Donald Trump has been getting a lot of mileage out of his overheated rhetoric about illegal immigration. But a visit to the Greek island of Kos serves as a useful reminder that this is hardly an only-in-America phenomenon. 
Arrayed around the scenic harbor of this scenic isle is a squalid sight: Arab refugees, Syrians mainly, living in tents. There are men, women, children — all no doubt equally uncomfortable in the 90-degree heat. But at least they are better off than thousands of their compatriots who were locked inside a stadium on the other side of Kos without access to water or shade. And at least they have avoided the awful fate of the 71 migrants, including four children, who were found dead inside a truck in Austria in which they had most likely been accidentally asphyxiated.

Demagogues like Trump who claim to have easy solutions to the problem of illegal immigration should ask themselves why people would risk misery and even death to move to a country not their own? The answer is not, needless to say, a plot on the part of the Mexican government to export “rapists” and “murderers” to the U.S. If that were the case, it would be hard to figure out why similar population movements are happening on the other side of the world — is the Mexican government responsible for the exodus of Syrian refugees too?

The real answers are more prosaic: Syrians are fleeing a war that has decimated their homeland. Central Americans and some Mexicans are fleeing the poverty and joblessness that have long afflicted their homelands. Not surprisingly, the lure of advanced Western economies — whether those of the European Union or the United States — proves irresistible to those who have nothing to lose.

Both the U.S. and EU have tried to use their armed forces and law enforcement resources to better police their frontiers. The EU this summer has sent a naval squadron to patrol the Mediterranean, while the U.S. has long relied on the Border Patrol backed up by the National Guard, the Coast Guard, and other military resources. None of it has proved remotely adequate, simply because it is difficult to stop all movement across a frontier as long as the land border that the U.S. shares with Mexico or the sea border that the European Union shares with the nations of North Africa. Perhaps Stalinist Russia or Maoist China could get the job done with a shoot-to-kill policy, but such an initiative is unthinkable for any modern Western democracy, even one led by a blowhard like Donald Trump.

Where does that leave us?

First we should recognize that the best way to discourage illegal immigration is to make legal migration easier and safer. Immigrants wouldn’t risk death if there was a legal way for them to move to a rich country and contribute by doing work that native-born citizens refuse to do at a competitive wage. Thus, paradoxically, the U.S. and EU should expand guest-worker programs and immigration opportunities in order to relieve the strain of stopping illegal crossings.

A second essential truth: The most useful way to ameliorate the problems caused by illegal migration is to focus on assimilating and integrating immigrants — an area where the U.S. has a much more successful track record than the nations of Europe where citizenship has long been judged synonymous with shared ethnicity. Yet if the U.S. falls prey to anti-immigration initiatives such as denying the children of undocumented migrants “birthright” citizenship or access to the public schools, it will be repeating the errors that have fostered the creation of a large, unassimilated, immigrant underclass in Europe (made up in Europe’s case primarily of Muslims from North Africa and South Asia).

The third essential truth that we should grasp about immigration is that if we want to reduce it, we need to go to the source, by improving life for ordinary people in neighboring countries. That has already been happening in Mexico, where, thanks to the North American Free Trade Agreement and free-market policies in Mexico City, the economy has been doing better and thus the number of Mexicans seeking to move north has been declining. The issue for Europe is that the hellish wars in Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, among other places, continue to rage on. Until the West does a better job of bringing a measure of security to these war-torn lands, it will never succeed in stanching the flow of migrants seeking a better life.

The problem is that these observations are complex and hard to reduce to pithy sound bites. Much easier to natter on about building walls and deporting immigrants and letting the “good ones” (those that might be employed by Trump resorts?) come back. But however appealing to those who are inclined to scapegoat migrants for all of society’s ills, Trumpite nostrums — which are echoed by far-right politicians in Europe such as Marine Le Pen in France — will do nothing to address the deeper forces that are responsible for mass movements of people across the world’s frontiers.

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