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  3. Those setting migration policy in rich countries face an almost impossible t

Those setting migration policy in rich countries face an almost impossible t

游客2024-11-18  0
问题     Those setting migration policy in rich countries face an almost impossible task. The demands of demography and economics—shrinking and ageing workforces, a growing shortage of people to fill jobs requiring both high and low skills, and increasingly flexible and open economies—all point to more migration. On the other hand, voters in many rich countries seem increasingly hostile to immigration, which suggests that politicians may find it more and more difficult to allow immigration to continue at its current high level.
    If only there were some means of getting all the benefits of migration but none of the costs. That is the thinking behind the latest solution now being promoted: circular migration. Europe’s commissioner for justice and home affairs, Franco Frattini, wants to see more temporary migrants in the E. U. For the highly skilled, he suggests a blue card (similar to America’s green one) to ease the temporary entry of professionals and their families into Europe. Foreign workers with the most skills make up just 1.7% of the workforce, about half the rate in America and far less than in Canada or Australia, and competition for them is getting more intense as some of the brightest head to Asia. A blue card would at least make it clear to migrant professionals that they would be welcome. On the other hand, highly skilled workers go in search of dynamic economies, along with the high pay and bright careers they offer, and a blue card would do nothing to bring more dynamism to Europe.
    What of the less skilled? Mr Frattini points to a pilot project in Spain over the past two years in which Moroccans—especially women—have been brought in to do specific jobs on farms and in hotels for a few months at a time and then sent home again. Contracts are drawn up beforehand, travel is part-funded by the E. U., everything is above board, and so far every migrant has gone back as agreed. As a result, 10,000 Moroccan workers did not have to run the risk of taking a patera across the Strait of Gibraltar. They were able to send remittances home but put no strain on Spain’s public services. If the projects work, Mr. Frattini would like to scale them up, with member countries eventually setting import quotas for foreign labour.
    But this part of what Mr Frattini and others call circular migration has been tried before and seems unlikely to bring the hoped-for benefits. Germany’s Gastarbeiter scheme began in 1955, drawing workers first from southern Europe and north Africa and then Turkey. Something similar was done in France and the Netherlands
    The trouble is that such a dirigiste design is not well suited to today’s liberal democracies and their flexible labour markets. And unless schemes are tightly regulated and the exit of workers is enforced by law, everybody has an interest in keeping the supposedly temporary workers in place. Employers would much prefer not to have to train new people every six months, and workers want to keep their jobs or move on to better ones. Many of the guest workers who arrived in northern Europe from Turkey and north Africa in the 1960s and 1970s never left, and eventually brought their families to live with them too. The old joke that there is nothing so permanent as a temporary migrant has more than a grain of truth in it.
    It might be possible to create financial incentives for migrants to leave at the end of their contract period. Co-operation between the governments of the host and the sending countries would be essential, says Mr. Frattini. And migrants could be policed more tightly with the aid of new technology: ID cards, databases with biometric details, systems like E-verify in America that allow employers to check whether workers are authorised to be in the country. Proponents of circular migration admit that it would entail a loss of privacy.
    The biggest problem, though, is that people who expect to be packed off home after six months will be seen as second-class residents, and will have less incentive to integrate with their hosts. Why learn the language or adopt local habits and values for just a few months? Locals, for their part, are likely to view temporary labourers with the same sort of hostility as longer-term immigrants.
    Yet any sort of circular migration brings challenges of integration. Faster movements of people, combined with technology—cable television piping entertainment from the sending country, cheap phone and video calls back home—slow the rate at which migrants adopt their host country’s language, values and identity. Migration, suggests Mr. Moudden in Rabat, "is changing our whole understanding of citizenship, of the nation".  [br] According to the passage, which of the following does NOT contribute to Europe’s increasing demand for migration?
选项 A、Demographic change.
B、Pressure from rich-country voters.
C、Labor shortage.
D、Economic necessity.
答案 B
解析 细节题。第一段第三句提到，富裕国家选民对外来移民的敌视有增无减，可见，他们要求抵制移民，故答案为[B]。第一段第二句提到，人口结构和经济形势都显示出对移民的迫切需求，例如工作人口的萎缩和老龄化、劳动力的短缺等，故排除[A]、[C]和[D]。
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