Migration Policy in Divided Times: A New Vision | Christian Joppke

[00:00:00]So now uh let me invite our first keynote speaker uh professor Christian Yupke so to share his views on neoliberal migration policy. So professor yup please.

[00:00:13]>> Yeah uh good afternoon uh thank you to those who invited me young rising scholar Teshi Mihi. Um I'm humbled that you trust that coming from afar I have something useful to say about uh migration policy. Um if you can move the slide here is the uh marching order the overview. Um the main argument is it's I'm afraid an academic argument because what I'm presenting here but I'm an academic is a paper still under review um for five months now actually I don't have a positive answer yet so there's no guarantee that I will not be telling nonsense to you bear with me uh and the argument is um economics and culture or utility and identity considerations which used to be logically and empirically separate criteria for selecting and integrating migrants um are no longer separate criteria. There's a fusion between utility identity, a fusion between economic and cultural considerations when a state has to decide whom to admit and how to integrate migrants. And I call that new um constellation where these two previously separate criteria become blurred or fused. I call that neoliberal migration policy. Also the title of this uh presentation. Uh my focus here simply because it's the focus of this little paper that I'm uh relying on is on the selection side that is on immigration policy proper. Um it's not um my um consideration to talk about the integrating of migrants even though that is an equally important challenge.

[00:02:31]That's always the dual challenge um with respect to migration. How to select and how to integrate. I only talk about uh the selection and also I think that is your main interest here. But I would claim um that some of the same patterns um neoliberalization that is can also be identified on the integration side.

[00:02:58]So um seven steps and I hope to be in time. Um um the first one is a bit of the academic side. Um um I will uh question whether there's really a liberal paradox when states decide about migration. I will tell you what it is. It is one of the key theoretical themes underlying the scholarship on immigration policy since 30 years now and it's closely identified with the name of esteemed colleague Jim Holiffield who has introduced the term. I'm not so sure the term is helpful, particularly not helpful to understand this new constellation of the fusion of previously separate criteria of selection. And indeed the second step then is to uh tell you a little bit about this new constellation of blurring of the previously separate uh economics versus culture divide. And I try to make sense of this new con empirical constellation in terms of I think we have a new form of nationalism that is informing states uh in this domain and I call it uh neo uh liberal nationalism also the title of a previous uh book of mine and I illustrate the workings of neoliberal nationalism um um along three uh aspects of my or three types of migration policy which are also the three dominant criteria of how states today select migrants on the basis of we need workers for our economy and there's a clear focus um in the neoliberal order for in terms of uh we prefer high-skilled migrants over low-skilled migrants and a second um um aspect is family migration and a third one is asylum migration. My claim is in all of these three dominant um sectors of u uh immigration policy you find similar patterns of the blurring of economic and cultural considerations when you select these t three different types of migrants labor migrants family migrants and asylum migrants. Yeah. And I'm closing with a mandate that I got from my inviting party here to talk a little bit about the future of migration policy. As an academic, you don't talk about the future, but I try to fulfill my duty here. And uh lessons for Japan, I have a big question mark here because I do think what I'm going to tell you is quite specific to uh the European constellation or North Atlantic constellation. And Japan is different in important respects. And perhaps you will see your own specificity in light of uh that rather different story I'm telling you about um um Europe and North America. So if you move the slide to my first point, the liberal paradox. Um the gray imminence for all of us political scientists or sociologists who study migration is Ari Zulberg. Uh he wrote um not terribly much but probably the best book ever on the um American immigration experience over the last 150 years or so. And um in in some he's more of a historian, always very concrete and very careful not to overlord uh his observations with with too much jargon.

[00:06:50]But when he was in the mood of jargonizing a bit or kind of generalizing a bit, he argued indeed when states select migrants, they have two two different toolboxes or selection criteria. One he called the identity axis. Um the other one he didn't give it a name really in terms of he should also call it some sort of axis. No, the approximate term I found in his work is uh if states don't select on the basis of uh are people close enough to who we are then they select people on the basis of they are useful for us because they fulfill jobs say that other domestic people do not want or cannot fulfill. He called that material conditions. I one could call it the economic axis even though that is a term that you do not find in Zoberg and interestingly his it's very complex this reasoning he he argued that each of these two axis cultural economic can have two expressions it can be restrictive kind of closed to migration or it can be inclusive in that is um migrant friendly as it were. So each axis has two poles, an open liberal pole and a closed restrictive pole. And yeah, he is the master of the historian of the history of American migration. And uh he could then show that US legal migration um um policy has always uh been dominated by identity concerns. And the big break here was 1965.

[00:08:41]Before 1965, you had an immigration policy uh called the national origins system that selected migrants on the basis of their race and their ethnic origins. Newcomers had to be similar to those who were already in the US. Go mudo, north European um uh migrants uh first and foremost and less if at all Catholics and uh Jews. Uh so this is of course if you select people on that basis by origins as I called it in one book then uh this is identitydriven and also after 1965 when um under the influence of the civil rights and student movements the United States had to abandon its racist kind of identity. It became more civic liberal. Then uh also uh when a new system now was actually giving quarter country quarter um an equal number of migrants from all countries in the world and that was kind of the idea was this is not discriminatory. This is not selecting on the basis of race. Each country has the same country in the world has the same chance to send newcomers to America. I will not talk about the subterranean motivations which were not so completely decoupled from racial ethnic considerations but also that was selecting on the basis of identity. No, America saw itself as a freedom country, as bringing liberal democracy to all over the world. And uh it was not a change of policy that was uh driven by utility, by economic considerations, but by more cultural identity considerations. Okay, that's Sber.

[00:10:42]Masterful stuff. Um no, why do you move here?

[00:10:49]That was my uh arm movements here. Um I will be short on this because it's a little bit too academic. Uh coming to the liberal paradox, Jim Holiffield introduced the term.

[00:11:04]It is motivated by a very similar consideration of as as Zberg that identity and culture on the one side and economics on the other side are kind of separate criteria. when states have to decide about whom to admit um as a newcomer. Um however um in his in his vision or in his model these two um axis are in a way monochrome. Each axis is monochrome. The identity culture axis is always kind of restrictive.

[00:11:41]The economic axis is always inclusive.

[00:11:46]uh to me this is a bit problematic and not making this notion so useful to understand real world policies there are two versions to the liberal paradox um um and I don't think that is helpful for you to go into that I actually have for anyone interested uh the paper and you uh consulted uh then I leave it with a paradox here and move on to the Next slide.

[00:12:18]Yeah.

[00:12:20]Uh several scholars and in a way what I'm doing in this paper is not terribly original. It's kind of summarizing new insights, empirical insights by people who study contemporary migration policies. And two of these very interesting scholars is uh Jennifer Elrich of McKill University in Canada and her Canadian colleague Canadian German colleague El Cavinta. They argued very much in my uh kind of confirming my intuition or the argument that I'm presenting here that utility and identity and indeed they use these two terms are no longer as they call it logically distinct concerns in migration policy. And this nice little paper um of the year 2017 looks primarily at uh recent German labor migration policy and they interpret this policy as an instance of national middle class building. This is their term and uh the primary example they discuss in this paper is German Germany's new pension or kind of drive towards admitting highskilled migrants which started sometime in the 1990s and was something completely new in Germany because before that moment Germany was like Japan before its recent developments that uh my predecessor just marvelously outlined it said we invand we are not an immigration country and that change uh when there was a perceived need actually for high-skilled migrants and according to these two scholars this is not just a utility considerations uh if Germany now moved to high-skll migration gave up its old self designation as not an immigration country it was also identitydriven that is following the project of what they call national middle class building. There's another example in the paper um that exemplifies this um national middle class orientation um of this new direction of German labor migration policy that or we see despouses that is the spouses of mostly male migrants coming from rich developed countries like Japan or South Korea or United States they were exempted from the uh new civic integration tests uh um that mostly global south migrants were um um subordinated to in a way their national origins um coming from rich societies qualified them. Quai automatically um for middle class uh status. So there was a fusion here, a fusion in in this labor migration policy of Germany in this point of time very recently um of class or utility and nationalist or identity considerations.

[00:15:31]And um another set of very um perceptive migration scholars to today, Saskatia Bonjour, who is actually a colleague of Hindas at the University of Amsterdam and Sebastian Shouva who works at the University of Loausan very close to B.

[00:15:52]They summarize the same observation. They argue in the current they call it nationalist neoliberal context. They don't call it really neoliberal nationalism. They don't really dwell much on the meaning of this uh combination here of nationalist and neoliberal. U in this context the policy distinction between cultural and economic criteria is increasingly blurred. And they argue the good citizen from the perspective of the state who rules over society selects migrants is the good citizen is a worker citizen. The worker citizen that's a term that comes from yet another interesting scholar um um I will not go into much of named dropping here. the worker citizen here. It's not really important what in a way the passport of that then metaphorically speaking citizen is the worker citizen an individual who is productive and useful in society can be either a citizen in the narrow term of passport holding or it can be an immigrant. Um okay I come back to that theme later.

[00:17:10]Therefore I think now we can uh move to our next slide and I have to consider time constraints would have never thought that. Yeah I call that constellation um that makes sense of these empirical observations um I call it neoliberal nationalism. Um generally one has to say nationalism is a necessary input factor for all migration policy. Migration policy is a policy that shapes and determines who is to be a member a new member of our society. And um countries um in a way do this or states do this membership policy. I follow here a nice argument by the American philosopher Michael Walter. They select newcomers in the image of who are we?

[00:18:09]We want to maintain who we are. Uh immigration policies in the service of maintaining and sustaining communities of character. This is Japan.

[00:18:23]This is Luxembourg. It's not me ball.

[00:18:31]Now neoliberal nationalism, this new type is neither civic nor ethnic. These are the two dominant types in the literature on nations and nationalism. Civic, the classic example is France. Ethnic, the classic example is Germany. No, neoliberal nationalism is neither nor.

[00:18:58]It raises the question, what is neoliberal?

[00:19:03]Now, colloquially speaking, neoliberal is to economize everything, not just things, but people included.

[00:19:16]The famous billionaire investor George Soros spoke of market fundamental market fundamentalism.

[00:19:24]If kind of market principles are not just at home in their original domain of the market but dominate education, dominate politics, even shape the subjectivity of people. um to responsibilize to make the individual self responsible so that society is not um um required to intervene. Uh that's a typical motif in that literature that reflects on what is neoliberal, the building of human capital. The idea is if education, previously education was to educate citizens, well-rounded integrated people. Now the new idea of education and in particular higher education is to get a good job to make myself sellable on labor markets to build human capital.

[00:20:23]So that is kind of intuitively speaking the meaning of neoliberal to economize everything to spread the market throughout society.

[00:20:33]Hayek in my view is the greatest theorist of neoliberalism. He denied the neo for Fred Hayek what he wrote about uh in his 50y year writing career.

[00:20:45]Marvelous productive writer actually he he thought he just reconstructed the original classical uh liberalism. No he did not. Hayek was concerned about social liberalism that liberalism turned into something like social democracy that it became closely allied with democracy. He hated social justice. He hated welfare. He he thought the individual is responsible for herself and if she fails there is nobody there to the rescue except perhaps her family.

[00:21:19]Individual justice not social justice.

[00:21:23]Margaret Thatcher who brought neoliberalism down from the sky of the philosophers like Hayek to the real world she said there is no such thing as society. They are only individuals and their families and there's no state that people should look for to help them out if they are in need. No such thing as society. That is also a good description of the meaning of the neoliberal doctrine. Here, however, a few self-critical remarks. Um, if you want the general ethics of all of immigration is neoliberal before the word. One of the earliest provisions in American um, immigration, federal immigration policy which originated only in the late 19th century was the so-called deeming provision. Ari Zberg whom I started with today wrote uh very prol prolifically about deeming. What is deeming? deeming was the idea that if an immigrant passes Ellis Island, then she had to um or it was mostly a he, even though a lot of families moved at the time as well, um find a relative say in New York who would sign a little paper and aid um saying if my relative just coming from Italy or from Slovenia, if she falls destitute ude then I will take care of her. That is deeming in a way it's a privatizing of um social aid. And you you see only if an immigrant to late 19th century America was self-sufficient, economically useful, was she considered a prop if she was sick and the teeth was shown to be inflicted with a disease, you go back anyway. So that was rough and utility oriented if anything. So one should be careful not to overdraw uh the meaning of neoliberal here. All ethics of immigration in a way has been neoliberal before the word. I also have to say uh neoliberal nationalism this strange neolism u as an ideology is very strange. This is what Philip Manu said actually in a re review of my one of my earlier books which was uh with the title of neoliberal nationalism. Why is it a strange compositor to to square neoliberal with nationalism? First the neoliberals now the doctrinires like Hayek and Bam Rupka and others sometimes considered and called the Geneva school in a great work by the American historian Quinn Labodian they were globalists they they didn't like the nation state they didn't like nationalism was too narrow for them they actually feared nationalism M that they feared the nation state because the nation state is a typical site and still today of democracy. People rule themselves. That's the meaning of democracy. The demos rules um and the nation state in a way had to be sidelined for um capital to move freely and unbburdened across borders. uh the people um the demos the nationalists were kind of a threat to property to property and therefore the Geneva school neoliberals they they they looked for new types of polity like actually the European Union uh um which were um more like an interstate federation as Frederick Hayek called it in an early very ingenious work um um and Hayek himself self. First, of course, he rented against anything social and socialist, but he also rented against or become argued against and mobilized and yelled against nationalism. He called it threat to a free civilization. So, one has to put that into consideration here.

[00:25:59]This is a very bizarre creature neoliberal nationalism. It grates in the ear. And if you could now move the slide that is at the level of doctrine in the real world. However, I think one can observe that thing that I call such and n for neoliberal nationalism.

[00:26:24]It is the idea we are a community of the thrifty.

[00:26:30]Thrifty means productive, useful, not cost factors. And who is excluded here from the community of the thrifty? Um on the one side lazy citizens and on the other side um um costly migrants who only come to us for abusing our marvelous social aid and welfare system. So the community of the thrifty excludes lazy citizens but includes productive immigrants. The community of the thrifty which is another more colloquial wordage for neoliberal nationalism blurs the boundary the boundaries the previously strict boundaries between citizens on the one side and immigrants on the other side. No not yet. No. Yeah. Stay with that. Um and policy examples of this real existing neoliberal uh nationalism u is social policy that has recently moved uh from welfare to workfare.

[00:27:44]America, Britain under Reagan and Thatcher respectively pioneered that that Grea German chancellor um belatedly joined the train. Tony Blair of course with new labor as well in the 1990s. Social policy I will not say more about that.

[00:28:08]Citizenship policy is another instance of neoliberal nationalism.

[00:28:14]There was a moment in not too long ago Europe that citizenship was considered a right if an immigrant um fulfilled certain uh prerequisites such as residence time or you know language compet. It was a right if certain conditions were fulfilled. The new rhetoric roughly since the 1990s is it's not a right, it's a privilege.

[00:28:44]It's a privilege that you have to earn.

[00:28:48]Citizenship is not um something that helps you to better integrate. That is the old liberal social notion. No, the new neoliberal notion is citizenship has to be earned. I talk about it in that uh book a older book of mine under the title of neoliberal nationalism and related articles.

[00:29:11]And a third example of course is immigration policy the topic of today.

[00:29:17]Rubaker esteemed colleague from UCLA has actually discarded nationalism as an input factor in immigration policy. He thought only citizenship citizenship not immigration policy is kind of shaped by nationalist considerations. I myself have taken this position in an earlier book and I will not bother you with that. What I do in the next slide is to simply elaborate um on neoliberal nationalist motifs shaping three types of contemporary immigration policy for the highkl family and um asylum.

[00:30:05]I can be very short about high-killed migration here. Um to a degree of course its origins are simply the new era of globalization in which there is a race for talent as my colleague Ylet Shah put it in a nice article early on. um this simply need in in emer in in a kind of technologically ever more advanced economies for IT specialists and they are predominantly to be found in Bangalore, India at least that was the earliest mythology. So um there is a very um economic um consideration here. It's not just a kind of nationalist however neoliberal nationalist consideration. It's both of these factors. will not talk about the uh EU which is uh an example of uh this combination here of uh economic uh knowledge based economy and identity considerations. We want social cohesion.

[00:31:10]Um and indeed when El Cavinta, I already mentioned her, introduced this notion of middle-class nation building, she primar primarily exemplified it along highkilled migration. Canada is an excellent example for that. I will not bother you with that detail here. read uh the paper and I think we can move on to the second type of contemporary migration policy that is shaped by neoliberal nationalist motifs which is family migration.

[00:31:46]If you can move the slide.

[00:31:52]Yeah. Generally, of course, family migration I always thought is immensely fascinating because this is a type of migration that is both individual rightsbased and it is something relevant for the interests of receiving states. Um, family migration happens because families are simply protected entities in liberal state constitutions. However, family migration can also be new seed immigration as it was called in the 1970s when Europe stopped accepting guest workers because of the first and most serious economic recession of the post-war era. Then most people actually who were still coming in were the family members of the guest workers. And so there was a a feeling that if we allowed too many of them uh our recruitment stop will simply be undermined. People abuse family migration for continued and then ever more um perpetuated new seed uh immigration. Now um in a liberal social liberal social democratic regime, the family would be considered a support factor for say male labor migrants who already arrived in a in a country of destination. It's good for integration.

[00:33:37]In a neoliberal context, the family is considered not the support factor but the cost factor. Um and under this um lens or from with within this optic there have been restrictive trends uh to cut down family migration whenever it since ever it became um a rather important u new channel for migration.

[00:34:06]And still today the majority of migrants who arrive in Europe are not labor migrants, not asylum migrants, they are family migrants. So if you went want to get serious about restricting migration, then you have to restrict family migration. And that was done in various ways uh raising the income level of the sponsor already residing uh say in Germany or in France. She had to show I earned a lot of money and I can support my spouse and my children. You raise the income levels. You have to demonstrate that you your apartment is big enough so that you're not crowded. U not as small as the hotel room that I enjoy here in Tokyo. Um so um another another restrictive trend is and that's very interesting because remember the dominant trend of this neoliberal nationalism is the blurring of the citizen immigrant distinction and previously citizens had more family rights than settled immigrants.

[00:35:20]it was easier for them to bring in spouses from abroad, spouses of a different nationality.

[00:35:28]Um, also settled immigrants have certain family rights, but they tended to be weaker and lesser than the family rights of citizens. And in countries like Germany and France, you can see a leveling down of these previously privileged privileged citizens to the level of of immigrants. And interestingly, very often uh driven by the demographic new constellation that a lot of u uh claims makers for family formation and family unification from a certain point on roughly 1990s were former immigrants are naturalized French or Germans. So in fact if you level down citizen rights here in that family um domain you you actually leveled down the rights of previous immigrants. So um um okay this is an interesting uh trend here. And thirdly highly interesting is that high-skilled immigrants in European countries like Germany and France they have more family rights than citizens. Um and the countries that um have been examined in this respect here is the UK, Norway also. Here you see almost uh certain foreigners are treated better than citizens uh if it comes to uh family migration rights. Okay, I don't need the case of Canada here. I can move on to the next slide.

[00:37:15]asylum migration.

[00:37:18]Now here the trend of there is a trend of economizing asylum migration which is quite recent and quite new and it has both a plus and a minus side.

[00:37:36]The minus side to begin with it is this trend to look at asylum migration increasingly from an economistic perspective is it is restrictive for recognized refugees. Refugees recognized under the Geneva Convention who are uh increasingly treated like ordinary labor migrants. Previously, refugees were put on a higher pedestal that they had more integration uh rights and more um easier residence uh rights uh than than labor migrants. And it is inclusive, this trend to economize asylum migration is inclusive for rejected asylum seekers. And one must know in in Europe in most European countries the number of uh recognized uh convention refugees is much smaller than the number of asylum seekers who are whose claims are rejected but who cannot be um deported kicked out for other reasons. I go to it in a second. So neoliberal asylum migration means that asylum to the degree that it's still granted is no longer primarily a right but it is increasingly charity. It's done for humanitarian reasons not for respecting a rights title on the part of the claimment.

[00:39:14]There's one side to it that is from right to charity and there's another side to it that is just crudely economistic. Uh the CEO of Daimler Benz big German upper middle class car maker in 2015 which was the moment of the big Syrian refugee crisis when about 1 million Syrian refugees arrived in Germany. They welcomed he welcomed that. He said, "Hey, most refugees are young. They are well educated. They are highly motivated." Um, in response to that big um incoming of about a million Syrians and others under that same uh in that same moment, the Germans passed a so-called integration law simply to to adjust the law to the new situation.

[00:40:08]Interestingly, that was written by the McKenzie Consultancy. Uh that is only mentioned here in in brackets. And what this new law did is on the one side it reduced the rights of recognized refugees. They were now demoted as I say to the status of ordinary legal migrants.

[00:40:33]permanent residence was no longer given to them automatically after they were recognized as refugees fulfilling this charact this criteria of political fear of uh persecution.

[00:40:46]um they had to submit themselves to the usual civic integration tests. If they if they wanted to have permanent residency, even convention refugees, they had to pass a language test and the civics's integration requirement that labor migrants had to undergo. But on the other side, that's kind of the minus side from the point of view of the asylum seeker or the refugee. On the plus side, uh there was a new legal term introduced in that law. It's called good prospect to remain and it gives all asylum seekers in whatever phase of the asylum uh process they are from day one on in a way if they have a good prospect to remain and that was simply defined by the probability that she would actually be granted refugee status. So if you came from Syria or from Afghanistan, the recognition rate for refugees is very high. So her prospect to remain is very high. Such asylum seeker was immediately kind of given integration support. And finally uh there was also um so-called track change for rejected asylum seekers. That's a complicated thing I cannot go into otherwise I would. I see my time is running here like mad. Um so summing up neoliberal um asylum migration is double-edged economization.

[00:42:22]This whole prospect to increasingly look at asylum seekers from the point of view of utility. It blurs the labor asylum distinction.

[00:42:30]It is good for rejected asylum seekers who are kind of track changed to the labor migration track. But it may also create false incentives to claim asylum only in the hope that eventually okay my asylum claim will be rejected but I will be admitted as a labor migrant as it were. That is the the purpose behind track change. I have written about it and I will not further dwell on it. And um the second problematic side here is humanitarianism undercuts the rights um basis of asylum seeking. There are several examples to it which I will not uh go into because my time uh is lapsing. There's an Italian scholar MLI who teaches Luca Mlli who teaches somewhere in England.

[00:43:24]He said the connection between these two uh sides, the double-edge as it were economization on the one side and humanitarianism on the other side is there is the reality of a new neoliberal political economy of belonging. That is his word for neoliberal nationalism.

[00:43:44]Okay, you can move the slide.

[00:43:49]Yeah. Summing up um summing up in terms of a question is neoliberal immigration policy middle class building or middle class nation building as El Cavinta um suggests yes and no. And in the end I'm kind of undecided on that. I give you the the the yes um um signals. Um economic class considerations have held entry across selection criteria no longer just labor migration where they were always but also increasingly in family and in asylum migration. And of course the whole vision of middle class is a classless vision a vision of society beyond class. So it reduces reduces the classic tension that exists between class and nation as competing um um um kind of uh affiliations of people in political uh terms. Um so uh in that respect middle-class nation building as Elgavinta calls it is an instance of what I call neoliberal nationalism which is indeed centered on this idea of the community of the thrifty of the worker citizen. There's a nice formulation of that in a work by the Israeli philosopher political theorist Yael Tamir. She says has to be very carefully read here. Elites have broken the very first rule of social solidarity. Members come first because under neoliberal nationalism certain migrants are even privileged over um own citizens.

[00:45:32]But then perhaps not. Perhaps middle class nation building is not so good a term for these new developments that I empirically elaborated here very briefly. Um no because ex explicit nation building concerns um one do not find um in migrant selection but in migrant integration which I have not covered here at all. Therefore, I u I will no longer dwell on that point. Um you know the middle class, the western middle class is the loser of globalization. You see it in terms of the famous elephant curve curve of the economist Branco Milanovich.

[00:46:18]Um and it would be an ultimately cynical enterprise to kind of uh uh rebuild the middle class that has disappeared with respect to natives to replace it with foreigners. It would actually be a a full example of this crazy right-wing fantasma of the Gongo Plasmo, the great replacement that conspiratorial elites are putting on ordinary hless people to let in a lot of immigrants in order for despised co-ationals to suffer even more. This is a topic in radical right political uh fantasy. uh lag plus more I will not further go into that um there's another um objection to looking at neoliberal immigration policy from the point of view of middle class nation building um yeah indeed in countries like Canada even the high-skilled immigrants that they want and wanted as one of the first countries starting in the 1960s they subject even high-skilled people to a probationary period. You have to test yourself first before you can establish permanent residence. The new um um reality in Canada is so-called twostep migration. you are first even if you're super high skil admitted on a temporary basis and um you have to prove over time that you deserve to stay here. Katrine Dania colleague from the University of British Columbia a lawyer he called she calls that new uh model the loss of settlement. Migrants are no longer wanted as future citizens and it was before. No, they're just widgets in the machine of neoliberal capitalism. Um, and all of that summing it up to use these grand terms like neol liberal nationalism, like middle class nation building, it suggests there's a grand great design, a grand design behind what states are doing. In reality, migration policies in the plural are patchwork.

[00:48:53]They don't follow a coherent philosophy.

[00:48:56]Um there's a lot of contingency and randomness to them. And finally to my second last slide, the real interest for you um lessons for Japan. Um, now in my view, the European challenge is to more clearly and cleanly separate labor migration from asylum migration because the recent trend has been to blur the distinction between both. Um, from the point of view, you know, we have 900,000 uh rejected asylum seekers in Germany.

[00:49:37]We cannot get rid of them for all sorts of logistical legal reasons. Better to integrate them. Okay. But if you drive this integration noble intention too far, you create false incentives for people to abuse the asylum process only to find a better life. And excuse me, the Geneva Convention was not written for all the downtrodden uh and exploited people in the world to find a better life, but it was written to protect those who are politically persecuted. A very narrow focus that should not be abandoned otherwise you abandon just the separate legal regime of asylum and refugee migration. So the European challenge is to separate these two types of migration that have become fused. And that is not an issue in Japan because because of your island geographic constellation, you're not overwhelmed by asylum seekers to the same degree as Europeans are. The Japanese challenge actually is to further institutionalize labor migration policies. that is that Europe have been doing since the roughly um early 1990s since Germany abandoned its old old logo. We are not an immigration country. You kind of you're 30 years backward in that respect and uh your your task is to open up to labor migration to the same degree that Germany in the last 30 years has uh opened up to it. Um um so a completely different constellation in Japan not comparable with Europe and the big mistake of uh the progressives the leftleaning most migration scholars are leftleaning um in in in Europe is to to consider asylum and labor migration as communicating vessels. So if you open the tap for labor then the assumption is you reduce the demand for asylum. That is naive and empirically speaking wrong because you're dealing with two types of people who are addressed by either asylum or labor migration policy. Um, liberal labor migration always, always, always needs to be complemented by restrictive asylum policies. That is the lesson of the last 20 years that the big struggles that Germany and other European countries have with respect to asylum migration today. There's an inevitable goal conflict. On the one side, you have to control migration, particularly irregular, unwanted migration, and sorry to say, asylum migration as it happening today is is part of that. And integration, if you do too much on the integration side, as the German progressives called it, integration for all from day one, then you are um opening your country to migrants that actually may become a danger to your security. as the Germans had to experience last year when there were a lot of knife attacks, terrorist knife attacks in public places like supermarkets, Christmas markets by rejected asylum seekers who should have been deported but were not deported for legal reasons, for Shia oversight of the um of the responsible authorities and other reasons. I think I spare myself the last slide which is simply laying out um um yeah the defunctness of Europe's asylum system something that is in dire need to be fixed. Um, in my view, in my view, the inevitable future of asylum in Europe is to externalize the migration, the asylum process to third countries. A total scandal from the point of view of the progressive uh migrant scholar. Um however no alternative and there are several models of doing that. There's a model wonder that has failed because high courts in the UK have prohibited it. It would simply it would simply ship all those who still arrive on rickety boats export expel them immediately to wonder and wonder then is supposed to make an asylum determination process that corresponds to the Geneva rules. And these people once they are even accepted as refugees under the Geneva Convention in Rwanda have no right to move on to the UK. The very rough model very similar to what Australia has actually pioneered in these uh uh island outlets uh east of uh west of the continent. Um and as a model Albania, what Italy is practicing right now, they they build certain detention centers. U they they ship um people who arrive in Italy on boats. If they are young and male and majority of asylum seekers in Europe is young and male and under 35, they ship them to Albania and there will be a asylum determination process very much influenced by European rules and if you're successful actually you are entitled to move to Italy. So it's a very different model. is a much more generous model even though it's pioneered by Georgia Maloney who is originally a radical right populist politician. she mellowed in office very much and very importantly the whole thrust of contemporary European migration policy and there is a new um migration pact that after many years of big struggle between member states has been passed um will come into effect next year in 206 and one element of it is the so-called border procedure which um would make a very fast um paced determination if someone's asylum request is valid or not. U and there will be the fiction that at the border where this whole process is to be started and quickly coming to an end, you are not yet on European or whatever is the member state territory. that lawyers called it the no entry fiction which is very important because the if you have not yet entered European territory you are not considered subject to national law and European Union law which is very very protective of asylum seekers because in a way the reality is once you manage to put your food into a European country you you you can only with great difficulties be removed. Therefore, if you want to bring back control over the asylum system, you have to neutralize the legal constitutional overp protection that exists as a result of law makingaking and as a result of judicial interpretation, what is the law? And in my view, this border procedure um where you will not be granted entry and if you are in most cases rejected as an asylum seeker, you're not allowed to move further. To me, this is only an intermediary step uh to the externalization of the asylum process uh where indeed the asylum process will be done outside of the shores of the European uh Union. This is very um controversial reasoning. I'm aware of it. Some of my colleagues who have proposed that there's no alternative to it like Ruth Kopmans who teaches at the science center in Berlin, they are kind of excunicated from the overall progressive migration scholar community if you want to call it that way. Uh well um I commend the audacity and the courage of people like K cookmans to kind of um call the spate by its name.

[00:58:26]All of these things do not uh matter for Japan. Therefore I will leave it with that and I finish even three minutes before my allotted time. Thank you very much.