Immigration: The Global Reality Show Nobody Can Cancel
Immigration: The World’s Longest-Running Season Finale
By “Borderline” Benito K., Senior Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Atlantic
If Earth were a reality show, immigration would be the cliff-hanger no scriptwriter dares resolve—too lucrative, too messy, and the audience keeps hate-watching. Every continent is simultaneously auditioning newcomers and locking the greenroom door. The same governments that begged nurses to fly in during Covid are now fingerprinting them at departure gates, just in case they get any funny ideas about overstaying their usefulness. The irony is artisanal and locally sourced.
Take the Mediterranean: Europe spent €3 billion on drones to spot dinghies, then €4 billion on NGO boats to rescue the occupants of said dinghies. Somewhere a Brussels accountant is updating PowerPoint slides titled “Efficiency, Mediterranean Flavor.” Meanwhile, Tunisia’s coast guard—whose wages are partly underwritten by EU development funds—plays maritime whack-a-mole with the very same people Europe’s farms will quietly hire next harvest. Everybody wins, except the humans bobbing in between.
Across the Atlantic, the United States is performing its own tragicomedy. Congress hasn’t updated visa quotas since the era of fax machines, so the labor market has outsourced innovation to cartels. A Guatemalan teenager willing to roof a McMansion in 102-degree heat can expect a coyote fee roughly equal to four years of Harvard tuition. The American dream now comes with interest and optional dismemberment. Still, demand remains robust; nothing says “land of opportunity” like risking death to trim hedges nobody else wants to touch.
Asia, never to be outdone, has turned migration into a contact sport. Singapore imports Bangladeshi construction crews by the battalion, then politely asks them to disappear after dark like a Victorian footman. Japan solves its demographic crisis by building robots to spoon-feed the elderly, because importing Filipina caregivers would apparently fracture the national soul. China, meanwhile, is exporting people the way it exports plastic flamingos: in bulk, to Africa, complete with company housing and non-optional overtime. Belt, Road, and indenture.
Down in Australia, the government once paid people-smugglers to turn their boats around—an avant-garde twist on customer service. Refugees who made land were shipped to Nauru, a Pacific island so small it appears on most atlases only as a misprint. Canberra’s message was subtle: we will imprison you on a coral atoll until morale improves, or until CNN loses interest, whichever comes first.
Yet for all the barbed wire and biometric gates, migration has already won the numbers game. There are now 281 million international migrants, roughly the population of Indonesia wearing someone else’s passport. Remittances—those guilt-edged money transfers—outpace global foreign aid three to one. In short, the world’s poor are subsidizing the lifestyles of the world’s middle class, who then complain about the service. Capitalism’s newest miracle: the circular firing squad.
The broader significance? Borders are becoming performance art. States insist they are sovereign fortresses while quietly relying on imported everything: lettuce pickers, software engineers, Uber drivers, Premier League strikers. The pandemic taught us that when migrants stop moving, strawberries rot on the vine and TikTok videos buffer endlessly. We are, in the most literal sense, co-dependent.
So what comes after the season finale? Probably a spin-off. Climate change is busy producing 1.2 billion potential extras—coastal farmers whose fields will be starring as saltwater aquariums by 2050. The script writes itself: rising seas, falling yields, and a caravan of humanity looking for higher ground while the cameras roll. Spoiler alert: the wealthy nations will still need their lawns mowed.
Until then, keep your boarding pass handy. The queue is long, the mood surly, and the in-flight meal is whatever hope you can smuggle past security. Bon voyage.
