‘We’re being taken for fools’: How soaring migration came back to bite Ireland’s political elite
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/03/30/soaring-migration-ireland-conor-mcgregor-elon-musk/
With finite housing and overstretched public services, the government’s ‘cack-handed’ border policies have triggered a wave of public anger.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/03/30/soaring-migration-ireland-conor-mcgregor-elon-musk/
With finite housing and overstretched public services, the government’s ‘cack-handed’ border policies have triggered a wave of public anger.
Sweden Has a Big Problem by LYDIA POLGREEN
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/28/opinion/sweden-migration-policy.html
Lydia Polgreen:
As wealthy countries across the globe turn against migration and ascendant right-wing parties push harsh restrictions, Sweden stands out as a country that has gone hard and fast to keep migrants out — first under a center-left government and then a more right-leaning one. It is a case study of backlash, where the fantasy of draconian border restrictions has been enacted. The story, on its face, may seem a simple one: After being overwhelmed by an influx of asylum seekers from Syria and other war-tossed Middle Eastern countries in 2015, the country sought to assert control over its borders and its population.
Yet when I traveled to the country earlier this year, I found something much more complicated. There is certainly antipathy toward migrants: In a survey last month, 73 percent of Swedish respondents said migration levels over the past decade were too high. But that’s of a piece with a society ill at ease with itself. Beset by metastasizing gang violence, stubborn unemployment and strain on its vaunted social welfare system, the country is rife with discontent — a distemper shared by foreign- and native-born alike. The problem with Sweden, it seems, is not migrants. It’s Sweden itself.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/28/opinion/sweden-migration-policy.html
Lydia Polgreen:
As wealthy countries across the globe turn against migration and ascendant right-wing parties push harsh restrictions, Sweden stands out as a country that has gone hard and fast to keep migrants out — first under a center-left government and then a more right-leaning one. It is a case study of backlash, where the fantasy of draconian border restrictions has been enacted. The story, on its face, may seem a simple one: After being overwhelmed by an influx of asylum seekers from Syria and other war-tossed Middle Eastern countries in 2015, the country sought to assert control over its borders and its population.
Yet when I traveled to the country earlier this year, I found something much more complicated. There is certainly antipathy toward migrants: In a survey last month, 73 percent of Swedish respondents said migration levels over the past decade were too high. But that’s of a piece with a society ill at ease with itself. Beset by metastasizing gang violence, stubborn unemployment and strain on its vaunted social welfare system, the country is rife with discontent — a distemper shared by foreign- and native-born alike. The problem with Sweden, it seems, is not migrants. It’s Sweden itself.
I Went to Dubai, and Caught a Glimpse of the Future by LYDIA POLGREEN
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/opinion/dubai-migration-trump.html
In our current age of vituperative anti-immigration politics, Western leaders seem to assume that the best and brightest people from poorer countries will always want to build their lives in the West, no matter how many hoops they need to jump through to be allowed in or how unwelcome they are made to feel on arrival.
But this attitude fails to understand the experiences of people like Fredah, who 15 years ago joined a relatively new tide of educated, middle- and upper middle-class people from Africa, Latin America, Asia and the wider Middle East who have flocked to the Gulf in search of opportunity.
Something Extraordinary Is Happening All Over the World by LYDIA POLGREEN
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/31/opinion/trump-migration-world.html
The countries that malign migrants are, whether they recognize it or not, in quite serious need of new people. Country after country in the wealthy world is facing a top-heavy future, with millions of retirees and far too few workers to keep their economies and societies afloat. In the not-so-distant future, many countries will have too few people to sustain their current standard of living.
The right’s response to this problem is fantastical: expel the migrants and reproduce the natives. Any short-term economic pain, they contend, must be borne for the sake of safeguarding national identity in the face of the oncoming horde — a version of the racist “great replacement” theory that was once beyond the pale but has become commonplace. But we can see how this approach is playing out, in a laboratory favored by Trump and his ilk.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/opinion/dubai-migration-trump.html
In our current age of vituperative anti-immigration politics, Western leaders seem to assume that the best and brightest people from poorer countries will always want to build their lives in the West, no matter how many hoops they need to jump through to be allowed in or how unwelcome they are made to feel on arrival.
But this attitude fails to understand the experiences of people like Fredah, who 15 years ago joined a relatively new tide of educated, middle- and upper middle-class people from Africa, Latin America, Asia and the wider Middle East who have flocked to the Gulf in search of opportunity.
Something Extraordinary Is Happening All Over the World by LYDIA POLGREEN
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/31/opinion/trump-migration-world.html
The countries that malign migrants are, whether they recognize it or not, in quite serious need of new people. Country after country in the wealthy world is facing a top-heavy future, with millions of retirees and far too few workers to keep their economies and societies afloat. In the not-so-distant future, many countries will have too few people to sustain their current standard of living.
The right’s response to this problem is fantastical: expel the migrants and reproduce the natives. Any short-term economic pain, they contend, must be borne for the sake of safeguarding national identity in the face of the oncoming horde — a version of the racist “great replacement” theory that was once beyond the pale but has become commonplace. But we can see how this approach is playing out, in a laboratory favored by Trump and his ilk.