamics of migration these are people with needs uh when workers in the beginning income they’re often welcome because everybody in the understand to do useful work but they also have families um and if we don’t acknowledge that migration also comes with a degree of settlement because we often like to think away of think like to not even think about it really we think okay it’s useful but perhaps one day they will go back or something like that there’s this famous quote of the Swiss writer Max FR who wrote in the context of the 1960s in Switzerland about Italian guest workers in Switzerland it is very difficult to imagine right now but at the time the influx of Italian guest workers was seen as a threat in in uh in U in Switzerland there was a specific German term called uong they were afraid to be overwhelmed by foreigners and he said he already described what often goes wrong with lower skilled workers the kind of guest worker conundrum and he had this famous quote where he said we wanted workers we got people instead and it really summarizes the whole conundrum and what often has gone wrong as well I think we should draw lessons from the so-called Gest worker experience of the 1960s and 1970s in countries like Germany France or the Netherlands because the idea was we’ll get Workers to work in Industries mind services and once their job is done they’re going to go back yeah then the crisis hits there’s always going to be a crisis and what happens in the next recession the first who will be expelled from those jobs will be migrants last in first out discrimination plays a role and then the problems arise if you haven’t really thought through that these are indeed people that often have come with families that have been around for four five six years very unlikely they’re going to go back and then look the other way not to take responsibility for that and then you may get create your problems so overall the integration experience has been very successful but there have been groups for instance in French ban Leos who’ve suffered from yearlong exclusion and mass unemployment and that of course creates social problems down the line if the second generation go doesn’t get access to good education and career opportunities that of course can create social problems but it is rooted in the fact that governments didn’t Embrace or acknowledge that these people were there to stay so I think in the case of Portugal indeed it’s a new phenomenon particularly to have migrants from non-portuguese speaking countries and settling here what we know from migration research that’s another sort of what a lot of migration research is quip there’s nothing more permanent than a temporary migrant don’t create any illusions that a fair share of Marans is not going to stay so if you now have your share of Bangladeshi Pakistani nepes migrants if this will continue for another four or five years the probability of having permanent settlement is very high and then you can resist that fact and this is what went wrong often if Government resisted and don’t put in place policies to prevent marginalization segregation then you set yourself up for trouble what are some of those policies that that that seem to work from from your experience across across the world because you’re right I think for many years as well there were the expats and and and international workers who are here with International companies we’ve seen a big influx of Brazilian population but that makes it easier for their integration obviously not only language but but culturally but with these other countries that you mentioned whether that’s Bangladesh uh uh Pakistan Nepal Etc um there is a barrier there’s a cultural barrier and there’s a language barrier so what could we learn make sure that the second generation gets access to education prevent segregation in secondary in for the second generation because kids are integrating naturally if they get in touch with mainstream Society I mean kids learn language flawlessly right if they just in the street at least if they have the opportunity to play with kids from that grew up already in in in Portugal or any country I think it’s the prevention of segregation that’s the most important thing but if governments turn a blind eye for too long for instance I know that in in agriculture as well in in in the south of Portugal there are a lot of migrants working living completely segregated and if governments don’t take responsibility for those populations you set yourself up for trouble because of kids grow up in impoverished migrant communities where there is no opportunities for social Mobility if they go to schools where they don’t get incentivized to learn the language or to go further in life then you create set yourself up for problem it’s a looking away of government and that I think is is a lack of responsibility taking for politicians who frame migrants as the enemy the same migrants who do all these essential jobs because they frame them as the enemy they don’t take responsibility for the populations they have allowed in or tolerate basically and Toleration sounds nice but Toleration has a shadow side it’s like we tolerate you being around but you can never be really part of society so you create a segregation problem for the future I just want to emphasize that for the vast majority of immigrant groups all around the world if you look at the second generation immense successes amazing successes but the dangers exist there where you have the combination of Crisis residential segregation and then these areas can develop into poverty traps and then the second generation of course will get frustrated in many ways and then you can get social reactions that you could see in some of the BOS and other neighborhoods across Northwestern Europe where the impoverished migrant population is being concentrated so so to put it differently I think the the American sociologist Alejandra PES is one of the most famous researchers in migration studies he has said the question is not whether migrants integrate he say all migrants integrates because the second generation will learn Portuguese no doubt about it the question is in what segment of the society they integrate and he use this concept of downward assimilation if migrants assimilate into a sort of underclass a sort of permanent underclass which is a result of failure of governments to make sure that segregation doesn’t happen and you could do that as a government I can give an example you could say to employers who allow migrants in that they have to provide decent housing or you can you know force them to set a particular to invest resources into the correct reception of Migrant communities to make sure that schools don’t get segregated to make sure that neighborhoods are reasonably mixed and this has to do with housing policy and it often went wrong when governments have built those huge Estates where only migrants live basically and haven’t provide enough mixed housing and in most countries where there is a sort of ripe mix of housing in terms of lower and higher income groups you also see much more mingling of migrants and nonmigrants and that generally works much better than basically isolating people so I think segregation is the main problem and it’s a government responsibility we’re wrapping up our conversation and and we always finish with with a series of quickfire questions but before we we get to that last question for you from a European standpoint from an EU standpoint what do you expect to be uh the main shift in Immigration policy over the next decade so to speak depends on whether you would ask what I hope and what the worst outcome could be I mean the worst outcome is a raised to the bottom in terms of taking rights away from migrants uh uh and and and trying to further um fortify border controls because it’s going to lead to more misery in many ways it’s going to not solve the issue uh but I’m also hopeful because many people think that the victories that quite some farri right parties have made across Europe means that people increasingly become racist and anti-immigrant that is actually not supported by public opinion re research public opinion research shows that most people are very ambivalent have mixed feelings about immigration they have certain worries indeed about segregation or isolation of particular migrant groups they may be worried if they see things on television about boats and Caravans for good reasons at the same time most people do realize that migrant do good jobs it’s essential jobs people have migrants as neighbors a typical thing you hear well I don’t like immigrants but my Turkish neighbor he’s fine you know it is a typical reaction people have so I think most people are aware of that and there is no clear right leftwing divide as much as you would think for instance many religiously conservative people also know as a religious Duty you have to welcome the stranger so there is this mixed feelings often about migration uh we see also see it politically so right-wing parties uh let’s say conservative parties often see migration on the one hand as this Potential Threat for cultural identity and things like that at the same time those parties have a very strong um uh business orientation that wants to keep borders open on the left wing side we have this cultureal Progressive voice about open borders but also trade unions who’ve been quite hostile towards the unlimited influx of Migrant workers so but opinion polls actually show a very mixed picture and I think the biggest sign of Hope in a way is that there is no shift against immigration the long-term trends are rather into more positive views towards immigration you wouldn’t think that what the far has successfully done is draw in that vote that anti-immigrant vote that has always existed but the mainstream parties never made political Capital out because their own constituencies are divided on the issue so the far right has successfully drawn that vote in but the share of the population particularly if you look at younger people in Europe that thinks moderately about migration actually has increased not decreased so I do think but perhaps it’s visual thinking that the current political narratives we’ve been discussing and the hypocrisy is getting almost unbearable right now it’s like this big smoke screen politicians are putting many politicians not all of them but many politicians put those smoke screens about framing migrant workers who do all these jobs as the enemy or refugees at the same time I think the hypocrisy is becoming so big that I think there is more and more space for a more moderate narrative about migration and my hope is that there will be a new generation of politicians that dares to tell the real story about migration not about migration being a good or a bad thing but something that is inevitable yeah that we have to learn to deal with that can have negative sides as well as positive sides and that we need to think much more critically about what kind of policies can make sure that all members of society benefit from migration and not just employers and a few other people who benefit from it but that spread the benefits more evenly and make sure that people who let’s say the lowest income earners who don’t see many economic benefits from immigration can also benefit from it and this is ultimately a question about Labor because the way we treat migrant workers reflects on the way we treat workers more in generally and I think that comes back to the initial issue we discussed about the growing inequality in Western societies particular the lowest income owners that have lost out on globalization that have lost out on liberalization that is a much broader issue of course immigration hasn’t caused those problems but it’s very effective and attractive for politicians who don’t want to pursue those reforms let’s say more social reforms to improve the position of workers more in general to basically use a divide and Rule ideology by portraying the migrant as an issue as as the ultimate cause of growing inequality growing job insecurity it’s a very effective divide and Rule strategy and I think that needs to be broken because the hypocrisy is simply getting too big so I’m I’m a born Optimist but I think we cannot afford to be pessimistic in a way because I do think the scare is real I think we live in a an important Junction of time that the biggest danger I see is that Centrist parties whether they are slightly to the right or slightly to the left are increasingly taking over those farri narratives and I think that is really dangerous that is why I’m really hoping that cist politicians take the responsibility also because of the fact that copying The Narrative of the far right is not going to bring them electoral victory in the first place because we know from political science that people will vote for the original not for the copy but secondly I think it is very dangerous because you start to normalize these ideas that are plainly racist that only create more Division and I find the irony that the same far-right politicians that say immigration is a scare for social cohesion is going to you know create more and more insecurity actually their narratives create Division and politicians should take responsibility to try to keep Society together and the issue is that migrants will be part of our future Society if you don’t Embrace that fact you set yourself up for failure so there’s a lot of wishful thinking going on but I do think there is real reason for Hope okay so quick fire three questions for you in one uh sentence or in one word uh what is the personality trait that a good leader could really benefit from having responsibility taking if you could change anything in the in the world by by Magic right now today in 10 minutes what would it be wow teach that people would see that what they project on a migrant is ultimately about ourselves we project a lot of our fears on migrants very true and and and and finally um I also want to get your take on what is the most important learning of your life and career that you’d like to share with us most important learning of my career I like that you’re really thinking about this I like it makes it more meaningful than well I think it reflects back on on on what we’ve discussed before is that I think it would be very useful for all people in the world we used to have military service in our societies I think it would really be useful if people all young people would spend at least three or six months in a totally different country and then you start to realize how privileged we are in the Western Society what I really my biggest learning moment was when I lived in Morocco and I was still really young and had friends at my age having the same dreams that’s one thing you discover that you’re not that different so the outside looks very different the first lesson is that you by staying in another country and interacting with people there and really living with them you learn that we are not that different in the first place but second you also start to realize that what is so normal for people moving around is not normal anymore for many other people in the world if you take away that right from people the right to go where you want people are getting angry it is like living in a dictatorship people go in the street they willing to die right for democracy right now we’re depriving a big chunk of the world population to try out life that’s what people used to do and being somewhere in a totally different Society not as a tourist but really participating I think it would be such a healing experience to first of all not be too dramatic about the problems in Western societies and also to understand what we are doing in a way by creating all these barriers that was the longest sentence I’ve ever heard in my life but I let you finish it because it was good thank you I’m the hus thank you so much uh for taking the time to uh speak with us on it’s not that simple um fantastic to get your your Insight and expertise on such an important topic uh good luck with uh your most recent work how migration really works and uh continue success in your career thank you very much thank you [Music]