Why deportations, border and immigration controls in Global North?

IT was in 1980s when the Global North was caught in a whirlpool of rising inflation, unemployment and falling rates of profit — an economic phenomenon called stagflation — triggered by the oil crisis, that entrepreneurs were looking for greener pastures to invest their capital and management strategies at least to prevent further decline in profit levels.

- By Dr. Ameer Ali

China's conversion to a market economy, dissolution of the Soviet Union, reunification of Germany, and above all a new wave of technological and electronic innovations came to the rescue.

George H.W. Bush exuberantly announced that a New World Order had come into place and territorial borders were becoming increasingly porous. The neoliberal philosophy of deregulation, privatisation, and free market became the magical economic mantra of economists and diplomats. From 1990s, rising levels of trade and investments and proliferation of transnational corporations became the visible identities of globalisation, and to Francis Fukuyama it marked the "End of History".

Although this borderless world was meant chiefly to promote financial mobility, cross border investments and trade flow with little or no restrictions, the demand for skilled and unskilled labour in Global North and in oil rich countries also gave a boost to the movement of people from Global South. In addition to the Northern pull factor there were also push factors from the South such as grinding poverty and political and social unrest that encouraged this migration. US, UK, EU and Australia in particular, became favoured destinations. Unlike in the Middle East, Global North was prepared to accept this peripatetic labour on long term contracts and even prepared to offer them citizenship eventually.

Alarm bells in Global North