Iran, refugee boats – and President Trump

This article is in response to Monday’s leader, by Daniel Johnson.

The ongoing flow of migrants across the English Channel is a reminder not only of their personal desperation as they confront the merciless perils of the sea, and the ruthlessness of the criminal gangs that orchestrate their passage, but also of a curious and unnoticed contradiction in the policies and worldview of President Donald Trump.

Consider, on the one hand, the president’s hard-line anti-immigration views. Rightly or wrongly, he wants to drastically curb inflows into the United States, not least by the proposed construction of a new wall along the border with Mexico. He has also made clear his views of the damage that migration has done to Western Europe. “For those who want and advocate for illegal immigration”, he tweeted in October, “just take a good look at what has happened to Europe over the last 5 years. A total mess! They only wish they had that decision to make over again”.

But while disparaging immigration, the president is also engendering the very conditions that make so many people want to leave their native lands and migrate, at such immense personal risk, to more prosperous lands.

So it is no coincidence that a great many of the new arrivals on our own shores are (or are thought to be) Iranian nationals, around 200 of whom have arrived over the past two months alone. They are just a tiny proportion of a huge although uncharted exodus of ordinary Iranians who continue to flee abroad. Until a few weeks back, many exploited the visa-free travel that the Serbian government granted all Iranian visitors before this privilege became too widely abused: whole planeloads arrived in Belgrade but return flights were empty. Around 15,000 Iranian ‘visitors’ to Serbia just disappeared, probably across its porous borders into the EU and thereafter to the coasts that lie on the Channel.

Yet President Trump’s hard-line policy towards the Iranian regime has hugely accentuated this outflow of migrants into Western Europe. Last year, in a vigorous bid to make Iran “abandon its current revolutionary course”, he reimposed the full package of economic sanctions on Tehran that had been waived under the hard-won Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), hard fought for and then signed by his predecessor in the White House. Such sanctions have seriously accentuated the country’s existing economies woes, sending the value of the rial into freefall and forcing many foreign companies to cancel or scale down their investment plans. “Iran was like hell”, as one refugee told a newspaper in September. “I prefer to sleep in cardboard here rather than live in Iran”.

Instead of creating the economic conditions that cause the very migration that he condemns, President Trump could simply have bowed to strong international pressure by respecting and upholding the JCPOA. A more audacious move- although unfortunately a course that is politically unthinkable in contemporary America – would have been to encourage foreign investment in and trade with Iran, in return for some concession. Not only would this have given would-be Iranian migrants a reason to stay in their homeland but it would also have undermined the existing regime in a much cleverer, and humane, way than by trying to starve it into submission: greater economic freedom and a higher disposable income is apt to engender a “revolution of rising expectations” as ordinary people start to expect more of their society around them. The Tehran regime’s days would have been numbered.

To curb migrant flows from Iran and elsewhere in the world, a politically more realistic course of action would have been to tackle some of the underlying pressures that are pushing such huge numbers of people out of their native lands. A sensible starting point would be to address the huge demographic pressures that afflict so much of the developing world, as massive population growth outstrips resources: most countries that have high migrant outflows – Iran, Nigeria and Mexico amongst them – are also afflicted by high birth rates. Yet since 2017 Washington has ceased funding the UN’s Population Fund and all of its support for family planning.

President Trump may not be alive to witness what lies ahead but future generations will bear witness to the mass migration – on a scale that may dwarf what we have seen so far – that such short-sighted policies on population control will cause.