In a piece published last October, the left-wing journalist Aaron Bastani argued that conservatives who oppose mass immigration into Europe should also oppose Western military interventions in the Middle East. After all, Bastani reasoned, such military interventions lead to the displacement of millions of people – some of whom end up coming to Europe.
The typical conservative response to this argument is to point out that the vast majority of people coming to Europe are not in fact genuine refugees, but rather economic migrants. Indeed, many are from countries like Turkey, Morocco and Algeria where there have not been any Western military interventions in recent decades.
However, the debate has proceeded without much recourse to actual data. In this article, I attempt to redress that. Specifically, I investigate whether Western military interventions in the Middle East have contributed to mass immigration into Europe.
To do so, I analysed the UN’s International Migrant Stock database. This database gives, for each country in the world (and for several different time points), an estimate of the number of people from that country who are living in every other country around the world. One weakness is that it does not count second generation immigrants. However, this isn’t too much of an issue in the present context, since we are interested in recent immigration.
Using the database, I calculated for each of 26 Muslim countries, the number of people from that country living in the EU, Britain, Norway or Switzerland. The 26 Muslim countries are all located in the MENA region, which controls (to some extent) for one major factor affecting migration, namely distance. I did not include Muslim countries like Bangladesh, Malaysia or Indonesia in the analysis, since they are so much further away from Europe. In any case, the 26 countries are: Afghanistan, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Djibouti, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, UAE and Yemen.
I first calculated the migrant stock from each country for the year 2019 (the latest available). However, simply comparing migrant stocks as of 2019 isn’t a good way to test whether military interventions have contributed to mass immigration. After all, migration flows are subject to a large degree of path dependency. Once a migrant community from a particular country becomes established somewhere, more migrants from that country tend to follow. Hence we need to control for the size of the migrant stock before the interventions took place. I therefore calculated the migrant stock from each country in two earlier years: 1990, which marks the end of the Cold War, and 2000, which marks the beginning of the ‘War on Terror’. (Note that UN figures are available for 2000 but not 2001.)
However, simply looking at change in the migrant stock isn’t a good way to answer the question either. After all, some of the Muslim countries are much larger than others: Pakistan has 241 million people, whereas Brunei has only 0.5 million. Hence we also need to control for population size. I therefore divided the migrant stock from each country in each year by that country’s total population in the relevant year.
Next I identified eight countries where there have been major Western or Western-backed military interventions since 1990: Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Palestine, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. Afghanistan had the War in Afghanistan, which began in 2001. Iraq had the Gulf War in 1991 and then the Iraq War in 2003. Lebanon had the 2006 war with Israel. Libya had the NATO intervention in 2011. Palestine has the ongoing conflict with Israel. Somalia had the US intervention in 1992–95 (which was the basis for the film Black Hawk Down). Syria had the US support for rebels that began in 2011. Yemen had the US intervention that began in 2002.
Now let’s look at some results. The chart below shows the relationship between the log of population-adjusted migrant stock in 2019 and the same variable in 1990. (Both variables were logged to reduce skewness.) The countries with Western military interventions are shown in red.
There is a strong positive relationship, indicating that between-country differences in the population-adjusted migrant stock are largely stable over time. Yet what’s also true is that most of the red countries are above the line, while most of the blue countries are below the line. This indicates that countries with Western military interventions have seen larger increases in population-adjusted migrant stocks than those without interventions. (The difference is statistically significant with a p-value of 0.006.) Indeed, when we rank the 26 countries by the residual (the vertical distance between the point and the line), six of the top seven are countries with Western military interventions.
The chart below shows the same relationship when using 2000 as the baseline instead of 1990. It looks much the same as the first chart: the red countries are concentrated at or above the line, while the blue countries are concentrated below the line. Again, the difference is statistically significant with a p-value of 0.003. When we rank countries by the residual, all five of the top five are countries with Western military interventions.
(A simpler way to analyse the data is to subtract the population-adjusted migrant stock in the baseline year from the equivalent value in 2019, and then compare the two groups of countries. This method yielded similar results.)
Overall, these results support Bastani’s claim that Western military interventions in Muslim countries contribute to mass immigration. However, there are some important caveats. First, there are often many ways to analyse the data. I chose to analyse a limited sample of similar countries and did not control for factors aside from those mentioned. An alternative analysis might yield different results.
Second, in several cases it is plausible that there would still have been large-scale immigration from the relevant country in the absence of Western military intervention. For example, the civil war in Somalia during the 1990s might have produced just as many displaced people if the US had not intervened at all. Part of the difference between the two groups may be due to conflict in general, rather than Western military intervention specifically.
On the other hand, only counting migrants from MENA countries understates the impact of Western military interventions on mass immigration. In particular, the NATO bombing campaign in Libya played a major role in the defeat and eventual death of leader Muammar Gaddafi. This, in turn, led to a substantial rise in the number of Sub-Saharan migrants attempting to reach Europe through Libya. (Gaddafi had previously kept a lid on such migration in exchange for money.)
Third, even if Western military interventions do contribute to mass immigration, it remains true that most MENA migrants come from countries where there have not been such interventions in recent decades. As of 2019, only 22% of the MENA migrant stock in Europe is accounted for by migrants from countries with interventions; the three biggest groups are Algerians, Turks and Moroccans.
Given the limitations of my analysis, this article should not be taken as the final word on the subject. Nonetheless, the results are interesting.
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