What’s our problem with immigration?

Inside Geneva regulars may remember that at the start of the year, I got my journalist colleagues round the table to make a few predictions for 2026, and one of the topics we all agreed would remain high on the agenda was immigration.

Not the most brilliantly radical suggestion, I know. The issue has dominated political discourse for years, so our journalist credentials would have been in doubt had we left it off the list.

But…even at the start of the year, we could not have predicted that, just a few days later, an American woman would be shot dead in Minneapolis by immigration control officers, or ICE as they are known. Or that, just days later, an American man would also be shot – killed, again, by ICE officers.

I had already planned to devote an episode of Inside Geneva to immigration and asylum, to ask why the topic is so divisive, why it stays higher up the political agenda than climate change, or even conflict. But the masked ICE agents squirting pepper spray into the faces of peaceful protesters, or putting a five-year-old boy into an unmarked car and driving him away to detention, made me ask another question. Are concerns about immigration, some of them perfectly legitimate, being manipulated into something darker – an all out assault on fundamental human rights?

A race to the bottom

Our guests on Inside Geneva this week include Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, Philippe Bolopion, executive director of Human Rights Watch, and Vincent Chetail, director of the Global Migration Centre at Geneva’s Graduate Institute.

Egeland, understandably, is focused on refugees, and the right to asylum. “We’re in a race to the bottom,” he told me. Reminding me that the 1951 refugee convention was created in large part because of the suffering of millions of Europeans driven from their homes during the Second World War, he expressed dismay that now “in Europe we are seeing one country after the other erecting barbed wire around their country and around a continent”.

I was reminded of his words just last week, when the news came that more than 50 people, among them mothers and babies, were missing, presumed dead in the Mediterranean after setting off from Libya, hoping to reach Europe. In a rubber boat, in February.

Egeland pleads for more compassion, for safe and legal routes. But how does he address the fear and anger of Europeans who believe that immigrants, asylum-seekers among them, are putting pressure on housing, on hospitals, and on jobs? Egeland suggests putting the blame on immigration is a deflection from “an ageing Europe, a Europe that is not producing as we should, has not been as innovative as we should, is not educating the young generations as well as we should”.

Facts – and fears

As with any heated political debate, the one over immigration is clouded by deeply held opinions and perceptions. Some genuinely fear their communities are changing beyond recognition, others are passionate about upholding the compassion and solidarity written into international laws like the refugee convention. Fears, we all know, are also ripe for exploitation by unscrupulous politicians. How easy it is, if you don’t really have an answer of your own to overcrowded hospitals and schools, to point to immigrants and pin the blame on them.

Facts tend to get drowned in such a debate, and so, to try to revive them, I talked to Chetail. As a specialist in migration trends and statistics, he is not inclined to engage with the high octane rhetoric, instead, he wants to deal in numbers.

Pointing to a multitude of data, he first points out that, contrary to populist slogans, migrants are not taking jobs away from natives. “Overall, most studies are clear that migrant workers are not in competition with national workers on the labour market,” he told me. The reality, he explained, is that migrants primarily do jobs the native population does not want to do (crop picking, cleaning, etc). Or, they fill gaps in our labour market that we haven’t been able to fill – in Europe that is especially true in the health sector.

What about the alleged drain on welfare benefits? Here too, the facts are different from the slogans, and Chetail has the data to prove it. “Three decades of OECD (the Organisation Economic Co-operation and Development) data show year after year that migrants are paying more taxes than they are costing in terms of public services.”

And crime? That is one we hear over and over again: migrants commit more crime, our communities are at risk. Here Chetail points to over a century of data from the US. “It is clearly demonstrated that foreign-born migrants are committing, overall, fewer crimes than the national population.” There is one exception to this: so-called “administrative” crimes related to visa overstays, or other variations on not having the right papers.

No right to mistreatment

Not having the right papers; for some, that is reason enough for deportation. But that starts to become tricky when a new government changes the definition of what the right papers actually are. Many of those being rounded up and sent to detention centres in the US had claims for asylum pending. They were legal when Joe Biden was president. Now Donald Trump is in charge, they are not.

Human rights groups have grave concerns over the way the US is treating those sent to detention, or deported. Human Rights Watch recently published a report into the experience of Venezuelan migrants sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador. It documented widespread torture and sexual violence.

“We believe it’s within the rights of any government to set immigration policies that they believe makes sense for their country and electorate” says HRW’s executive director Bolopion. “But setting lawful immigration policies does not mean that you have the right to mistreat migrants.”

Bolopion, and many other human rights groups, fear the immigration debate is being hijacked and turned into “a fundamental challenge to a lot of the rights and values that the American people have fought for. We see a deterioration of democracy in the US…and an attack on all of the pillars of this democracy, all of the checks on power for the president. It’s a dangerous slide, and it really has consequences for the entire world”.

So what to do about it? Perhaps, try to stick to the facts. There are ways to take the heat out of this increasingly toxic debate, and Chetail’s data is a useful tool. But if the debate about immigration – and the strategies now being used to control it – are truly, as many fear, a danger to our fundamental rights and principles, then, Bolopion says, we need to act.

“People who study democracy say that democracy dies with a whimper, not with a big bang. It dies through a thousand cuts when people renounce their rights one day after the next. It’s really for people to rise up, wherever they are, and do whatever they can to not tolerate an encroachment on their basic rights.”

vm