Migrants change track to beat recession

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There is no doubt the current recession will be the worst in a generation and migrants are changing their destinations as a result, reports BBC.
The hike in oil prices in the 1970s and 1980s caused a recession in the industrial world, but created a boom in countries with access to cheap energy - particularly the oil exporting nations.
Subsequently, migrants changed their destinations - just as they are doing in the current financial climate where job losses are most severe in industries that use immigrants, such as construction.
Unauthorised migration in north America is most sensitive to the economic cycle, according to Demetrios Papademetriou at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington.
"We haven't been able to measure a significant uptake for 18 months," he says, "and in some countries it has ground to a halt." Americans themselves are beginning to move around the country in search of better jobs.
In other parts of the world, evidence shows that unemployment rates among immigrants has skyrocketed.
He sees a resistance against going back to their country of origin, however, along with Spain, the Czech Republic and other EU member states are introducing packages to entice people to return.
Some countries have more generous social benefits than others and that can often be an incentive to remain.
Although migrants who have earned the right through membership in the EU might travel back and forth to see if circumstances are better in the country of their birth, Mr Papademetriou says this tends to be temporary rather than a permanent return.
In Europe there was a large migration from Eastern Europe to Western Europe, but now many of those eastern Europeans are moving back because the financial gains are not as good as they were.
Recession raises all sorts of arguments about immigration, especially when fearful workers think their jobs are threatened by foreigners.
"People on the left might welcome world socialism, but when it comes to people coming from other countries and taking their jobs they are not so keen," he says.
He believes that stopping the movement of workers would be counterproductive and that we actually need people to move between nations.
"A lot of countries send labour abroad and it is good for people in poorer countries to go abroad and send money back home," he says.
"The best sort of world is one in which people are free to migrate over the long term," he maintains.
"What we have at the moment is governments deciding who will be admitted into the country.
"They tend to resist inward migration and eventually, at some point when skills are in short supply, they give in so you get a massive surge."
Massive movements are most difficult to deal with and it is hard to convince people that the lower paid worker is a benefit to the country.
"You had massive migrations to America and Canada caused by the clearances of subsistence farming in Scotland and the Irish potato famine," Dr Butler says.
Ellis Island was the great Mecca of that migration, the holding and processing place on the Hudson River, within sight of Manhattan.
Since 1 January, 1892, when records show that Annie Moore, a 15-year-old girl from County Cork in Ireland, was processed, more than 12 million people went through Ellis Island and remained to make modern America.
The criterion for admission was an economic one: would the immigrant be a payer of taxes or a taker from the public purse?
If the latter, they were marked on the shoulder with a chalk cross and put on the boat back to Europe.
"I joined the Brain Drain from Britain to America in the 1970s when Britain was in a very poor state and America seemed to be a land of enormous riches," Dr Butler reflects. He however, did not have to undergo the rigors of Ellis Island.