Immigration to OECD countries has shown a structurally increasing trend over the past two decades. Apart from occasional refugee influxes, these have been mainly driven by growing labor shortages for lower and higher skilled workers. In the post-covid "labour crunch", labour shortages reached an unprecedented high across the OECD world, and so did immigration levels (for an example, see the graph below).
Levels of immigration mainly follow business cycles. The main dilemma governments therefore face is that it is impossible to reconcile the growing demand for labour, and pressure by business lobbies to open more legal migration channels – and to turn a blind eye towards the widespread and largely tolerated employment and exploitation of undocumented migrants; and on the other hand to satisfy public demands for less, or more controlled, immigration.
In other words: Governments can't have their cake and eat it too.
Migration, it's the economy!
As I argue in my book How Migration Really Works, This explains the largely and growing "discursive gap" - and political hypocrisy - between tough political rhetoric and largely symbolic border crackdowns and much more lenient immigration policy practices.
