How should migration be managed?

The memo from one of the American president’s counsellors could not be clearer: immigration, the aide writes, is a “no win issue”. Another adviser says bleakly: “Nothing short of a Berlin Wall” can keep “illegals” out. “Good lord,” observes the president as discussion in a meeting turns again to this thorny issue. “We’re back to immigration already!” 

You might imagine these quotes shed light on the thinking of President Joe Biden’s inner circle on this most delicate of issues ahead of November’s election. They also read as a timely echo of the dilemmas if not failures of many policymakers in the EU, where just last weekend anti-immigration parties surged in the elections for the European parliament.

The quotes are not in fact contemporary. Rather, they date back to when Ronald Reagan was president in the 1980s. But they could conceivably have come from any White House in the intervening years, for they encapsulate four decades of tangled, sometimes hard-headed but also complex decision-making in Washington over immigration and its 1,900-mile southern frontier. 

At the heart of that debate is a big question: how should the government of a wealthy liberal democracy balance its moral and legal obligations to asylum-seekers and its belief in the economic benefits of immigration with domestic political pressures over security and constrained resources?

All this is fertile ground for publishers. A slew of new books implicitly take on the uncertain approach of many western politicians as to how to manage their borders at a time when the right are ramping up popular anxiety over the issue.

Immigration has increasingly overshadowed politics in Europe since 2015-16, when 2.3mn people came to the EU, mainly fleeing the civil war in Syria. All the while, European policymakers have become more hardline, increasingly trying to outsource their responsibilities for asylum-seekers to countries such as Tunisia, Egypt and Turkey, and all but resiling from their international obligations as they seek to offset the siren allure of the populists.

Goldin seeks to buttress the traditional liberal argument that accepting immigrants is not just humane but also good economics

Yet populist and far-right parties did better than ever before in elections for the European parliament, with Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National winning 31.4 per cent of the French vote. Among their arguments was that the continent needs to tighten up policies to reduce the numbers of immigrants, whether economic migrants or asylum-seekers. In part their success reflects their seizing on myths, but they have also capitalised on a widespread perception that the establishment has not levelled with the broader population about the scale of the numbers of migrants and the consequent pressure on public services.

There is a similar story in Britain, where the debate over immigration, which influenced its vote in 2016 to leave the EU, is bubbling away again ahead of a general election, to be held on July 4. Successive governments have skirted public concern over the issue and failed to plan for it by, say, building many more new homes and expanding transport. Meanwhile, the numbers have been rising, with net migration at 764,000 in 2022 and 685,000 in 2023, a trebling since the last election in 2019 and the opposite of what the governing Conservatives promised.

It is also a divisive issue ahead of the US presidential election. Last week, to outrage on the left of his party, Biden signed one of the toughest executive orders on immigration ever issued by a Democrat, which allows the authorities theoretically to reduce the number of asylum-seekers. Purportedly it was to “gain control” of the US-Mexican border but, in reality, it was more performative, to counter his rival, Donald Trump, who has been turbocharging the issue in his bid to regain the White House.

If anyone is well placed to take on the agonising story of America’s southern frontier it is Jonathan Blitzer, a writer for the New Yorker who has spent the best part of a decade reporting from there. The quotes from Reagan’s White House are among the many diamond-stud details in Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, Blitzer’s sweeping history of humanitarian crises on the US-Mexico border, and of the politics of immigration in Washington.

His focus is the fraught relationship between the US and the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America — El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala — the source of many of those crossing Mexico in recent years to the US. What could be a complex story is a stunning epic woven around the lives of four individuals seeking sanctuary from the death squads and murderous gangs that at different times dominated their homelands.

While at times this is implicitly an indictment of the sometime short-termism and cynicism of Washington’s foreign, security and immigration policy, this is a novelistic account rather than a tract, and his tale is beautifully told. All four characters, whose lives he has followed over many years, linger in the reader’s mind. 

The story of Juan Romagoza, a Salvadoran doctor who witnesses an execution of a wounded activist by a state death squad from under a bed in a hospital ward in 1980, before having to flee, wreathes the narrative. After unimaginable suffering and loss, decades later he seeks to bring to book the perpetrators of so many atrocities. Then there is the mother from Honduras who is separated from her children at the border, a victim of a cruel shift in policy under the Trump administration.

Linking these stories are the shifting currents of America’s relationship with the region, not least the consequences of the US cold-war doctrine of supporting rightwing client regimes as pieces on a chessboard.

Jason De León, a professor of anthropology, takes a similarly immersive approach in Soldiers and Kings. His focus is not the migrants, however, but the people often demonised in this story: the “coyotes”, as the smugglers who facilitate migrants’ journey over the border are known.

This is an extraordinary — and brave — piece of research. His characters are young people who somehow escaped the anarchy that has enveloped Honduras in recent years, and ended up in Mexico working with the gangs that dominate the people-smuggling trade. The book is not about policy nor politics. Rather, it is about people and people usually seen as the lowest of low life but who, in De León’s hands, become human.

His gaining of their trust is remarkable — as is his account of the life and death of one of them, “Chino”, whose story runs through the book. He and his fellow coyotes live in a horrible world of stabbings and shootings and double-crosses. Often these take place on the roofs of the carriages of “La Bestia”, the freight train that is a major conduit through Mexico for migrants. “On the tracks for $500 you can get someone killed like a motherfucker,” says one of the author’s subjects. “That’s a price that comes with a guarantee. But people will do it for a lot less.”

At times the fly-on-the-wall description is almost too much to bear. The author himself queries his own ethics and worries about the stress he exhibits. But these stories help to explain why the Biden administration’s bet on working with Mexico to reduce the numbers crossing its vast expanse has failed, and was probably always going to fail.

Only at the end does the anthropologist allow himself a brief indictment of the west’s preoccupation with seeing migration as a matter of security: “Wherever there are border walls separating the haves and have-nots, you will always find desperate people and enterprising smugglers working their way over, under, and through those barricades at all costs.”

The conundrum for America is that its southern border is so long that even if a government had the will, there is no effective way to shut it. And anyway, even if there were a wall, people are so desperate to reach the US that it’s all but impossible to make it impregnable. But that, of course, does not make policy choices any easier.

In Britain, the government has sought to focus attention on the relatively small number of asylum-seekers trying to cross the English Channel in small boats, rather than the far vaster numbers of legal migrants. Across Mountains, Land & Sea, a short plangent memoir by an Afghan who nearly drowned in a small boat in the eastern Mediterranean, is a timely reminder of the extraordinary risks asylum-seekers so often have to take. 

The author, who uses a pseudonym, Arman Azadi, to protect his family in Afghanistan, has an inspiring life story. After fleeing the Taliban, he arrives in England, having tied himself underneath a lorry for the last stretch of the journey, penniless and uneducated. He ends up working for the UN to help refugees. Near the end of his account, he quotes the British-Kenyan poet, Warsan Shire, who wrote: “No one leaves home, unless home is the mouth of a shark.”

After these three books a reader might be close to despair. If so, The Shortest History of Migration by Ian Goldin, professor of globalisation at Oxford university, makes the ideal complement. In 272 crisp pages of body text dotted with charts, he addresses the history, consequences and opportunities of migration. He also cuts through the political rhetoric to look at the facts, seeking to buttress the traditional liberal argument that accepting immigrants is not just humane but also good economics.  

Among his many salutary data-points are figures that suggest that, given the increase in the global population, the percentage share of people on the move has barely changed over the years. He also highlights that, according to the OECD intergovernmental organisation, given Europe’s declining birth rate, the EU will need 50mn migrants in the next 25 years to stabilise its population. Ultimately demography may shift approaches elsewhere too, including Japan, where immigration has traditionally been relatively limited.

Attitudes, Goldin believes, can change. Encouragingly he points to Romania, a country that, post-communism, was wary of outsiders and yet is now welcoming immigrants to make up the shortfall caused by the numbers of Romanians working in western Europe. Unfortunately, however, as Reagan’s adviser wrote all those years ago, politically at the moment immigration is “a no win issue”.

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer Picador £22/Penguin Press $32, 522 pages

Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling by Jason De León Viking £28.99/$32, 400 pages

Across Mountains, Land & Sea: One Boy’s Extraordinary Journey by Arman Azadi Trapeze £22, 224 pages

The Shortest History of Migration by Ian Goldin Old Street Publishing £14.99, 272 pages

Alec Russell is the FT’s foreign editor

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