Right wing anti-immigrant parties have recently achieved power in a number of European countries. But their immigration policies often don’t seem to match the campaign rhetoric. Here’s The Economist:
In April 2023, six months after the hard-right government led by Giorgia Meloni took office, her agriculture minister, Francesco Lollobrigida, chided Italians to have more babies or face being “replaced” by foreigners. Yet in practice Mr Lollobrigida has pushed for more visas for agricultural workers. Ms Meloni, while trying to ship off many asylum-seekers for processing in Albania, is welcoming more labour immigration, so long as it is controlled.
The reason is pure necessity. Italy’s agriculture industry has a shortfall of some 200,000 workers each year, says Massimiliano Giansanti, president of Confagricoltura, a farmers’ association. The legal workforce in agriculture, including seasonal workers, numbers around a million. A third are foreigners. Among those aged 18-35 nearly all are, says Mr Giansanti; young Italians think of agriculture as “back-breaking work under the sun”. In addition, some 230,000 people work in the sector’s shadow economy, many of them undocumented migrants from Asia and Africa.
And it’s not just Italy. A similar process is occurring in Poland and the Netherlands:
The hard-right Law and Justice party that governed Poland in 2015-23 railed against non-European immigration. But in practice it quintupled the number of work permits issued to Asians and Latin Americans, to 275,000 in 2023. Many involved bribes. . . .
The Netherlands epitomises the tension between farmers and anti-immigrant groups. The biggest party in the hard-right government that took office in July is the anti-immigrant Party for Freedom. But it also includes the Farmer Citizen Movement, which resists any restrictions that might interfere with getting the berries plucked.
In the US, Donald Trump earned the votes of many opponents of immigration. But even within the GOP, there is a major split between social conservatives who favor less immigration and business conservatives who favor more immigration. In recent weeks, a rift has opened in the GOP, with the tech bloc headed by Elon Musk advocating for more immigration. Trump himself suggested that he liked the visas that allowed him to employ unskilled workers at his various properties:
President-elect Donald J. Trump appeared to weigh in on Saturday on a heated debate among his supporters over the role of skilled immigrant workers in the U.S. economy, saying he had frequently used the visas for those workers and backed the program. . . .
But his comments — which were enthusiastically embraced by the technology industry as an endorsement — may muddy the waters because Mr. Trump appears to have only sparingly used the H-1B visa program, which allows skilled workers like software engineers to work in the United States for up to three years and can be extended to six years.
Instead, he has been a frequent and longtime user of the similarly named, but starkly different, H-2B visa program, which is for unskilled workers like gardeners and housekeepers, as well as the H-2A program, which is for agricultural workers.
To be fair, there is fairly general agreement within the GOP that unrestrained illegal immigration is a problem. But even in that area there are difficult decisions to make. Deporting all 11 million illegals would have a major impact on industries such as agriculture, hospitality and construction. There are no (politically) easy answers.
In the past, the most effective technique for reducing illegal immigration has been economic recessions. It will be interesting to watch how this issue plays out over the next few months.
