The immigrant as a function

Governments often manage immigration as a cold calculation to address structural gaps in the national budget. When an individual arrives to a new country on a legal work visa, the state rarely sees them as a new member of the community. Instead, they are treated as a resource to be utilised until the cost of their public requirements outweighs their economic output. The current system sorts people according to their ability to improve the national accounts. This process dismisses a person’s history and character as irrelevant information that only complicates the financial projection.

This emphasis on utility stems from an effort to rebalance demographics where a shrinking workforce struggles to support an ageing population. Many wealthy nations depend on a steady arrival of young, healthy workers to keep pension systems from becoming insolvent. Such a policy is a strategic requirement rather than a move of altruism (Coleman, 2002). Essentially, the state imports youth and health from abroad to compensate for the structural flaws in its own population growth. It is a calculation in which the immigrant is the necessary element to prevent the welfare system from failing.

Although many immigrants do find high-level professional roles, a significant number face systemic underemployment. Highly educated migrants often find themselves in lower-tier roles because local employers do not recognise or value their original qualifications (Batalova et al., 2021). This allows the host country to profit from high-quality talent while the individual performs tasks far below their actual ability. Extracting talent to fill undesirable gaps in the economy suggests that the state values the labour more than the professional potential of the people it invites.

The difference between the rights of citizens and those of immigrants shows that the loyalty of the state is conditional. A citizen possesses the right to be unproductive or to rely on public funds for their entire life without ever facing questions about their residency—as it should. The state preserves this social contract for citizens to maintain domestic stability. For the immigrant, however, residency functions like a subscription service that requires constant proof of usefulness to be renewed. Many countries charge immigrants fees for visas and health access that far outweigh the actual cost of providing those services (OECD, 2023). Should an immigrant lose their job or see their income fall, the state maintains the right to cancel their status. The right to remain in the country is a commodity that must be bought repeatedly.

The demand for integration is frequently a demand for people to become invisible. Public and institutional support for immigrants is often tied to how well they fit in and how much they contribute financially (Bansak et al., 2016). The state prioritises removing cultural differences so that the newcomer fits into a specific economic gap without causing social friction. The logic is that the host society must not be altered by those who arrive. Instead, the expectation is for the newcomer to be absorbed by the local culture until their original identity no longer challenges the status quo. Alas, integration is often considered successful only when the immigrant’s background is no longer visible to the local population.

This approach will become increasingly difficult to maintain as global environmental conditions change. If we continue to view people only as economic assets, we will be unprepared for a future where movement is forced by survival rather than chosen for a career (Hoffmann et al., 2020). A system built to filter for immediate financial gain cannot cope when people move because their homes are no longer habitable. At present, the state looks for workers who offer a high return on investment. If the only reason a person seeks entry is to survive, the logic of the financial ledger offers no solution. By treating the immigrant as a function, the state has protected its short-term interests but has created a society where human worth is measured entirely by the ability to produce a profit.

References

Bansak, K., Hainmueller, J., & Hangartner, D. (2016). How economic, humanitarian, and religious concerns shape European attitudes toward asylum seekers. Science, 354(6309), 217-222.

Batalova, J., Fix, M., & Bachmeier, J. D. (2021). Untapped Talent: The Costs of Brain Waste among Highly Skilled Immigrants in the United States. World Education Services.

Coleman, D. A. (2002). Replacement migration, or why everyone is going to have to live in Korea: a fable for our times from the United Nations. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 357(1420), 583-598.

Hoffmann, R., Dimitrova, A., Muttarak, R., Crespo Cuaresma, J., & Peisker, J. (2020). A meta-analysis of country-level studies on environmental change and migration. Nature climate change, 10(10), 904-912.

OECD (2023), International Migration Outlook 2023, OECD Publishing, Paris,