How Should Countries Approach Immigration?

Words First, Then the Map

Free write (5 min): should countries have open immigration policies? Get the instinct down before the vocabulary arrives, because the vocabulary changes the question.

The definitions are not optional here. Most of the confusion in this topic is terminological, and the deck opens with five terms for good reason:

• Immigrant — someone who comes to live permanently in a foreign country.
• Migrant — someone who moves from one place to another, especially to find work or better conditions.
• Undocumented immigrant — someone residing in a country without legal documentation, including both those who enter without inspection and those who overstay a legal visa. The second group surprises students.
• Refugee — someone forced to leave their country to escape war, persecution, or disaster. Status is granted while they are still outside the destination country.
• Asylum — the same protection, but granted after arrival. The distinction between refugee and asylum status is where most student errors live.

Then the long view: humans first migrated out of Africa 70,000–100,000 years ago, and every era since has moved people — colonisation, exploration, war, slavery, industrialisation, and the two World Wars. The modern nation state, with fixed borders and controlled entry, is a comparatively recent invention.

Two ways to become a citizen at birth: jus soli, by place of birth, which more than 30 countries including the US use; and jus sanguinis, by the nationality of one or both parents. France, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia have all abolished birthright citizenship in recent decades — a fact that reliably surprises American students, who assume their system is the norm.

Assign the readings, deliberately paired, due before Tuesday:

• The Case for Immigration — The Economist
• The Case Against Immigration — Steven Camarota, Center for Immigration Studies

Why Countries Invite People In, and Why They Don't

Mindful moment (5 min), then breakouts built on the deck's two lists:

• Why governments encourage migration. Economic — filling labour shortages, spurring innovation, raising tax revenue and the working-age population. Family reunification — most countries, including the US, give preference to relatives of citizens and permanent residents. Humanitarian — accepting people fleeing persecution, war, or environmental crisis.
• Why people oppose it. Economic — competition for jobs, and the cost of providing education, health care, and housing. Nativist and identity-based — where national identity is defined by ethnicity, religion, language, or shared belief, immigrants who don't share those traits are seen as a threat to it. And claims that immigration raises crime and security risks.

The demographic puzzle, which is the most interesting slide in the first session: fertility rates across the Global North have been falling since the 1970s, ageing populations slow growth and strain welfare systems, and immigrants are younger and have more children. Immigration looks like the obvious fix. But there is no correlation worldwide between a country's fertility rate and its immigration rate — the countries with the lowest birth rates are not the ones with the most immigrants. One proposed explanation is uncomfortable and worth putting to students: older populations tend to hold more negative attitudes toward immigrants, so the countries that most need immigration are the least willing to accept it.

Attitudes are not uniformly hostile. In a 2018 Pew survey of 18 countries, majorities in 10 saw immigration as a strength rather than a burden — including the US, Germany, the UK, Australia, and Canada, which are among the largest receiving countries in the world.

Who Belongs?

Mindful moment (5 min), then the seminar. The deck's global cases give the discussion something other than American politics to work with:

• South Africa — Operation Dudula ("force out"), an anti-immigration movement organising protests and intimidating immigrants from Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia.
• Myanmar — the government treats the Rohingya minority as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, denying them citizenship and attacking them militarily.
• Europe — parties campaigning on preserving cultural identity gained ground after the 2015 migrant crisis.

Discussion questions:

• What are the arguments for and against birthright citizenship? Which system is fairer — and how might a country's history and its idea of ethnicity shape which one it chose?
• Should people be allowed to hold citizenship in more than one country?
• How do the arguments for and against immigration shift depending on an immigrant's country of origin, education, income, or religion? Ask this one carefully, and ask it — it exposes what the arguments are actually tracking.
• Modern states redistribute heavily through taxes — health care, schooling, a safety net. How does immigration put pressure on public support for that?
• Should ageing countries with falling birth rates open their borders? Why is that hard for countries with strong ethnic conceptions of national identity?

Before students leave: themes, lingering questions, and one new resource for Thursday.

Immigration and Crime — Read the Scatterplots

Mindful moment (5 min), resources shared, then the strongest piece of evidence in the first session, treated as a data-reading exercise rather than a conclusion to accept.

• A 2016 study compared immigration rates and crime rates across 200 US metropolitan areas over forty years (1970–2010); The Marshall Project extended it to 2016.
• In 68% of the cities studied, the immigrant population grew between 1980 and 2016 while crime stayed flat or fell.
• On the undocumented-immigration scatterplot, each dot is a metro area, the horizontal axis is the relative size of the undocumented population, and the vertical axis is the local crime rate. Across five categories of crime, the line of best fit is close to flat.

Make students state what a near-zero slope does and doesn't establish. It is strong evidence against the claim that more undocumented immigration produces more crime. It is not evidence that immigration reduces crime, and it doesn't speak to any individual case.

Score Your Participation

The four reflective questions, then the participation matrix. Students also use the participation rubric to score the week and explain the score.