IRRI-KIIB expert seminar:
“The Global Governance of the international Migration: A Belgian Perspective”
Brussels, Egmont Palace, 12 June 2006

Labour Market Shortages & Demographic Gap. Irregular Migration.
Prof. Johan Wets, HIVA-KU Leuven

I will address some challenges Belgium is confronted with in relation to international migration. I will first discuss issues related to employment and demographic gaps and then the topic of irregular migration.

a) Employment and Demographic Gap

The dynamics behind migration are to be found outside of Belgium. Belgium doesn’t really control these. I’ll highlight this with a number of figures.

The world’s annual population growth is about 80 million people per year. This is more or less the population of a country like Germany. Every second, the world counts three people more. A small part of this growth occurs in the West where fertility is almost the same as replacement level. Today, the Western world amounts to 1.2 billion people and this figure is expected to reach 1.25 billion by 2025. The biggest part of the world demographic growth nevertheless takes place in the developing countries, especially in the cities. The population growth is generated almost exclusively in the South.

This growing population is active in the labour market and figures from the World Bank show that we need 38 to 40 million new jobs a year to absorb this new labour force. But most job opportunities do not lie where the demographic rise is taking place. The necessity to create new jobs is beyond dispute, but even without the exceptionally high population increase an economic revolution would be necessary to enable the national job markets to absorb the increase of workers. In good years the United States for instance, a rich economy, are able to create 2 million new jobs (within the US). 

International migration has increased and migration is not only a “South-North” movement. Migration is also an issue in the South. Not all migrants go to the industrialised countries, although the number that is heading to the western world is increasing. If we look at the number of migrants as share of destination countries’ population (%) and compare today with the ‘70s, we then had a percentage of 4.3% of migrants whereas now, the industrial countries count 8.3% of migrants. One remark in this respect: it is not always easy to compare migrant figures because countries calculate the figures in different ways, which is a determining factor.

In the Global Economic Prospects 2006, the World Bank analyzed who benefits from the fact that there are migrants on the labour market. The countries of destination as well as the countries of origin clearly benefit from the situation. When people leave their country, there is less social tension. They can find a job elsewhere and send money back home. It is obviously a win-win operation. The amount of money migrant workers remit annually to the countries of origin is significant. Remittances are considerably larger than the value of Official Development Assistance (ODA). In the last decade, the remittances have grown annually. These migrant transfers are essential for a number of developing countries. In Turkey, the remittances represent an equivalent of 20% of the export earnings. In Morocco, it amounts to more than 40%. In 2000, 1.2 million Moroccans managed to escape absolute poverty solely on remittance income.

At individual level, the new migrants can improve their situation and have been able to build up a career. The big losers in this story are the ‘older migrants’ in the countries of destination; the migrant population who migrated several decades ago. For instance, if we look at the unemployment figures in Belgium – this is an example of a couple of years ago- we had an unemployment rate of 8% for the Belgian population. Twenty-seven (27%) of the Moroccan population was unemployed and up to 29% of the Turks living in Belgium were out of a job.

Large groups remain jobless, despite the demographic evolution in Belgium, which can be seen as a de-greening and a greying, even whitening society. Less and less youngsters are living in our region and the share of seniors is very high. The proportion of seniors aged 80 or more is growing fast. The distribution between who works and who is inactive reflects the problems of a society steadily becoming older. And moreover, people still actively working tend to leave the labour market at an even younger age. If we could enhance the employment rate, we might reduce the pressure on the different social groups.

In the 2000 report Replacement Migration Is It a Solution to Declining and Ageing Populations?, the UN projections indicate that over the next 50 years, the populations of virtually all countries of Europe, as well as of Japan, will face population decline and ageing. The report considers replacement migration in order to maintain certain balances on the labour market. We worked out a scenario taken from the Higher Council of Employment and looked at the impact on the labour market.

[See Chart: “Possible evolution of the Labour Population in Belgium”.]

The left column is the active population and the level of it without migrants. In the first model, we added 40.000 migrants on an annual basis and then 20.000, 15.000 and 10.000 migrants a year. You see a continuous reduction of the active population. If you want to keep the active population at the same rate by 2040, you would need 15.000 migrants per annum. This is of course a very static viewpoint, because it is difficult to tell how the labour market will evolve. From the previous results, it is clear that you have to take into account the older citizens. The OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) already calculated much earlier that Belgium would need around 40.000 new migrants per annum in order to keep up the same levels.

In this case we are talking about legally residing migrants. There is, however, a growing group of migrants who don’t have a residence permit. They are the topic of my next presentation where I will focus on irregular migration. The labour market is split up in certain segments where offer and demands meet in the various sections. It is obvious that if you need nurses at a given moment, and you see a large unemployment in the metallurgic industry; it would be almost impossible to train these workers to become nurses, at least not in a short term. This is the larger context where migration has an impact on the labour market and on society in general.

b)(Irregular) Migration

I’ll give ten statements on (irregular) migration.

1.” Migrants are here to stay”.

It is hard to find a country without immigrants. Basically only totalitarian regimes or extremely poor and/or war-torn states have little or few migration. We are not living in such a state, and thus migrants will keep coming. The share of immigrants on the total foreign population has steadily increased in the whole of Europe. There are very few indications that this will change.

2. “Large scale, unwanted migration is the export of the problems of the developing world”.

The world population keeps on growing, especially in the poor countries. This means that there, the share of the pie becomes smaller for everybody, even if the economy grows. On a world scale, the 20% richest of the population receive more than 80% of the total world income. This means that they generally don’t want to migrate because they don’t need to, whereas the poorest, let’s say 40% to 50%, don’t migrate to the industrialised world, because they don’t have the means for an expensive journey.

3. “It is hard to make a distinction between political and economic driven migration”.

Anthony Richmond’s paradigm shows that you can’t make a clear distinction between economic and political motivated migration. There is the reactive and there is pro-active migration and there are internal and there are external factors. If we translate this into a Belgian situation (and this situation can be compared with most of the European countries) we basically only take into account a few categories of the migrants we see in Richmond’s model: those who fit into the Convention of Geneva (refugees), the economic migrants who manage to obtain a work permit and the ones who find a bride or a groom in the country. Most other groups do not manage to enter Belgium. As a consequence, there is a large potential for irregular immigration.

4. “Migrants and migrant communities contribute to the development of the countries of origin”.

Studies on irregular migrants in the US have showed that even people without a legal status manage to save a considerable share of their income and send it to their country of origin, in spite of their low wages.

5. “Migrants and migrant communities contribute to the development of the countries of destination”.

Local population generally benefits form the arrival of migrants. They find their place in the host society. There is e.g. the so-called ethno-stratification of the labour market. Top jobs are performed by Belgians and by English, French, Dutch, German ...  people. Secondly, the middle layer includes Europeans and naturalised Belgians. The lower layer includes Turks and Moroccans. A glance at the informal labour market illustrates there is further ethno-stratification there. A lot of Moroccans are active in Spanish agriculture, working officially, or not. Even in the informal labour market, the Moroccans meet with competition from the Eastern Europeans.

6. ”No human being is “illegal”.

Only the legislation in the countries of destination makes migration “illegal”. A person may not have a residence permit, which makes his stay illegal. A person as such can never be illegal. Portugal for example was a country of emigration. The situation turned in the ‘80s. A new legislation was needed and the criteria to obtain a residence permit were defined. From that moment on, the phenomenon of irregular immigrants occurred.

7.  “Also undocumented migrants have basic (human) rights in the country of residence, like labour rights, the right to urgent medical assistance and the right to education“.

If you are working (employed), it means you are always entitled to wages etc. Many people active on the informal labour market are unaware of this and are afraid to raise awareness to the unjustice if they are being exploited. The law provides means to protect the rights of these workers. Also if you can deal with the employers, it is clear that they tend to exploit less and less. You might also consider involving the trade unions to discuss the problem.

PICUM (Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants) lists ten ways to protect undocumented migrants: Engaging public support through events and consumer campaigns; Collecting data; Informing undocumented workers about their rights; Building capacities through empowerment; Unionising undocumented workers; Working with employers to prevent exploitation and advocating for laws to hold them accountable to fair labour standards; Challenging exploitation and abuse through mediation and collective actions; Asserting undocumented workers’ rights in the legal system; Working with government agencies to promote undocumented workers’ rights; Advocating for legal status of undocumented workers.

8.: “Consumers create the market where irregular migrants find their job.“

Partially, we are all responsible. People want cheap tomatoes, but they don’t realise the tomatoes might be picked by irregular immigrants. Irregular migration greases our whole economy. For example, the huge meat market in the USA. Many are employed illegally. If all irregular migrants would be dismissed, the whole market would collapse, this situation is therefore tolerated. Knowing this and refraining from any sort of action, implies that we accept exploitation.

9. “Measures to reduce the number of migrants on the long term, lead to more migration on the short term”.  Looking at the growth of the world population, we could expect the same growth figures for the migrant population. But the relation is different: the growth of international migrants is substantially higher than the growth of the world population. It is often taken for granted that a rising income of the countries in the south will reduce the migration propensity. A rising income in some of the countries where most people don’t have the means to migrate over a long distance might, on the contrary, lead to even more migration instead of less. The outlook that the socio-economic situation might improve in several decades is not a message that restrains a young population from migrating to countries that offer more possibilities and hopefully a better future.

10. “Regularisation is an integral part of an integrated migration policy”.

The present migration policies, taking the current demographic evolution and current world order based on nation states into account, cannot prevent people from travelling from poor to wealthier regions. As a democratic society, you cannot rule unwanted migrants out at all means. This leads to a tension between reality and what is wanted. Moreover, criminal organisations are involved in the exploitation of the loopholes of the law or directly violate the law and make a lot of money by smuggling people into a country. Phenomena like human smuggling, human trafficking and regularisations are the indicators of the failure, or call it “imperfection”, of a migration policy. As long as the migration policy isn’t comprehensive and excludes groups that want to enter the country at a high cost, regularisations will be necessary.

Thank you.