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Braverman claims illegal migration poses
'existential challenge for political and cultural institutions of west'
Braverman started her speech by claiming uncontrolled
and illegal migration poses an “existential challenge” to the instituions of
the west.
She said:
I’m here in
America to talk about a critical and shared global challenge: uncontrolled and
illegal migration.
It is an
existential challenge for the political and cultural institutions of the west.
To defend
this point, she cited what happened in Lampedusa recently.
To
understand the future, cast your mind back a couple of weeks, and a few
thousand miles south-east of here, to the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa,
population then 6,000.
Lampedusa,
where in a 24-hour period beginning on 12th September, over 120 hundred boats,
carrying more than 5,000 illegal migrants, made the hundred-mile crossing from
Tunisia, in Africa, to Italy.
Within 48
hours illegal arrivals outnumbered the local population and a state of
emergency had been declared. By 20th September, at least 11,000 had landed,
with migrants sleeping in the street, stealing food, and clashing with police.
And she
implied that whole countries were at risk of being overwhelmed.
Illegal
migration to the US has in recent years gone from just under two million in
2021 to more than 2.8 million this year.
Illegal
migration is not merely an event-driven, or cyclical problem.
It is a
permanent and structural challenge for the developed nations in general, and
the West in particular ….
As the
American economist Michael Clemens has found: “Emigration from a country tends
to rise until it reaches a level of income of about $10,000 per person, before
declining”.
World Bank
data show that more than 3 billion people live in countries where the average
income is below this threshold. The potential for migration to increase yet
further is truly colossal.
The raw
numbers show how demand for migration, legal or otherwise, is likely to surge
in the coming years.
So too does
personal testimony.
A 2021
Gallup Poll found that 16 per cent of adults worldwide – around 900 million
people – would like permanently to leave their own country.
And those
numbers are not evenly distributed around the World.
37 per cent
of people living in sub-Saharan Africa – some 481 million people, and 27 per
cent of those living in the Middle East and North Africa – around 156 million –
say they’d like to migrate.
The ease
with which some of them might reach Europe poses a unique and deepening
challenge.
The fact is
that our countries are exceptionally attractive.
4 per cent
of those polled by Gallup – approximately 40 million people – named Britain as
their preferred destination.
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