The main driver of motorcycle ownership is "I want to ride a motorcycle." there is, however, a small proportion driven by "I am in a biker gang." The overwhelming majority of motorcycle riders are not a problem; this does not mean there are no problematic biker gangs.

Despite this, however, there is no scientific evidence to sustain the claim that global migration is accelerating. International migrants account for about 3% of the world population, and this percentage has remained remarkably stable over the past half a century.

The problem is not immigration. The problem is problematic immigration. Large numbers of Romanians emigrated starting in 1989 without doing much except increase the likelihood of encountering Romanians. Were there concerned articles in Der Stern? Absolutely. Did it ultimately matter? Well, I had a lovely Romanian doctor for a while and Bela Karolyi ended up coaching Nadia Comenici and Kerry Strug. What about the Armenians? There's been an Armenian diaspora for a couple thousand years but there wasn't really an Armenian mafia in LA until the Yugoslavian conflict. Fundamentally, people who emigrate by choice face less desperate circumstances than those who emigrate at gunpoint.

While refugee flows fluctuate strongly with levels of conflict, there is no evidence of a long-term increasing trend.

UNHCR via World Economic Forum

This is also one of the many reasons why, contrary to common assumptions, climate breakdown is unlikely to trigger mass movements of “climate refugees”.

We'll just disregard the Syrian civil war and the impact of drought on refugees. Or the impact on climate on Venezuela's refugee crisis.

Research on the effects of droughts and flooding shows that most people will stay close to home.

Again, it's not everybody. If 99 out of 100 people are nice, and 2 million of them suddenly have to leave Gaza, then there's 20,000 not-nice people looking for a new home. Again, migration isn't bad! Nobody sensible has ever said that all migration is bad. However, migration due to circumstance tends to go worse than migration due to choice, and the rate of migration due to circumstance has been steadily ticking up, regardless of what the author wishes to believe.

Still, despite global averages remaining stable, it is difficult to deny that legal immigration to the US, Britain and western Europe has been growing over the past decades. The frequent discontent this has caused has gone along with repeated calls for less, more controlled or more selective immigration.

Yeah and this stuff is a net positive. This is why the US has birthright citizenship - giving the ambitious a reason to become citizens will always improve your GDP, regardless of what the Republicans might think.

But border crackdowns have clearly failed to achieve these objectives or have even made problems worse because they were not based on an understanding of how migration really works. The main reason is that these policies ignored the most important root cause of migration: persistent labour demand.

Well, that and there's a mismatch between "migrants desirable enough for the process" and "migrants with enough grit to get there anyway." Are they really a problem? Historically, not nearly to the extent that conservatives make them out to be. But you can't ignore the fact that when push comes to shove, people are less interested in due process and the rule of law and while a good person in a bad circumstance tends to keep their head down, a bad person in a bad circumstance just ends up with less to lose.

Fundamental choices have to be made. For example, do we want to live in a society in which more and more work – transport, construction, cleaning, care of elderly people and children, food provision – is outsourced to a new class of servants made up mainly of migrant workers? Do we want a large agricultural sector that partly relies on subsidies and is dependent on migrants for the necessary labour? The present reality shows that we cannot divorce debates about immigration from broader debates about inequality, labour, social justice and, most importantly, the kind of society we want to live in.

The fundamental issue is that a society where rule-breakers get ahead and rule-followers stagnate tends to vote Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Geert Wilders and Georgia Meloni into office. Immigration needs to be addressed in terms of protecting the livelihoods of those being left behind by innovation and the neoliberals have done a shitty-ass job of that since 1979. You can't do that by going ackshully there's no border crisis because the people who need their fears assuaged are absolutely not going to hear it.

I've been saying forever / several years that the anti-immigration resentment being stoked by Capital in the name of "populist" messaging should be completely undermined by Capital's benefiting from cheap(er) migrant labor. Should be. We're somehow still trapped in an era of redirected, faux race warfare while class warfare is the real battlefront.