The Numbers are Clear: Migrants are Largely Drawn, not Pushed
The outgoing President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO), has argued walls and border security cannot solve the migration crisis wracking the U.S. Instead, he claims only economic development of the countries of origin could prevent further flows. He argues that until “push factors” like poverty are reduced in countries of origin, those factors will always cause people to migrate illegally to wealthier countries. However, while push factors are a serious consideration, the pull factors that attract migrants are also critical and receive much less attention from open-borders politicians, academics, and media outlets. In some ways they are stronger, because while poverty is a constant and sad feature of life in the Global South, wealthy countries offering incentives for people to move there are more sudden and recent. Data show that when a wealthy country announces such a policy, this “pulls” a huge wave of migrants who otherwise would not have come.
The first example is Venezuela, now the second most common country of origin for illegal aliens and a country about which FAIR has produced a detailed report. Venezuela has been poor for the last two decades, since the current socialist regime came to power in 1999 and initiated a period of economic collapse. These conditions have ranged from persistent hyperinflation to malnutrition, problems that have been severe for many years. However, the number of Venezuelans encountered by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) was extremely low for the vast majority of the regime’s time in power. If push factors were as critical as AMLO claims, then one would expect large numbers of Venezuelans would have arrived in the U.S. as soon as the economic decline began. But this was not the case.
It was only when the pull factors of country-specific immigration parole benefitting Venezuelans, such as the CHNV program, were introduced that encounters soared. Between Fiscal Year 2022, when the parole program was announced, and Fiscal Year 2023, encounters increased by 77 percent, and a 7,300 percent increase from FY 2020. Temporary Protect Status (TPS) for Venezuelans was also an issue, as it allowed Venezuelans to avoid deportation if they were already in the U.S. when granted. This had the perverse effect of pulling more Venezuelans into the U.S. to claim this status, with encounters with Venezuela spiking shortly after the TPS announcement.
The second example is in the 2015 European refugee crisis, less provoked by war than by German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s policy announcements. Syria plunged into civil war in 2011, but despite this, very few migrants were arriving in Europe from that country. The European Union border agency FRONTEX data show that just a few hundred individuals were being apprehended monthly on the Eastern Mediterranean and Western Balkans routes between 2011 and 2015. But when Merkel announced that Europe would welcome ‘refugees’ from the conflict, things rapidly changed.
In 2015, over 870,000 migrants moved into Europe on the Eastern Mediterranean route, nine times the number who had been apprehended in the previous five years combined. On the Western Balkans Route, over 764,000 migrants were detected, compared to 79,000 during the whole five years before that. As European countries like Denmark and Sweden have changed course and rolled back on their pull factors, these numbers have fallen back again, despite Syria remaining unstable.
Countries can and do turn the tide against persistent poverty, with formerly poor countries like Taiwan, South Korea, Chile and Poland all showing a country can reverse poverty if given enough time and with the right policies. That said, these countries did not become prosperous overnight and we cannot simply wait potentially decades for countries like Guatemala and Haiti to become rich, all the while accepting endless migration. Mass migration also denudes origin countries of their working population, who could stay and build up their own countries. The longer this outflow of human capital continues, the less likely it is the world’s poorer countries will catch up with their Global North counterparts due to brain drain.
Pull factors are particularly important because, unlike push factors, countries like the U.S. have complete control over them and can change them in an instant. U.S. immigration policy can be changed in a single day, such as the temporary suspension of the CHNV program that was driving much of the current flows. Policy announcements such as Sweden’s restrictions on citizenship or Denmark’s limiting of social housing to migrants are all changes to pull factors that immediately reduce flows of migrants. While push factors in the Global South and the desire to enter a rich country will always exist, the pull factors that encourage illegal mass migration are up to us to fix.