Last night we launched my non-fiction book ‘The refugee, the border guard and the rich Jew’ about the refugee crisis in Europe during the war in Ukraine.
There were people working the IND (Immigration & naturalization service), a lawyer who has been labeled the best lawyer for foreigners who end up in immigration detention. They are all mentioned in the book, and they were happy to be part of the launcg/ A former politician and I argued about the question whether labor migration is desirable or not. He feared that it would depress the income of workers at the bottom of the pay scale.
I wasn’t so sure, I haven’t seen the data yet, but more important I don’t believe that you can uphold the myth of the nation state as an island where workers are not competing with workers in other countries. The EU made this kind of competition legal, and yes, one of the reasons the British voted for Brexit was that they didn’t want to compete with workers from Poland.
Well, less than a decade later, they regretted the Brexit by and large.
If we frame the right to international protection solely in moral dimensions, the battle is lost before it started, because too many people in too many countries reached the conclusion that the moral high ground is something to be despised.