The number of migrants worldwide has risen to 304 million, while Trump, Meloni, and the architects of Brexit have merely reshuffled the flow, because the real question is no longer how many people to let in, but whom to allow to work
In late September 2026, the U.S. State Department approved its refugee admissions plan for fiscal year 2026: 7,500 people, the lowest ceiling in the history of the program, which has operated since 1980. Back then, under President Jimmy Carter, the country planned to admit an average of 95,000 refugees annually.
The published document directed that almost the entire quota be allocated to white Afrikaners from South Africa, whom Donald Trump described as victims of discrimination in a country with a Black majority, a claim rejected by both the South African government and leaders of the Afrikaner community itself. On the surface, this looks like a victory over immigration. In substance, it demonstrates that modern anti-immigration policy has long ceased to be about stopping migration and has instead become a way of reshaping it to serve a specific ideological objective.
The motives behind such a decision are not difficult to unravel. The immediate trigger was South Africa's Expropriation Act, adopted in January 2025, which allows land to be expropriated "in the public interest." The measure is intended to address the legacy of apartheid, under which the white minority, accounting for roughly 7 percent of South Africa's population, continues to control about three-quarters of the country's agricultural land.
The government of Cyril Ramaphosa stresses that not a single parcel has yet been confiscated. Trump's close adviser, billionaire Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, has for years promoted the claim of a "white genocide" in the country of his childhood. Following his public statements, Washington froze aid to Pretoria and then ordered Afrikaner applications to be processed on a priority basis: the first arrivals received refugee status within three months, while applicants in other categories typically wait between 18 months and two years. In November 2025, Trump boycotted the G20 summit in Johannesburg and announced that the group's next meeting would be held at his own resort in Miami, a demonstrative rupture with Pretoria in which immigration policy became a direct extension of the personal worldview of one of the most influential advisers in the U.S. administration.
304 Million Migrants: The Numbers That Shatter Political Promises
Global statistics confirm a pattern that politicians prefer not to acknowledge. By mid-2024, the number of international migrants, people living outside the country of their birth, had reached 304 million, according to the United Nations Population Division.
That is almost double the 154 million recorded in 1990, although as a share of the world's population the increase was far more modest, from 2.9 percent to 3.7 percent. During the same period, nearly every major democracy elected at least one leader who promised to radically reduce immigration. The outcome has been similar almost everywhere: the numbers do not decline; they are redistributed.
Trump, Meloni, Brexit: Three Hard-Line Policies, One Paradoxical Outcome
Donald Trump's first term, from 2017 to 2021, provided a striking example of this kind of reshuffling. The annual refugee admissions ceiling, set by Barack Obama at 110,000, was repeatedly reduced by Trump: to 50,000 in 2017, 45,000 in 2018, 30,000 in 2019, 18,000 in 2020, and then to what was at the time a record low of 15,000 in 2021.
Legal labor and family immigration declined far less sharply, while illegal crossings at the southern border increased over the same period. Giorgia Meloni, who became Italy's prime minister in October 2022 on a wave of hard-line anti-immigration rhetoric, encountered the opposite of what she had promised: by mid-August 2023, more than 101,000 migrants had arrived in Italy by sea, nearly twice as many as during the same period in 2022 and almost three times as many as in 2021. In 2022 as a whole, Italy received 105,129 arrivals, compared with 67,477 a year earlier, remaining the principal transit point for migrants entering Europe illegally.
Brexit produced perhaps the most paradoxical result of all. The 2016 referendum was, to a significant extent, a vote against the free movement of Europeans, and after Britain left the European Union, net migration from EU countries did indeed collapse.
Yet the government that had promised voters it would take back control of the borders instead opened them more widely to everyone else. In 2022, net migration to the United Kingdom reached a record 606,000, with 925,000 arrivals coming from non-EU countries and only 151,000 from EU member states. By comparison, in 2015, the year before the referendum, net migration stood at 329,000. Russian authorities are following similar logic in reverse: while intensifying an anti-immigration campaign against people from Central Asia, the Kremlin is simultaneously easing entry for migrants from more distant and culturally unfamiliar countries, seeking to replace one migration stream with another rather than reduce immigration itself.
The Greatest Enemy of Border Fences Is Demography
Behind these maneuvers lies a demographic equation that no politician can abolish by decree. Developed economies are aging faster than they can replace their workforces: birth rates are falling, the number of retirees is rising, and jobs in construction, agriculture, logistics, and health care remain unfilled. In earlier reports, the International Organization for Migration projected that the number of migrants worldwide could exceed 400 million by 2050, while more conservative econometric models based on UN demographic forecasts offer a lower estimate of roughly 3.5 percent of the world's population, or about 340 million people.
The 60 million gap between those forecasts illustrates just how uncertain long-term projections remain. They depend on variables that are almost impossible to predict today, including climate-driven migration, the course of armed conflicts, and the demographic boom in sub-Saharan Africa. On one point, however, the forecasts broadly agree: migration will increase rather than decline as long as structural demand for labor persists. Officially recorded remittances sent by migrants to their home countries reached nearly $905 billion in 2024, an amount larger than the GDP of most countries and one that makes migration one of the world's largest channels for the redistribution of capital.
The Swedish Paradox: Maximum Integration on Paper, Minimal Results
If migration flows cannot be stopped, the only substantive question is how to absorb them without producing rising crime, ghettos, and electoral fury directed against the system itself. On this issue, the empirical evidence is far more surprising than political arguments suggest.
Successful integration correlates weakly with either the generosity of welfare programs or the severity of border controls. Sweden, the country with Europe's highest Migrant Integration Policy Index score, 86 out of 100 in the latest update, according to the Berlin-based Friedrich Ebert Foundation and index coordinator Thomas Huddleston, produces some of the weakest outcomes among developed countries. Migrants there commit crimes more frequently than native-born Swedes, earn less, pay less in taxes, and their children lag behind in school performance. The return on investment from integration programs can take decades to materialize.
In Spain, where the share of foreign-born residents had reached nearly 18 percent by the beginning of 2024, including 7.2 million citizens of non-EU countries and 1.6 million EU citizens, according to Eurostat, a proportion comparable to Sweden's, both the MIPEX score and spending on integration are significantly lower. Yet the gaps between migrants and native-born residents in income, employment, and education are smaller, while immigration itself has reduced unemployment and increased GDP per capita. Russia represents an extreme case: it has one of Europe's lowest MIPEX scores, yet available data indicate that migrants commit crimes at roughly two-thirds the rate of local residents while maintaining comparable employment levels.
Jobs Instead of Benefits: What Actually Reduces Crime
The explanation lies not in government generosity but in three factors: access to the labor market, the composition of migration flows, and the ability of institutions to prevent discrimination. Employment is a key predictor of criminal activity in every social group.
Unemployed people are more likely to turn to "survival crimes," including theft, squatting, and participation in underground networks that effectively substitute for legitimate income. Around 60 percent of migrants worldwide move specifically in search of work, and because crime rates among labor migrants are generally lower than among native-born populations, their arrival often reduces rather than increases the overall crime rate per capita. This largely explains the relatively low crime statistics among migrants in Russia, which admits very few refugees and relies predominantly on labor migration. Ukrainian refugees, who since 2014, against the backdrop of Russia's occupation of Crimea and parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, have been granted preferential treatment including the immediate right to work and simplified access to citizenship, barely appear in crime statistics as a separate category.
A comparison of different waves of immigration to Britain directly confirms this pattern. Asylum seekers arriving in the late 1990s and early 2000s, who were prohibited from working until their cases had been decided, contributed to an increase in property crime. By contrast, migrants from the ten new EU member states who arrived between 2004 and 2007 and were immediately granted the right to work slightly reduced the crime rate.
In Italy, legalizing the status of Bulgarians and Romanians after their countries joined the European Union cut "survival crimes" among those groups by half, but only in the country's industrialized north. In the south, where migrants were already informally employed in agriculture, the effect was negligible. A German court decision that shortened the waiting period for refugees seeking work authorization created a natural experiment for economists: those forced to wait seven months longer were 20 percentage points less likely to find employment, and the gap did not close until ten years later. Researchers estimate that restrictions of this kind on the employment of refugees who entered the European Union during the Syrian migration crisis cost the EU economy $37.6 billion in lost GDP.
Europe Talks About the Right to Work While Erecting Its Own Barriers
A report by the European Council on Refugees and Exiles documents a systemic gap between declarations and practice. Dozens of European directives describe work as a fundamental human right and call for refugees to be given access to the labor market as quickly as possible, yet in practice governments erect increasingly elaborate barriers. In the Netherlands, of the 26,520 people who applied for asylum in 2021, only 590 actually received work authorization.
Hungarian temporary residence permits are issued for only three months, forcing employers to repeatedly renew the documents of refugees they hire and discouraging businesses from employing them in the first place. In Greece, only 3 percent of refugees were able to open a bank account into which wages could be paid. Ireland, by contrast, is among eight EU countries where the employment rate of migrants from non-EU countries exceeds that of the native-born population. The same is true of Poland and the Czech Republic, which operate simplified arrangements for Ukrainians, and Portugal, which has retained special rules for people from its former colonies.
The logic behind such barriers is rarely accidental. Governments benefit politically from appearing tough on asylum seekers while maintaining separate channels for recruiting labor migrants that are far less visible to voters, including seasonal visas, skilled-worker programs, and "circular migration" agreements.
Labor-market barriers for refugees, in this sense, are less a mechanism for controlling numbers than a way of separating two migration streams in the public mind: "unwanted" asylum seekers and "needed" workers, even when, in practice, they often come from the same countries. This distinction allows governments to increase labor migration while simultaneously maintaining closed-door rhetoric toward refugees, a combination voters rarely recognize as a contradiction.
The American Crisis: When History Returns Through the Southern Border
The American case has its own history, one driven far more by politics than by economics. For decades, migrants from Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa integrated into the United States more rapidly than they did in Europe, while refugees achieved employment rates almost as high as those of labor migrants.
The situation changed in the 2010s, when a wave of asylum seekers from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Venezuela began pouring across the southern border. This crisis is a direct legacy of the Cold War: U.S. interventions and support for authoritarian regimes in Central America during the 1980s laid the foundations for decades of instability, which were later compounded by the illegal flow of weapons from the United States itself into the region. Asylum seekers, unlike refugees resettled through the United Nations refugee agency, are not permitted to work until their applications are approved, and their integration outcomes have been worse, while the financial burden on state and municipal budgets has increased.
An important qualification is necessary here: the gap between refugees and labor migrants cannot be explained by bureaucracy alone. Unlike economic migrants, refugees do not choose their destination well in advance, do not prepare for relocation, and often lose documents, property, and professional networks while fleeing.
Researchers refer to this as the "refugee gap," a persistent lag in the pace of integration that remains even when refugees and other migrants have equal access to the labor market. Government placement of refugees in economically depressed areas without established diaspora communities, the trauma they have endured, and prolonged legal uncertainty all amplify the effect. Employment restrictions do not create the entire problem. They simply make it harder to mitigate what is already the most difficult form of migration.
Why Sweden Lost to Spain
This is where a less obvious reason for Sweden's failure comes into view: the structure of its own former empire. Unlike Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal, which built overseas colonial empires, Sweden developed as a continental power centered on the Baltic, much like Russia, the Ottoman Empire, or Austria-Hungary.
The territories once dependent on Sweden, including Finland, Norway, the Baltic states, and parts of Germany, are today nearly as developed as Sweden itself, giving their residents little reason to move to Stockholm. Sweden therefore had neither an established diaspora network nor an accessible pool of inexpensive labor to draw on when its demographic crisis intensified. The authorities filled the gap through the only mechanism readily available to them: large-scale refugee admissions, primarily from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, countries that are culturally and linguistically far removed from Sweden. Today Sweden has one of the highest numbers of refugees per capita in Europe, and that decision, driven more by demographic necessity than ideological altruism, shaped the entire trajectory of its subsequent integration policy.
Spain addressed the same demographic challenge differently. Nearly 47 percent of its migrants come from Latin America, whose citizens benefit from visa-free travel arrangements with Spain, share the Spanish language, and can qualify for citizenship after just two years of legal residence.
Another 27 percent arrive from other European countries, while only 18 percent come from Africa. Similar logic applies elsewhere. Russia's cultural and linguistic influence in Central Asia makes it easier for migrants from the region to integrate. The United States has spent centuries developing close ties with Latin America. Poland and the Czech Republic have for decades received linguistically and culturally similar Ukrainians, which helped even the sharp postwar influx of Ukrainian refugees integrate comparatively smoothly.
Not Culture but Selection: Who Arrives Determines Everything
Cultural proximity is not the only explanation, and reducing the entire gap to culture would be an oversimplification. The quality of the human capital being selected is equally important. The United States is geographically distant from the world's major migration pressure zones, and simply reaching the country requires a level of initial resources that the poorest migrants often do not possess.
As a result, Middle Eastern immigrants in the United States are roughly twice as likely as the average American to hold a bachelor's degree and earn slightly more than the national average. In Europe, by contrast, migrants from the same national backgrounds have more often arrived as low-skilled guest workers, undocumented migrants, or refugees and constitute some of the most disadvantaged groups in terms of income and crime statistics. Pakistani immigrants in the United States report incomes above the national average, while in Britain Pakistanis form one of the country's weakest-performing groups in employment terms. The difference is partly explained by the fact that British authorities themselves recruited large numbers of Pakistani rural workers for factory jobs during the 1950s and 1960s, after which family reunification programs brought their relatives to the country. Part of the employment gap is also linked to the fact that Pakistani women in Britain are more likely to remain outside the workforce because of cultural traditions and labor-market discrimination, a pattern seen in many Muslim-origin communities in Europe but by no means universal among comparable communities elsewhere in the world.
Discrimination That Can Be Measured
A third factor, the willingness of institutions in the receiving country to treat newcomers on equal terms, can be measured directly. A meta-analysis of 97 field experiments on hiring across nine developed countries found that the highest levels of discrimination against resumes bearing "immigrant" names were recorded in France and Sweden. The groups most affected were precisely those that make up a large share of migration to those countries: Black applicants and people of Middle Eastern origin.
The lowest levels of hiring discrimination were recorded in Germany, Norway, and the United States. The researchers make an important qualification: even where resume screening has become relatively fair, discrimination often shifts elsewhere. In Germany, for example, hiring practices have become noticeably more equitable, while migrants continue to face systematic difficulties in finding housing.
One Passport Means an Extra $5,000 a Year
Switzerland provides perhaps the cleanest evidence that formal recognition of status can be more effective than financial assistance. Until relatively recently, naturalization applications in a number of municipalities were decided through local referendums.
Researchers compared migrants whose applications passed by the narrowest possible margin with those who fell short by only a few votes. Those who received citizenship went on to earn an average of about $5,000 more per year over the following fifteen years. The effect was strongest among the most marginalized groups, particularly migrants from Turkey and the former Yugoslavia, as well as among low-wage workers. Institutional recognition as a full member of the community, in other words, translates into tangible economic gains more reliably than almost any social welfare program.
When Migrants Become a Weapon
Migration also has an openly instrumental dimension that politicians generally prefer to discuss in quieter terms. In the fall of 2021, the government of Alexander Lukashenko organized the large-scale movement of migrants from the Middle East toward the borders of Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia, turning a humanitarian crisis into an instrument of pressure on the European Union in retaliation for sanctions. It became a textbook example of how human mobility can be weaponized as part of hybrid warfare rather than treated merely as a matter of social policy.
Warsaw responded by declaring a state of emergency in border regions and constructing a barrier along the frontier with Belarus, firmly establishing the concept of "instrumentalized migration" in the European political vocabulary. The European Union applies similar logic in reverse through agreements with Tunisia and Libya designed to stop undocumented migrants before they reach Europe. Human rights organizations have criticized these arrangements for effectively transferring migrants into the custody of structures accused of abuse. The broader lesson is that humanitarian rhetoric directed at voters inside the European Union can coexist comfortably with a much harsher containment policy beyond its borders.
The Next Decade Is Already Visible
The trajectory of the coming decade is more predictable than campaign slogans suggest. Demographic pressure will not disappear regardless of which parties control national parliaments, meaning countries will continue to divide into two broad camps regardless of their leaders' rhetoric. Some, including Spain, Poland, the Czech Republic, and to some extent the United States, have learned how to move newcomers rapidly into the labor market and generate measurable economic gains from immigration.
Others, including Sweden, France, and to a significant extent Germany, will continue paying a rising price for a model in which generous social protections coexist with bureaucratic barriers in employment and housing. If current trends persist, Sweden will probably remain near the top of the next major MIPEX ranking, expected around 2029, in terms of formal migrant rights while simultaneously continuing to show substantial employment and income gaps. The index simply does not measure the one factor that often determines the real-world outcome.
In the United States, the current administration's decision to sharply reduce the humanitarian admissions program while the economy continues to demand workers is highly likely to encounter the same problems faced during Trump's first term: litigation against executive actions and labor shortages in agriculture and construction. By the 2027 and 2028 fiscal years, the political cost of labor scarcity may begin to outweigh the electoral advantages of hard-line immigration rhetoric, forcing at least a partial reversal.
Walls Lose to a Single Administrative Stamp
The most revealing lesson is that the history of migration in the twenty-first century is not fundamentally a story about walls and fences. It is a story about who understood first that denying people the right to work does not stop someone who has already crossed the border. It merely postpones for years the moment when that person becomes either a neighbor earning a legal salary and paying taxes or a participant in the underground economy with no realistic way out.
While a teenager in the Stockholm suburb of Rosengard, equipped with the full set of formal rights promised under Sweden's MIPEX-based integration model, waits for a municipal commission to decide whether he can take his first job, his Latin American counterpart in Madrid, who arrived in the same year, may already be in his second year of formal employment, paying taxes and only months away from becoming eligible to vote in local elections.
The difference between them is not the generosity of the welfare state, nor the color of the passport they may eventually receive. It is a single administrative stamp granting permission to enter the labor market in the first week rather than two years later.