Movements of people have recently far exceeded those of the immediate post-war period. For example, in the UK, the migrant population in long-term residence rose by over half a million between 2011 and 2015 (BBC News on-line, 6th March, 2015); by November 2018, another quarter of a million immigrants a year were arriving, but the proportion from the European Union (EU) was falling, and that from the rest of the world rising. Asylum applications peaked between 2004 and 2007, but have continued at high levels ever since. After 2016, fewer students from EU countries came, but this was more than compensated by the increase in non-EU immigration (Migration Statistics, November, 2018). By the end of 2019, there were estimated to be a million undocumented (irregular) immigrants in the UK, similar numbers in Germany, and 800,000 in the USA (BBC Radio 4, News, 14th November, 2019).
But now a new factor has put a sudden brake on these population movements, as nation states rush to close their borders against the spread of the coronavirus Covid-19. Although economic globalisation is much too strong a force to make this a feasible policy goal, the pandemic has slowed economic growth, caused mass lay-offs of workers and launched whole new institutional innovations. The idea that President Donald Trump would authorise the payments of something like Universal Basic Incomes (UBIs) to US citizens would have seemed wildly implausible only a fortnight before the pandemic struck the USA.
In this book, I shall argue that it has been the dominance of politically driven movements of people (in which religion, too, has played a major role) that has made this centuryâs mass migrations distinctive. Industrialisation, which came first to the UK, then to Western Europe and the USA, and finally to Russia and the Far East, was achieved mainly by movements of peasants and other rural workers into factory jobs in cities, mostly within national borders (the huge trans-Atlantic migration from Ireland during and after the famines of the 1840s took several decades). Now refugees from civil wars, most with religious undertones, have combinedâfirst with economic and now with pestilential factorsâto accelerate these movements.
There have been other examples of mass migration, especially from the Soviet Union after the First World War, and from former communist states to the West after 1989. But the scale and consequences of present-day movements have been exceptional; in combination with the other features of globalisation, they have challenged our democratic political systems and now also our health systems.
After all, the main features of Democratic Party politics were established towards the end of the nineteenth century, and remained in place until very recently. Conservative (Christian Democratic) and socialist (Social Democratic/Labour) parties ruled throughout in Western Europe, with the mercifully brief exceptions of the rise of Fascism in Italy in the 1920s, Spain in the following decade through to 1970s and Nazism in Germany from the early the 1930s to the end of the war. Even in Russia and Eastern Europe, the Soviet period seems quite short from the perspective of the present day; in Hungary, for instance, it was crumbling within a decade of its establishment. The impact of globalisation is likely to be far more lasting than that of those versions of Fascism or Marxism; those of the pandemic are even more difficult to predict, as institutional innovation becomes a feature of some unlikely regimes.
This book will analyse the relationships between policies for political and economic integration at the national level, and those for regulating movements of people across borders. During the period of industrialisation in the USA, mass immigration, notably from Ireland and Eastern Europe, was supplying labour power for the new factories and construction sites. After the Second World War, the reconstruction of the German economy, and its recovery as an industrial power, were achieved with large supplies of labour power from Polish and East German refugees. But there is no such demand in todayâs post-industrial Western economies; these refugees have arrived in countries with long-standing mass unemployment, and in which even the service sectors, expanding sources of employment for many decades, have begun to experience the impact of automation through Artificial Intelligence (AI) (Jordan 2020a). The impact of the pandemic has rapidly exposed the shortcomings of policies to sustain employment levels; earnings subsidies have quickly had to be replaced by income guarantees for those struck down.
The tension between social cohesion and free movement has always been recognised in capitalist countries and in unions of states such as the EU. The goal of policy has been to take specific measures to sustain solidarities between backward, rural districts (and nations) and dynamic, industrialising ones (most recently, ones in which services deploying IT and other digital innovations have flourished, and ones where manufacturing has declined, or agriculture has remained predominantly on a subsistence basis). Various forms of support and subsidy have been used to assist those activities and areas losing ground, and particularly disadvantaged citizens and districts within them. Suddenly now the main transfers are between the healthy and the sick.
Before the coronavirus crisis, these measures seemed to have sustained political stability in Western European countries since the Second World War, and to have given rise to a successful transition to democracy in the former Soviet satellite states of Central and Eastern Europe. There were few signs of resentment or dissent among the latter during the years after 1989; rather, they seemed to compete with each other in their keenness to comply with the terms of membership of the EU, and to embrace the reforms required. If the older generations grumbled and looked back with some nostalgia, the young took every opportunity to travel to the West for work and study, to learn English in particular, and to become good EU citizens. As a professor employed by the EU to teach democratic politics, social policy and social work in Slovakia and Hungary in the 1990s (none of which had existed under their old regimes) I experienced friendliness among most colleagues, and enthusiasm among most students.
However, there was always a price to be paid for globalisation, and it was those made redundant by traditional industries, and the less-skilled staff in the expanding service sectors, who paid it. Not only did they endure periods of unemployment and see their wages and salaries fall to match those in the industries that had been shut down; they also experienced precarious work and earnings (Standing 2011), often requiring supplementation by state benefits (Jordan 1973, 1987, 1996, 2008). Crucially, this work was enforced by the benefits authorities, by means of sanctions (cuts) and disqualifications, the coercive conditions imposed on claimants, both employed and unemployed (Haagh 2019a, b).
Above all, the insecurity engendered in populations as diverse as France and the USA contributed to mass protests against governments, and created the climate for a rise in authoritarianism (Standing 2017; Jordan 2019, 2020a, b). Immigration was blamed for this insecurity, even in regions with low levels of inward movement, when the true causes were long-term failures in systems for social integration. For instance in the Mediterranean French city of Marseilles, the whole northern urban extension has become a segregated concentration of immigrants, originally from Israel, then Algeria and most recently from the Middle East; some terrorist incidents and high rates of unemployme...