Migration roots: the broken asylum system

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1:10Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

1:25the rise of generative ai is creating another kind of digital divide on one side the coders who can make the ai models and rake in crazy money and then there are all the other computer whizzes whose job prospects are swiftly dimming and a free open-air performance in london provides a window into the state of the theatre industry and shows how fame is changing in the internet era.

2:03But first...

2:12We interviewed an asylum seeker called Miguel. He's from Latin America, and his reason for claiming asylum in Britain is that he says that gangsters in the city where he's from are going to kill him if he goes back. Robert Guest is a deputy editor of The Economist and has been reporting around the world, speaking to people caught up in a broken global asylum system. The British authorities, they've been trying to assess this claim for the past seven years, but it's very hard to do because, you know, gangsters don't publish their hit lists. We don't really know whether he might find safety by moving to a different city or to a different Latin American country.

2:52It's just not something that the authorities are able to process. And here's the weird bit. He's married to a doctor, So he could perfectly well come to the UK as the dependent spouse of an essential worker. But instead of that, we've had expensive lawyers and officials haggling over this case for seven years. And that's just an indication of how messed up the system is. In the sense that there are a lot of kind of nonsensical cases like Miguel's? Pretty much all around the rich world, leaders feel that the asylum system is not working. The original Refugee Convention of 1951 was just supposed to deal with post-war Europe, and it was about not sending people back to be killed by Stalin.

3:39It was then expanded to the whole world. And then there have been some big changes, so it's much easier to travel, and the amount of displacement and conflict has gone up. The number of people who have been forced to flee their homes in the world has roughly trebled since 2010 to about 123 million people. At the same time, you've got lots of people, about 900 million people, according to Gallup, who would like to migrate permanently to a different country for other reasons, typically Labour. And it's virtually impossible if you're from a poor country and you don't have amazing skills or close relatives in a rich country to move legally to a rich country.

4:18So what's happened is that lots of people have noticed that there's a back door, that if you show up and claim asylum, that the rich countries feel obligated to consider your case, no matter how difficult it may be. And during that period, which can take years, you can sort of melt away into the labour market and work. So you're seeing lots and lots of people arriving, far more than the rich countries feel prepared to admit. You use the word backdoor, and surely there are a lot of people who see it as exactly that, a way to sneak into the system without merit. There's nothing morally wrong with trying to seek a better life, okay?

4:56But voters in rich countries won't have a say over who comes. If they want to let people in for labour migration, they want to choose them on the basis of the skills and value to the local economy. So the fact that people are saying, I'm an asylum seeker, when quite a lot of them aren't, it really upsets voters. And it's fuelled the enormous backlash we've seen against immigration more broadly. It makes it impossible to have a calm discussion about immigration, and it's fueled the populist movements. We've seen everything from Brexit to the re-election of Donald Trump. So it's poisoning politics in the West, and we need to have a more rational system.

5:37Well, what does that system look like then? How to balance all of those various incentives? If you want to both provide safety to the people who need it and have a reasonable flow of labor migration from poorer countries to rich ones that wins the consent of voters, then you need to separate the two things. You need to say, if you're seeking safety, you generally will find it in the first safe country you reach. And that does not give you a right to move from that country to a rich country where wages are higher. And that means if you move from Turkey to Europe or from Mexico to the United States, so you're moving from a safe country to a richer country, then the rich country is just going to need to say, no, sorry, you can't come in and we will remove you immediately, either to where you came from or if that's not possible, to a third country.

6:29And this is the direction that policymakers are going in. Italy's plan, which is held up in the courts at the moment, to send people to Albania for processing. I mean, Albania is safe. It does not seem to me that that should be illegal and doesn't seem to the European Commission either that that should be illegal. Donald Trump's plan to send people to South Sudan. Yeah, I mean, that's incredibly dangerous and deliberately cruel and that's not okay. At the same time, you need to have adequate provisions for refugees in the first safe countries that they reach. And right now, those are not nearly adequate.

7:01So the UN refugee agencies that work in places like, say, Chad, dealing with the refugees from Sudan, are sort of massively underfunded. Of those who cross an international border, the vast majority go to the country next door and the vast majority remain within the developing world. It is much cheaper to give them sanctuary there than to hear their cases in the rich world. And you have places in New York where they were spending nearly$400 a night just to find accommodation for refugees, whereas the entire budget for everything that the UNHCR spends on each refugee in Chad is less than a dollar a day.

7:40So would you say that Chad is an example of a system that works, something that should be used as a sort of example case? What I saw in Chad is the basis of how things might work. Among the refugees I met in Chad was a young lady whom I called Sukra. At the time I was talking to her, she was making mud bricks by hand for 50 cents a day. She told me through a translator why she fled from her home in Sudan.

8:14In my village, Krennik, the Arabs, they enter our village. They killed our families, men. They kidnapped young girls, raped them, and they burned our houses, and that is why we can... she's a black african the local arab militia had said to all the black africans in her town either you leave the country tonight or we rape you and so she fled as part of a crowd dodging bullets and whips in the middle of the night and when she got to chad and safety she realized her sister hadn't made it and she went back to find her and when she was looking for her she was actually raped by some militiamen and she never found her sister.

9:07So it's a story of enormous trauma and tragedy. But it's also a story where the country next door, Chad, has dealt with this as well as can be expected. They've welcomed more than a million refugees from Sudan. They let them work to support themselves. They let them rent farmland and grow food. They let them move around the country. And it hasn't caused any political problems there. None of the locals think that the Sudanese refugees are making it up. Nobody thinks that the refugees are coming to mooch off the Chadian generous welfare state because there isn't one. So it's probably the least bad solution you're going to get to this.

9:48So it's clear that the Chad Sudan situation is not necessarily representative of all of the asylum seeking situations around the world. How do we take some lessons from it? How do we help build a better system by starting in a place where it seems at least in part to work? The Chad Sudan situation is absolutely representative of the vast majority of refugee flows. What it's different from is the small number, relatively, who make it to the West, but who are nonetheless large enough numbers to disrupt the political system there and create a backlash against all kinds of migration. The West can help a lot more people find safety by properly funding the refugee agencies and the host governments in the countries closest to the conflict zones.

10:35If you combine those things I've said, separate asylum from labour migration, properly fund sanctuary in the first safe countries that people reach, then you could develop a better system. There's a danger, however, that you get all the enforcement and none of the extra funding and you end up with a crueller system. That's a real worry. Robert, thanks very much for joining us. Thank you, Jason. The topic of asylum is part of a wider and politically electric topic of immigration, particularly in America. My colleagues over on Checks and Balance, our weekly subscriber-only show on American politics, have done a deep dive on it this week, with the usual on-the-ground reporting and a historical view on immigration enforcement.

11:20Worth a listen. Checks and Balance is out tomorrow and every Friday.

11:54We'll see you next time. or data. Check out Odoo at odoo.com. That's odoo.com. Who says Halloween only lasts one day? With Wayfair, one night of Halloween becomes a whole season at home. From larger-than-life yard decor and moody lighting to festive accents for every room in the house, Wayfair has what you need to make Halloween feel like magic all in one place. Because the best Halloween memories aren't made in just one night. They're made all season long. Shop Halloween decor now at Wayfair.com. Wayfair, every style, every home.

12:37Look, I've heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor, and you know, I think it is rational for them. In Silicon Valley, companies are competing for a handful of superstar engineers. But they started making these, like, giant offers to, you know, a lot of people on our team. Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, recently told the podcast Uncapped that Meta is offering huge sums to poach some of his staff. But this race for a few AI whiz kids is paired with a slump for other coders. The demand for top-tier AI talent is obviously on the rise and companies are paying top dollars for that.

13:15But on the flip side, the demand for the rest of the industry has really fallen off the cliff. Shailesh Chitnis is a global business writer at The Economist. As an example, Microsoft just last week announced a layoff of 6 ,000 people. That was on top of the 2 ,000 or 3 ,000, I think they announced earlier this year. Mark Benioff, who's the founder and CEO of Salesforce, earlier this year he said that Salesforce is not going to hire any, quote-unquote, net new engineers for this year, which is a pretty big statement. And so that has been a continuing trend where companies are cutting back on the rank-and-file developers, even as they're investing a lot in AI.

13:54Because those at the top of the pile, the real hot AI talent, they're getting paid plenty. That's true. A lot of the listeners may be familiar with recent examples of Meta paying tens of millions of dollars. Even$100 million has been floated around as a number to attract really the top tier of AI talent. Meta is building out this team called the Super Intelligence Team. And as part of that, they're really splashing out in terms of the dollars to hire. This developer called Lucas Bayer, who's based out of Zurich in Switzerland, when he announced that he's going to meta, I think he felt compelled to say that he's not getting$100 million.

14:27And really, I think that should tell you the scale of salaries and what people expect. But in all seriousness, these top tier developers that we talk about, they really come from a few companies. Typically, they've worked in model makers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepMind. And it's pretty insentious in that sense that they move between companies. And if you're in the top tier, typically you would only hire from other companies in the top tier. We'd rarely go below that. An important thing about this is we shouldn't be thinking about them as just coders because what companies really price is their ability to actually build out full products.

14:59That means not just working on the code, but being able to actually articulate what the product should look like, communicate with different teams. So really being able to bring a product to market, that is what these top tier coders have the ability to do. And that is what companies price. But why does the appetite for those at the top tier create a lack of appetite for those doing the rank and file stuff, as you say, that work still needs doing. I won't say the two are related in the sense that just because you have demand for this, there's less demand. But what has happened is there's been a confluence of factors.

15:29So first and foremost, during COVID, a lot of companies really ramped up their hiring to new highs, and some would say they overhired. And so as interest rates increased, companies cut back on that. So a lot of what we see right now is also some of the reaction to that. But in parallel, the rise of AI has meant that companies are really looking at productivity gains. And not surprisingly, the first place that they're finding productivity gains is in programming. And so you have programs like Microsoft's Copilot, you have other similar software from Claude, from Enthropic, which really help programmers write code faster in more efficient way.

16:05And again, it translates to is essentially productivity gains. There have been some numbers floated around between 10 to 30 percent improvement in productivity, depending on how you measure it. And so a combination of these two factors means that what companies are doing right now is they're taking more of a wait-and-see approach. So rather than continuing to grow their developer workforce, they're trying to see how much of their efficiencies they can get from AI before investing further. So where do you see this going, this kind of rebalancing actually finishing? Will there be a sort of bottom tier of coder anymore, or is that all AI's business?

16:37So Dario Omede, who's the boss of Anthropic, he has predicted that in the future, AI could be writing all the code. I think that's probably a bit too optimistic. I think probably what is realistic is a lot of developers will have to find newer ways to code, which is being able to use AI and become more productive. So I think that is certainly going to happen. And the ones that actually do well with that, the ones that can use AI to become more productive will certainly be a lot in demand. I think what we will see is the basic work or the repetitive tasks that you think are being done by a lot of developers today may be automated.

17:10So essentially, I see this as an upskilling or an up leveling. I don't think developers are going away anywhere soon, but certainly this is something that for them is a change in the market that they need to adapt to. Shailesh, thank you very much for your time. Thank you for having me.

17:41I'm kind of obsessed this is my second time doing this I've come from Wales yeah so I got up and I got a taxi down to the coach station and got a three-hour coach up this morning so I got here about one o 'clock, came straight here. For two hours, a buzzing crowd has been gathering outside the London Palladium, just off Oxford Street. Andrew Miller writes Backstory, the Economist's column on culture. At last, the throng falls silent. Mobile phone cameras are hoisted aloft. And then Rachel Zegler glides onto a balcony over the street and serenades the masses. Don't cry for me, I am dinner. The truth is I never left you Zegla is starring in Evita, a musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Sir Tim Rice, in a new production overseen by Jamie Lloyd, a hip theatre director.

18:38She plays the title character, Eva Peron, who rose from obscurity to become Argentina's first lady. And ask for fortune, and ask for fame But when she comes to perform this, the show's most famous number, the audience inside sees a live stream. Outside, the impromptu crowd on the pavement gets the real thing. This six-minute cameo is a clever marketing ruse, but I think it's more than that. It's also a snapshot of modern stardom, trends in theatre and the age-old character of London. Vita's always been my favourite show. I saw the show three times last week inside. Now I've come back to see, I see it from the outside.

19:24Every night since word got around, hundreds have been gathering for every performance. That was wonderful, amazing. That was amazing. Breathtaking vocals, hammy acting. But loved it. I thought, like, what a stunt for her career. No one can deny her vocals. Some onlookers held a cardboard sign that read, We Love Ever, to give Zegler something to look at, I guess, apart from the sea of smartphones. Like she was looking at us smiling and singing for us for like five seconds or something. And the second time, like, she looked at us and she sent us like a kiss. As you can tell, Zegler is famous enough to draw huge crowds to her alfresco turns.

20:08A steward told me it's a bit of a nightmare as he struggled to keep a path clear for nearby shops. And the local pickpockets are onto it too. The hype machine has gone into overdrive. Eventually it becomes like everyone starts chanting a leader or something like that. Lots of these fans are keen to defend Zegler from criticism she's received over comments she's made in the past about the Middle East, among other skirmishes. Rachel Zegler's a pretty good performer and actress, so I think you kind of want to see where that story goes. But hers, I think, is a funny kind of warp speed 21st century fame, based on a few screen performances and a lot of online excitement.

20:49Millions of people adore her, but lots of others have never heard of her. And I think this little pavement spectacle also captures some key aspects of modern theatre. One of them is that it's getting really, really expensive. Top WAC tickets for Evita cost nearly£300 or just over$400. and otherwise for lots of people your best chance to see a star is well to stand on the pavement outside the palladium and wait for Zegler to come onto the balcony. It makes theatre accessible I can't afford to come here like you know I'm on minimum wage but I've got to see something that I would never normally be able to see.

21:27This little event is also part of a trend to expand and jazz up the action in theatre with the use of screens. You see a lot of them at plays in London and And sometimes it's just plain annoying. But actually, in the context of this story, the staging works. Evita, after all, was a charismatic populist. And this scene, she's supposedly addressing her working class supporters from the balcony of a palace in Buenos Aires. I was once as you are now. We have taken these riches from the audience. And in fact, here she is, having ditched the high rollers inside to sing to a real ticketless crowd. She wasn't having to imagine the common people, she was actually like with the common people.

22:12The best bit for me, I got chills when we all cheered because it felt like we were part of the show as well. It felt like we were the voice of Argentina. And while Evita is set in Argentina and it features a Hollywood A-lister, this it seems to me is a very London scene. This after all is a city that loves showbiz but hates pretension. In the Victorian era, for instance, after curtain calls at the opera house in Covent Garden, divas would rattle across town in carriages to sing in raucous East End musicals. Some of that down-to-earth spirit lingers outside the Palladium. I mean, I'm from Germany, and musical is a bit different there.

22:53It's a bit more like a pop concert. And for all the hype, the spectacle has the air of insouciance and shrugging indifference that are London's enduring keys. And when Zegler is done and she heads back inside the theatre, the hundreds of people who gather to hear her disperse in an instant. The safety barriers are cleared away and the show goes on. I saw maybe 20 seconds. It's been great. I enjoyed it, whatever it was.

23:37That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

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