The Myths and Realities of Global Migration

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Amy, thanks so much for joining me.

AMY POPE

Such a pleasure to be here.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Your fantastic Foreign Affairs essay, which was called “Migration Can Work For All,” was published just over a year ago. That was a couple of weeks before [U.S. President Donald] Trump’s second inauguration when it came out. The opening line of that essay was, “Across the world, a backlash to immigration is remaking politics.” That was certainly true at the time, and in the last year it seems that the backlash has become even stronger and has truly remade politics in the United States and a lot of other countries.

It strikes me that, in part because of the backlash, it can be a struggle to get a basic grasp on the facts of what has happened in global migration patterns over the last several years. As you note in the opening of the piece, “anti-immigrant politicians and activists spread disinformation to suggest that countries are being invaded by waves of undocumented migrants.” But even beyond that, I think it’s a bit hard for all of us to have a sense of exactly what’s going on. And you do note that levels of migration have been at historic levels in a lot of places, including the United States in recent years. So to start, before we get into the policy dimensions of this, I thought it’d be useful to get a clear understanding of what’s actually happened with migration patterns in recent years. So at a high level, if we go back over a decade or so, what have we actually seen? What have those patterns been?

AMY POPE

Well, the vast majority of people who are migrating are migrating through a legal channel or migrating within their region. We actually don’t see most of the migration patterns play out in the United States or Europe. They’re playing out in neighboring countries or they’re playing out—someone gets a job through a traditional visa and it’s not making headlines, it’s just part of the fabric of that society. And that number is about 304 million migrants around the world. And so the proportion of migrants who are coming through irregular channels is proportionately extremely small. But nonetheless it is driving a conversation and leading to the use of resources that, you know, is a question of whether or not it’s the best way to manage what’s happening.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And when you look at those irregular channels, how much did those numbers actually change in recent years? We see headlines in the United States with large numbers of Venezuelans or Haitians or others in Europe. There have been various waves of migration over recent years which tend to get most focus. Are those perceptions right? I mean, are those numbers in fact growing in marked ways, or is that a matter of headlines?

AMY POPE

It’s both. The numbers of migrants coming to the U.S.-Mexican border at the end of the sort of 2020, 2021, 2022 [period] actually did reach record highs, highs that we hadn’t seen since well before 9/11. The wave of migration in the United States and the Americas was—of irregular migration in particular—was fueled by a couple of things. One was post-COVID. Right around the time of COVID basically everybody stopped moving. And then post-COVID there was a very significant uptick in movement. It was also driven by economies across the Americas. We saw a lot of postsecondary movements, meaning that Haitians or Venezuelans who’d been living happily in places across the Americas could no longer find jobs or were facing xenophobia or other pressures and so they started moving. So we saw a wave of migration move through the Americas in that period right before Trump came into his second administration.

Now, we’re seeing similar patterns around the world driven increasingly by the impact of climate shocks. So high, high numbers of people getting displaced by drought or by floods or wildfires or you name it. And it’s basically erasing people’s livelihoods. We’re also seeing a significant number of people who are moving in search of economic opportunities. And that, by the way, is happening across regions. It’s happening across Africa. It’s happening across Asia. And to some degree from the Africa-Asia region into Europe, but a much lesser degree than what you see actually in those regions themselves.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Do you have any sense that technology and changes in technology have played a role here? I think anecdotally there are stories about both the greater ease with which migrants can find communities and work because of new technologies, but also they get kind of, on TikTok or other platforms, they kind of see pictures of life in other places that may in fact be better or may just look better. How much do you think that has driven the change?

AMY POPE

I think it’s significant, although the reports we have are anecdotal, I haven’t seen good studies on this. But we certainly hear from many of the migrants we speak to, especially young people, they see a life that is far different from what they have. They imagine that that could be available to them and figuring out how to get that has become even more accessible. I mean, the one way technology is really playing a significant role is the use of it by smugglers and traffickers to communicate this is an easy and effective way to go. And the truth is for many, many, many, many migrants, it is much easier to go with a smuggler than it is to figure out, How can you get somewhere, get a visa, get a job opportunity? So right now smugglers are really exploiting that, and they’re using social media platforms to get the word out very, very quickly. And much, much faster than governments have been able to react.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And not always with accurate information, I imagine.

AMY POPE

Absolutely not. I mean, we’ve seen actually a range of trafficking cases playing out in parts of Asia, for example in Myanmar, where young people thought they were going for a legitimate job opportunity and they get there and then they’re trafficked—trafficked into call centers, trafficked into scam schemes. And it’s all being fueled by social media, and they have a perception of what they’re going into that does not meet reality.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You noted a pretty staggering figure in your piece, which was that over 26 million people were displaced as a result of climate-related disasters in 2023. I was shocked to read that that was greater than the number displaced by conflict. We, of course, usually focus on conflict when we talk about this. To what extent do you see the climate element continuing? It seems pretty likely that it will get worse, so what do you envision climate-driven migration looking like in the coming years? How might it increase?

AMY POPE

Well, there is a convergence of communities that are at high risk of climate shocks and poverty. Everybody in the world, no matter whether you’re in the United States or Europe or other well-developed economies, is experiencing the impact of a changing climate. We see it all the time. The United States, they’ve seen it all the time with flooding and storms and record snowfalls and all sorts of things. But in these communities that are already vulnerable, where they have very, very low resilience to the climate shocks—particularly farming communities, communities that are reliant on fishing, agriculture, communities that are in coastal areas that are extremely susceptible to the rising seawaters—that’s where we see the impact. So quite a lot of coastal Africa, we’ve seen it. We’ve seen desertification in parts of the Sahel countries that’s sort of spreading out, that’s leading to increased conflict. We’re seeing it in Asia-Pacific and the Pacific islands in particular. We have people, literally their island nations are disappearing. So that’s the worry here, is that we’re seeing the impact of climate on communities that are already vulnerable and on communities that have high numbers of young people. So the perhaps traditional jobs that someone would have been able to take in the past are just not going to be available. And so that creates a migration pressure, that creates conflict, and then that leads to more movement of people.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And when you look at the U.S.-Mexican border, do you have any sense of how much of that was in fact driven by climate, even as we focus more on the economic and conflict dimensions of the problem?

AMY POPE

We actually saw, for example, in Central America, the impact of things like drought and coffee rust, flooding, things that directly affected the livelihood of the person. And so then they’re basically—they don’t have a job, there’s no way to get a job, or their house has disappeared or their resilience is basically gone. And so then it becomes a lot easier to move.

Now the flows in the Americas, certainly the situation in Venezuela fueled a lot of it, and those were not necessarily traditional refugees. In the early days of the Venezuela crisis, people were fleeing political violence. But as that crisis was prolonged, we saw more and more and more people—sort of regular, what would have been middle-class people or working-class people—leave because they just had their savings wiped out, they had no access to resources. So you saw Venezuela was really a driver of movement. And then, of course, as I mentioned, the Haitians who had been working and living throughout the Americas, that community also started moving.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And what comes through very clearly in the essay is the failure of the old system to address that kind of migration, so let’s turn to the system. You have a very striking line in the piece. You write, “Today’s unprecedented levels of migration make plain that a decrepit, outdated system, built in the wake of World War II, is incapable of contending with today’s humanitarian needs, demographic trends, or labor-market demands.” And you’re saying that, of course, as the person running one of the key organizations of that system, so it comes with a high degree of credibility. Stepping back, how was that global system supposed to work? And as you look back over the decades, where did it start to come apart? Where did those failures start to arise?

AMY POPE

We think about why it was put in place originally and why people were moving right after World War II, and clearly most of the people displaced at that time were displaced by war. Many were displaced by persecution based on their religion or cultural identity or other factors. And so there was a very clear reckoning of the system at that time and a recognition that states had an obligation to provide refuge, to provide asylum, to people who were fleeing that kind of persecution. That is the system that was built at the time, but actually that system, even at the time, didn’t address the high numbers of people who were just displaced by the war itself. It was really focused on a very specific category of people. But unfortunately, the rest of the system didn’t evolve.

I think it’s hard to put myself in the shoes of the states that were coming up with the Refugee Convention at the time, but I think they thought, “Look, we just did something significant. This is really important. Let’s check the box.” But they didn’t anticipate the movements of people that we’ve seen, especially in the postcolonial era and especially as demographics have changed. And so I don’t fault them for not being able to anticipate that, but it is clear that the world as it existed in the 1940s and 1950s is so far from the world we live in today.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And how does your organization, how does IOM fit into that system?

AMY POPE

So the International Organization for Migration is an organization that’s been around for 75 years, since the end of World War II, to help people displaced by that war find safety and security. Today we work in over 170 countries. We work to stabilize populations that are on the move. We provide humanitarian support for communities that have been displaced, whether it’s by climate shock or whether by war or poverty. And then we help people move safely, be resettled, move through legal channels. We also help people get home and to reintegrate once they get back home.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Could you just describe the Refugee Convention as it was envisioned in the 1940s and 1950s, and why that is not, in fact, suited to patterns that we see now?

AMY POPE

So there’s a very specific definition of refugee, and it is not just any person on the move. It is a person who is fleeing because of persecution, because of their place in a particular social class or religious background. People who were being targeted and could not seek safety, could not find a path forward, and many times were at risk of being killed if they stayed at home. And that system remains important because we actually still continue to see people who are fleeing because of that kind of persecution. Now the definition has been broadened in some places. If you look in the Americas, there is a recognition that people who are fleeing war itself should be included. That’s not necessarily been broadly agreed to by all states, but certainly the definition has evolved a little bit on the margins.

But the system never anticipated that a state would have an obligation to provide refuge to somebody who was fleeing poverty, or to somebody who was fleeing a catastrophic storm that destroyed their home, or even to somebody who was fleeing community violence—you know, it’s not safe for them to stay in their neighborhood but they are not specifically being targeted because they live in that neighborhood. So the world that people live in today and the pressures on people to move are not captured anywhere in any kind of internationally agreed document or norm or treaty. And so that means that, one, states are kind of on their own to figure it out, and two, more and more and more migrants are using the definition of asylum, using the Refugee Convention, as a way to get from here to there because that’s the only path they see available, even if they don’t qualify.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And there’s simply no other status for them to claim other than an asylum seeker at that point.

AMY POPE

There are very, very, very few options for people. Now some states will have recognition of victims of trafficking. Some states will have recognition for vulnerable communities, vulnerable children. But there is no agreed-upon way forward. And frankly, in this climate right now, getting to some agreed-upon consensus about how to treat the movement of people is, I would say, nearly impossible.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

The numbers with regard to the United States are really striking. In the piece, you note that asylum applications increased, I think this was annually, from something like 100,000 to 500,000 over the last couple of decades, and that the backlog, as you noted at the time—this was a year ago, and I imagine it’s higher now—was three million cases, with many of those taking seven years to resolve. And as you noted, that has driven a backlash against what was a kind of sacrosanct status among many places, not just in the United States, but you note Finland and Poland and South Africa and others that kind of see the asylum system breaking apart in a lot of these places. What is the extent of that backlash as you watch it?

AMY POPE

It’s enormous. And you know what, that is a real shift that I’ve seen even over the course of my work. When I first started working on issues around border management and the movements of people, what we would see, especially on the U.S.-Mexican border, were more people try to enter the country in a clandestine way, using smugglers to cross in often very sophisticated ways, over and under fences, through tunnels, through the sea, all sorts of different clandestine ways. But over the last couple of years, what we’ve seen are more and more people recognize that the asylum path could be a path that at least allowed them many years to live and work in the country of destination while their case was wending its way through the courts. So we saw increasingly, instead of people trying to kind of get smuggled into the country, we saw more and more people go up to the border, basically present themselves to a border official and say, “I’m here to seek asylum.” And then they’d kind of be put into a system, and the system would take years and years and years and years to evaluate their asylum claims.

Now that happened in the United States, but it’s happened across Europe as well. And there was a growing recognition that the system was not built to bear those pressures, and it’s then created a perception that the asylum system doesn’t work, it’s not worth investing in, and so let’s just throw it all away. Whereas what I believe what we see is the real issue is that, actually, asylum isn’t meant to be the pathway for people into a country. It’s meant to be kind of the option of last resort, and we really need to be thinking of smarter ways to manage the movements of people.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

How does the political backlash globally to these historic migration levels look from where you sit? It’s obviously very front of mind for people in the United States watching events in Minneapolis and elsewhere. It’s really at the heart of our politics. But if you look globally, to what extent does that seem central to the kind of political crisis of this moment, as it certainly feels in the United States?

AMY POPE

It’s playing out everywhere. It’s playing out in Europe. It’s playing out in South America. It’s playing out in Australia. It’s even playing out in places like Pakistan and Iran. There is a sort of frustration across the board with what feels like a chaotic movement of people, feels like there’s very little support for the movement of people. Communities get overwhelmed. It’s very easy to weaponize in a political debate. And as you’re seeing play out in the politics, that frustration is leading to lack of confidence in governments around the world, a lack of confidence in multilateralism around the world. And we’re kind of at a breaking point where the need to come up with new ways of dealing with the issue is increasingly urgent and not just to better manage the movement of people, but to make sure that we maintain trust in governments and democracies and the rule of law.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

As you look back to the post-COVID period, if you could go back and advise policymakers to handle things differently to avoid that sense of chaos and avoid the resulting backlash, is there anything you would advise them? Are there things that could have been done to get us to a different place now? Or was the—this is the kind of buildup of historical forces over so long that it’s hard to imagine near-term policy changes would have made a huge difference?

AMY POPE

There are policy options that are available. It does require some hard political decisions and it requires some hard financing decisions. And I’ve seen this firsthand in my work across many years in different places. It’s much easier to sell to the public, “Let’s spend billions of dollars in border security.” And I can tell you that it is relatively easy to get congressional support, and I see it play out across many of the countries where we work. It’s relatively easy to get parliamentary support to add more surveillance systems at borders, to add more border patrol agents, to add more balloons and fences and all of the hardware. Those billions of dollars, if put into systems that enable people to find some stability closer to home, could go so much farther.

And if we look at a couple of the active conflicts right now, you look at something—a situation like Sudan. Most Sudanese are going to Chad, they’re going to Egypt, they’re going to South Sudan, they’re going to Libya. What we see is, where the Sudanese cannot find safety, they cannot find options in those countries where they go first, then they move on. But they don’t come in with an intent to go to Europe. It’s along that pathway if they cannot get support. That is certainly the lesson of Syria and the movement of Syrians when that crisis started. They first settled in the surrounding countries, and they started moving to Europe when the pressures on them in those countries became too great and the countries themselves either lost political will or lost capacity to manage those populations.

So that’s the first lesson is this is not about—people tend to think about movements of people, everybody wants to come into Europe, everyone wants to come into the United States. That’s actually not our experience. Most people want to stay as close to home as possible, and they only keep moving when things become so bad in the first country of destination that they can’t really make a life for themselves.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So that’s Afghans going to Pakistan or Iran, or Venezuelans in Colombia or other South American countries, I suppose Syrians in Turkey or something who start there and then eventually end up in Europe or the United States or other wealthy countries?

AMY POPE

Right. So you look at, just take the COVID days, and most of the Venezuelans had gone to places like Colombia, they were in Peru and Ecuador, in surrounding countries. COVID stressed those economies significantly, much, much more than the U.S. economy. That created pressures on their services, and the ability for those communities to support even their own nationals became strained. And so then the pressure to also support Venezuelans became strained. So if I were to advise—sort of seeing what we see now—if I were to advise a government in the sort of early COVID days, I would have said actually, look at what we can do to support those countries in the region first because they’re really hurting, their politics are now spinning out because of this. Can you provide capacity around healthcare, around schooling, around job training, and help take off the burden? Because those communities actually started out as very welcoming of Venezuelans, and it was the pressures, especially the economic pressures post-COVID, that led to some of this backlash.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I have to think, hearing you say this, that given the crisis in the multilateral system all of these problems are going to get worse rather than better, at least in the near term, with UN funding crises and collapses in development assistance, not just from the United States but from European and other wealthy countries as well. That just seems like a challenging situation for poor countries that are trying to manage these flows from their neighbors.

AMY POPE

We’re seeing it firsthand. I mean, I was just in Libya within the last couple of months, and the number of Sudanese showing up in Libya, it’s doubled. The number of Sudanese who are now getting on boats to the Mediterranean is going up. And it’s because they’re not finding support. Much of that early humanitarian support is gone.

We’re also seeing it with a number of Somalis who are on the move. Traditionally Somalis, we’ve not seen high numbers of Somalis come. We’ve seen an increase in Somalis. And again, it’s correlation not causation, so I want to be careful that I don’t draw too straight a line. But what we’re hearing when we speak to those migrants is that they’re not finding support in the countries that they first go to, reflecting the fact that much of that support has come down. So it is, again, I certainly understand the political calculations that governments are making, but we are cautioning them that you can’t take your eye off where the movements of people are actually happening and the value of engaging closer to that center, both from a financial point of view but also in terms of a saving lives point of view.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So you write in the Foreign Affairs essay, “States that focus on border restrictions, mass deportations, or the abrogation of legal protections for asylum seekers will fail to solve the problem. They will simply redirect it while creating a new host of problems that will, in the long term, feed the problem rather than solve it.” If we look at the U.S. crackdown today, which is front of mind for many people and perhaps the most pronounced version of this, it does seem to be working on its own terms. You can criticize the cruelty and the objectives and everything else, but it has slowed flows quite dramatically and has resulted in large numbers of migrants leaving the United States. Again, that may be a bad thing, but it’s certainly worked on its own terms. How do you understand the effects of that in the short term? And if it’s in fact true that we’ll see long-term costs from that, what do you anticipate those will be?

AMY POPE

So no question that the very, very enforcement-minded policies we’re seeing are slowing the movements of people, and we’re actually seeing people moving in the other direction. That is, in the short term, there’s no question that that’s going on. But then, okay, you take a bigger view and you look at the American economy and where there are sectors where there have been insufficient numbers of Americans who can take the jobs. [The] agricultural sector is probably the most obvious one, and we see it in many, many economies, not just the American economy, where you do not have nationals—I don’t care what you pay them, you do not have nationals who are willing to go and work in the fields.

At some point, the demand for those jobs is going to increase and it’s going to create a pressure in the system. That demand will fuel effectively irregular smuggling routes because either we just decide we’re not going to have strawberries or tomatoes for the American public, or the pressures to get workers to do that work are going to grow so much. And if they cannot go through a safe and legal channel, they’ll come other ways. And this has played out in the United States for many, many years. So you just look at the evidence of how smugglers exploit those pathways.

And then, of course, the downside of that is when people are coming through smuggled routes, when they’re coming and working in the black market, it then depresses wages. It then creates conditions where people are more likely to be exploited and trafficked. It then creates effectively an off-the-books economy that becomes much more difficult to control. So that’s what we’re fueling because the demand for that labor isn’t going away, and in many economies the demand for the labor is increasing and it has to be fed somewhere. So that’s an important piece that states need to grapple with. And of course, there will be changes. There will be efficiencies that are driven by AI. But there are some jobs where AI is nowhere close to being able to deliver, especially in healthcare and in the service economy, in agriculture, in construction. You can get efficiencies on the margins but not to deliver at scale and not to meet the demand.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You note that in the U.S. case, you note this in the piece, that five percent of the overall workforce is undocumented, and in sectors like agriculture it’s something like 70 percent, which we all have a sense of that, but those numbers were quite striking when you gather them all together in the piece.

You mention being in Libya. There’s been this proliferation of third-party host-country solutions to migration crises where one country will pay another to basically take migrants that are not in fact from there. How widespread is this? And do you see this as part of the solution or purely a kind of danger to the well-being of these people and to the viability of a system?

AMY POPE

It’s kind of a mixed reaction. So we are not seeing the widespread use of the return of what we call third-country nationals to countries. There is a legitimate issue that states are trying to address, and that is when there is a person who’s come in who does not qualify for refugee status. So take an Afghan, for example, fleeing maybe terrible circumstances at home, economic pressures, the impact of drought, the impact of the Taliban, all the things we know are happening, but they do not qualify to get asylum in a country. What do you do with that person? And right now, states are grappling with, “Well, we have an order that the court has decided they don’t have a right to stay in our country, but they can’t go back to Afghanistan. So does that mean we just kind of live in this limbo?” So there’s a problem that states are trying to solve around, Where can or should people go in those circumstances? So that’s not widespread, but I certainly see many states grappling with it and trying to come up with some new ways of addressing it.

The bigger issue is the return of migrants to parts of the world where they have no connection at all. They don’t speak the language. They have no hope of getting a job. They’re going into a situation where the capacity of the local government is very, very weak. And you actually risk creating some conflicts within that country and creating negative dynamics and negative pressures. So returning persons from Latin America to some small state in sub-Saharan Africa with nothing, for that particular person it creates a vulnerability. For the country that is receiving the migrant, they often don’t know what to do. They don’t know how to integrate this person. And so you’re kind of just moving the problem somewhere else. So we’re encouraging states, “Okay, we understand the need to come up with some innovative solutions here, but let’s think through the consequences and let’s think through how do you mitigate those consequences?”

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

When you look at economies that need migrant labor and where you see the scope for a more kind of rational and mutually advantageous approach to this, I think what comes to mind for many people is the Gulf countries, where you have huge numbers of migrant laborers and small numbers of actual citizens in many cases. That model has a lot of problems with exploitation and abuse and everything else. There are people though—and the economist Lant Pritchett is one who comes to mind, and he’s written about this in our pages—who argue that that is in fact at least the kind of basis for a more sensible system that would be better for both wealthy economies and for migrants. Do you see that as having the kind of seeds of anything useful? Is that a model that others should be pursuing even with more kind of protections built into it?

AMY POPE

It’s really important that we underscore the “more protections built into it,” piece because I do think—and long within immigration advocacy communities there’s been suspicion of temporary worker programs and a perception that they’re just a channel to get cheap labor and a channel to exploit your workers and then send them back home. But what we know from speaking to so many of the migrants that we serve, many, many, many, many of those migrants just want a job, and they very much want to be able to go home, but because they’re in an illegal or informal or irregular status they’re actually afraid to go home because the cost of coming back to get a job the next season become too high or too dangerous. So they end up staying in a country when they actually had no intention to stay in the country. And that to me suggests that there is something to this issue of temporary labor. And if you can build it in a way where you have meaningful protections around wages and work-site enforcement and opportunities for people to report whether they’re being trafficked, you can actually build something better.

So if you look at the Gulf countries, they rely almost entirely on a foreign workforce. Something like 80 percent in some of the countries are foreign workers. They’ve had to make some adjustments, including getting rid of the kafala [“sponsorship”] system, getting rid of a system where the migrant basically has no rights at all, because of pretty serious concerns about the treatment of workers. But the concept—and again, I’ve spoken to so many migrants who say, “Well, look, I just want a job. I have nothing available to me at home.” So we need to kind of break open some traditional notions of what it means to work and how you work in today’s economy and, I think, not be constrained by an orthodoxy here. Take some lessons from what’s working in different parts of the world, improve on it, build on it, and I think ultimately that will lead to better outcomes. 

I want to just sit for a moment with an example that we’re seeing play out right now in real time, which is Bangladeshis who are now showing up in very, very high numbers in Libya and are the highest number proportionately of irregular migrants going into Europe. So there are about 16 percent of all arrivals now into Europe are coming from Bangladesh, and it’s an increase of 59 percent from last year.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And this is spurred by the political crisis in Bangladesh? Is that the cause of it?

AMY POPE

No, it’s not, it’s not connected to the political crisis. And it’s almost entirely young men, and young men whose families are raising funds to send them abroad. So what we’re hearing is the cost of coming from Bangladesh into Europe can be something like $10,000. Families will sell property, they’ll sell whatever goods they have. They basically will have kind of fundraising drives informally to then invest in this young person. Many are first going into Gulf countries and then leaving to go through Egypt, find their way to Libya. And without exception, that group of people is looking to go across the Mediterranean and into Europe to work. This is not a question of people who are fleeing conflict or violence. These are people who are looking for a job opportunity. This is their fastest way.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And what caused that spike, if not the crisis? What is our theory about what drove that?

AMY POPE

So the theory is that it has been happening in slow movements over the last couple of years. And what we’re hearing from the migrants themselves is that once you see a group of people go and set up, and you know you can do it, and you have a friend of a friend or a cousin or whatever, it then fuels more people to go. And in fact, some of the patterns we’re seeing is that people are coming from some of the same parts of Bangladesh, and they all, they’re very often telling very similar stories of poverty, lack of opportunity, impacts of drought, lack of, you know—or flooding. There’s no future for them.

And what I see is interesting right now, countries like Germany and Italy are signing agreements with Bangladesh, and in exchange for a certain number of worker visas and in exchange for investment and technical training for their nationals, the Bangladeshis are then agreeing to help facilitate the returns of the irregular migrants. So that is quite promising to me because what we know from our conversations with the government in Bangladesh is they’re highly reliant on remittances. They have a young population without job opportunities. They very much want to work, they’re not necessarily looking for permanent resettlement. And if they could go through a visa, a legal channel, you know they have enough of—these are not the poorest of the poor. They have enough of a means to scrape together thousands of dollars to pay a smuggler. So if they could find a way toward a better job opportunity, they’re all in.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You note in the piece that this anti-immigration wave is coinciding with a global demographic crisis, especially in rich countries. We all have heard plenty about dropping global fertility rates, but when you look, especially at East Asia, the numbers are just staggering. You note in the essay that, by 2050, nearly 40 percent of the population in Japan and South Korea will be over the age of 65. Lots of Europe will have similarly quickly aging populations. Do you see shifts in the politics of migration, especially in East Asia, which has historically been quite restrictive but where the demographic pressures are becoming quite acute?

AMY POPE

I see different countries with very different experiences. South Korea itself has taken a much more forward-leaning posture. We work with them to set up visa processing centers, for example in Central Asia, places where they have Korean diaspora, for example. They’re investing in language training, they’re investing in skills training in certain communities with an eye toward creating a pathway for people to come and work in Korea. Japan, it’s been much more challenging, and much of that is around culture and identity and language. And they’ve experienced a backlash even to government policies where they’ve looked to be more forward-leaning or find pathways for people to work in Japan. And so they’ve had a much, much harder time figuring out how to meet their demographic crisis. Now, it’s hard to break down why one society is able to move forward with more forward-leaning policy than another. There are lots of different factors coming into play, but it can be very culturally specific. And it’s also how the issue is being used within political circles.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Do you have conversations with the Chinese government about these questions?

AMY POPE

We do, although the Chinese government isn’t asking for support in how to address what will be their own demographic challenges. They’re more looking at, “How do we build capacity to work in other parts of the world where China has manufacturing or China has operations?” So they’re looking at, “How do we train a workforce outside of China?” They’re not coming to us to talk about, “How do we manage demographics in China?”

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

We tend to focus on relatively wealthy countries and governments in having this conversation. As you look across the Global South, especially in many of the countries that are dealing with the greatest numbers of migrants from neighboring states, do you see innovative solutions or interesting political developments there?

AMY POPE

Yeah, I mean, this is why I love working for this organization because actually we have the opportunity to kind of pull out and look at where we might have opportunities to work with governments. Interestingly, there are several countries within the Caribbean that have workforce shortages themselves and are very actively looking at, “How do we attract the workforce to come and help our demands?” Likewise, you see in many of the South American countries, countries like Uruguay is also an aging population, countries even where they have some more challenging political dynamics, they still have to attract a vibrant workforce. Places like Brazil has been open and interested in attracting the workforce. Even in Mexico itself they had a million jobs that went unfilled last year, so that’s interesting.

In the Pacific Islands, we are seeing cooperation with Australia [and] New Zealand about attracting talent from the Pacific Islands to work in their countries. They’re also talking to countries like Bangladesh about attracting a workforce. In Africa itself, in East Africa, you see really vibrant economic development. Parts of southern Africa you likewise are seeing that there’s a need for certain skills that they don’t have. Even in Côte d’Ivoire and in Senegal, their finance ministers have said to us, “Look, we have gaps in vocational workers.” So it’s actually, this is where I think it’s really interesting. We’re not talking about every migrant should go to Europe or the United States. That actually isn’t the answer, and that’s not good for development as a whole. But there are these pockets where migration is needed and countries are trying to figure out, How do we attract the workforce we need? And working with them to develop it would be a very good use of resources.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

It’s fascinating to me that you work for a multilateral organization, you’re part of the international system, and yet you’re talking to governments about issues that have these kind of economic and technocratic dimensions but also get at these very delicate, sensitive questions of identity and race and culture and everything else. How do you navigate those dimensions of it as you are working with different governments? I know it’s very, very different state by state, but I imagine that must be a complicated part of this job that in some ways is just a very, very different set of questions than most of what we’ve been talking about today.

AMY POPE

Well, I mean, first of all is you have to take seriously their concerns. And I know sometimes the language around migration can be quite polarized and people will throw around terms like xenophobia or racism when really, actually, there’s something more fundamental at stake. And it is important to hear that from states and understand what’s at play and figure out if there are ways to address it. Just an interesting anecdote from some of our work in Japan. There was some effort to attract Japanese diaspora who had lived and worked in South America, who’d grown up in South America. As you know, there’s a big diaspora community there. There was a very poor fit when some of that diaspora came to work in Japan because they were perceived as too loud and not respectful of the culture and kept different hours. So those are real issues, and if you lose the support of a community then you lose the debate. So I think it’s important not to shy away from those issues.

The way to address them, it really requires a level of engagement across different parts of a society that are not typically engaged. So we tend to think about migration, you just tend to think about the Department of Homeland Security or Home Affairs or Interior Ministers. That is one teeny, tiny piece of this equation, and you really need to be looking at what’s happening within communities. Are these migrant communities supported? Are the faith communities involved? Do the kids have access to schools? What’s the access in terms of hospitals? All of that. And governments don’t typically look at that. And I think both in Canada and Australia, they had some issues because there were housing crunches and a lack of access to services that really frustrated the population and then undermined some of their migration policies.

So our goal is just to—is first and foremost to share what we know and to give the examples of what’s working [and] what’s not working. In some cases we provide solutions. We do things like run mobile health clinics for migrants, but they’re also available to other community members. Or we’ll do things like add additional capacity to provide support for young people or kids or schooling. I mean, things that just help take a little bit of the pressure off of the local community that’s hosting a lot of migrants. And I don’t want to pretend it’s easy. It’s not easy, and it’s not something that any UN entity is going to solve. It’s really going to—it takes a lot more than that. It takes a lot of buy-in of community members. But that, for me, is what makes it so interesting. This is not a straightforward problem. It’s not a challenge that has, okay, we just do this or that. It really requires kind of some really lateral thinking.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

As you look at the incredibly fraught and difficult U.S. situation right now, are there lessons from other governments, whether developed states or developing states, that you think the United States should be trying to employ at this point?

AMY POPE

Depends what their goal is, ultimately. And that is not entirely clear. And there is a tension you see even playing in the United States between the demand of the private sector, the demand of business, and the concerns about migrants and migrant integration and irregular migration. And there needs to be a clearly articulated objective, and then we can identify what strategies might work. Obviously in smaller states it’s easier to come up with solutions because their populations are smaller and it’s easier to put your arms around what the options are. But the beauty of the United States is that it’s large, it’s diverse. You have communities that need migrants. You have communities that don’t need migrants. You have communities that are—where the churches are very actively involved in welcoming. I mean, that is the interesting thing about working in the United States, is that actually you can create solutions that respond to whatever pressures are being seen in the community. But the United States first has to articulate what it’s trying to achieve.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I want to make sure we turn to some of the solutions, the prescriptions in the piece, before we close. There’s a paradox when you try to get to the forward-looking part of this in the essay where you note that revising the Refugee Convention “to expand access and protection,” as you put it, “is a political nonstarter,” just given where things are, and yet quoting you, “Without a modernized approach to the movement of asylum seekers, increasingly negative public perceptions of immigration may cause governments to chip away at these protections.” Given that paradox, what are the kind of near-term policy options? And then looking a bit further ahead, what does a new system look like? And to the extent you have kind of pieces of that in mind, what might those be?

AMY POPE

So, first of all, I think governments need to take a hard look at what their labor-market needs are because unless you are very honest about that and honest about capacity that you have within your existing national system, you’re not going to solve the problem. You’ll always create a demand that’s being—if you don’t have the proper channels for it to be filled, will be filled with other mechanisms. So it’s first, let’s look at what you need. Second, let’s look at the policies that you have to meet those labor-market needs. And migration is one piece. It could be other pieces, right? It could be, let’s get more women in the workforce. It could be, let’s extend the retirement age. It’s all sorts of things. But migration for many countries is a necessary piece of that puzzle, and it needs to be built into the system.

Then I actually think we should be looking at populations where people are coming from and identifying what are the particular drivers in those communities. And you have a range of policy options to respond. There’ll be some subset of those populations who could actually help fill those labor-market needs. People who could—in some cases, it’s lower-skilled work, they don’t need training, it’s just about making sure you have a proper way to get a visa to go and work in that sector. And we see that there is very high compliance rates with those visas with migrant communities because they have a vested interest in being able to come back. I’ve seen it, for example, the United Kingdom has an agricultural program where it’s drawing from Central Asia—high compliance rates with that agricultural program because the Central Asians want to be able to go back the next season and they’re making good money, they’re learning practices, they’re investing that money back home and it’s kind of win-win.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

High compliance meaning people leave when they’re supposed to leave?

AMY POPE

They leave when they’re supposed to leave, they get their proper documents, they complete whatever checks they need to complete. The employers are following the rules because the employers want to be able to keep bringing them in. So there’s a lot of incentive for people to work within those systems when they’re working. So some population you’ll want to recruit to go and work in some of those underserved communities in the destination country.

The other piece, though, is how do we think about building out regional economies, and how do we use the lack of opportunity in a home state to help meet some of the labor-market needs in the surrounding states? And there are so many examples of states that are looking for migration. If I look, for example, right now in many of the states in Central Asia, in the states that are adjacent to the European Union, some of the EU accession countries, the Balkans, they have pretty serious labor-market needs and they don’t necessarily have the way to fill them yet. And they’ve lost a lot of their talented nationals to go and work in Europe. And so they’re trying to figure out, “Well, how do we attract and retain labor?”

Again, it’s not just about the United States, it’s not just about Europe, it’s about thinking broadly, all these economies that are evolving, and how do we enable them to attract labor? Because, as I said, most people move first in their region, most people want to stay in their region. So let’s figure out how to make the East African community function more properly. How do we take advantage of what’s happening in the [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] countries so that people can move? How do we take lessons from what’s happening in the Gulf so that people move more safely and with protections? And then you actually link—and this is the part that doesn’t happen now, but I believe should happen—you actually link some of your development assistance to creating the skills and opportunities for people to move. And you do so in a way so that you name the sector where there’s insufficient skills. Okay, let’s train nurses in this country, and then enough nurses who can work in the United Kingdom but also can work in the region. So you link it. And then when people go back home after they’ve worked in whatever sector, then you help them invest that money into creating jobs in their own economy. And we see lots of little examples of where this is working already. And so it suggests that if we were to create a model where we start to link these different pieces together, we actually could come up with something better. And ultimately what we want to do is protect the asylum system for those people for whom it was originally designed, for those who cannot find safety at home, are at risk of persecution, whose lives are being threatened because of who they are. And we’d see, I suspect, those numbers go way, way, way, way down.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

If we don’t manage to fix the system, if we don’t see the political will to embrace some of these solutions and the system continues to decay and the backlash continues, what are the consequences of that over the medium term?

AMY POPE

Well, people are people, and people will do what people have done since the dawn of human civilization: they move. And if you are not safe, if you don’t have a way to feed your children, if you don’t foresee a future for yourself, people move. And we see it all the time. People are moving, and they’re moving whatever way they can move. So this isn’t a question of whether people will move, it’s a question of how they move. Do they move through the hands of smugglers? Do they move in the shadows? Do they move in extremely dangerous and exploitative ways? Or do they move in ways that people can have a better sense of who they are and where they’re going and connecting people and opportunities?

So the fact that people will move is not something we’re going to be able to control. No one’s ever been able to truly, truly control that movement. So it’s really politically, from a human rights point of view, from a development point of view, it’s really in our interest to come up with a better way of responding to and managing that movement.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Amy, that’s a good note to end on. Thank you for doing this today. Thanks for the wonderful piece. It was exactly right for the moment a year ago and continues to be incredibly relevant to what we’re seeing in the United States and globally, so really appreciate that.

AMY POPE

Pleasure. Thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.