Killing With Kindness Revisited
The only way to curb immigration is to increase foreign aid.
Rhetoric about immigration is becoming more insistent throughout what we call the developed world. Recently the British Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, called for the revision of the 1951 Refugee Convention which she argued is out of date. Her statement has been welcomed by some and criticised by others.
Only a few days later, the BBC reported the development of a new malaria vaccine that has, according to Prof Sir Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute in Oxford, “the potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives a year.”
I have argued previously that the exponential growth in population in my lifetime has more to do with reductions in mortality, especially childhood mortality, than the number of actual births.
https://medium.com/illumination/no-one-can-predict-the-future-a3f60e0c4332
In the UK and Europe the population growth over the last 70 years is approximately 34%. In the USA it is 115%. That compares to 300% for the planet as a whole. Some of the biggest increases in population have occurred in Africa, in regions that were already poor by comparison with developed nations. They remain poor today yet have many more mouths to feed.
I can’t help wondering, if 50% or 100% population growth in developed countries is “unsustainable”, what adjective is appropriate for a sevenfold increase in the population of a nation like Niger? Surely migration from such countries to the richer nations of Europe is both inevitable and understandable. And now we are supposed to applaud a development that can only make matters worse.
Those “hundreds of thousands” of “saved” children in each of the next few years will need food, education and health care. They will grow up to have children of their own requiring homes. All things that, without further intervention from the rich world, they can find only by migrating to nations better developed than theirs.
The kind of intervention I have in mind is assistance with the creation of schools and hospitals, with the training of doctors, nurses and teachers to staff them.
And yet the same politicians who are calling for tighter controls on migration are also cutting back on aid programmes. In fairness to the UK, it is one of the few countries that spends anywhere near the 0.7% of GDP, the UN target for spending on development aid. The USA, for example, spends a paltry 0.17% of GDP on foreign aid.
My conclusion is this: if we in the developed part of the world are to continue preventing diseases and “saving” children, instead of turning migrants away, we must take steps to provide for their needs.
We can do this either by massively increasing our aid programmes so that they are properly provided for where they live, or we increase the availability of those resources — eduction, health care, housing — here in our own neighbourhoods so as to accommodate the influx of foreign migrants.
What surely is unsustainable is to keep on saving lives when the quality of life on offer is not worth having.