The globalization along with growing inequality between and within countries has brought new trends that today cause mixed reaction from the society. The global migration is considered one of the most crucial issues of the 21th century. There are more than 232 million of international migrants in the world. If they could occupy a separate territory for living it would be a new population in the world, strong enough due to its multicultural background (The United Nations, 3). However, Immigrants more often face discrimination, exploitation, ill-treatment, wounding and even enslaving. They are afraid to complain and fight for their rights while the other society misuses them for dirty, dangerous and poor-paid jobs because native citizens are usually unable to take such low positions. At present, the question of immigrants becomes more and more burning. Foreigners claim equal rights as native citizens have, while receiving countries suffer from sharp immigration wave, violence, rising crime rate and many contradictions between human rights and misunderstanding the law.
In my opinion, immigrants should have the same rights as citizens of receiving countries, first of all, because we are all humans, and there should not be any predomination of countries, nations or people in the world. According to the Universal declaration of Human Rights, everyone has a right to move to or leave at any country and shall not be discriminated due to its nationality. That proves that every person should have access to the fundamental human rights wherever he lives.
Naive citizen tend to think that immigrants arrive for the only purpose to misuse the government services cheating the social security and other benefits. However, in most of cases immigrants have to leave their country looking for better living or working conditions, or because of the dangerous situation in their country. Most of immigrants abandoned their families in order to help them from abroad with food and money. In the receiving countries immigrants actually play a very important role. They are usually hired for the positions that the governments need, but the citizens do not want to do. Immigrants and refugees have limited access to the labor market due to poor language and education, so they start working in minor areas. Citizens live and work in buildings built by immigrants, eat food cooked by immigrants, walk along streets cleaned by immigrants and receive other services from immigrants every day.
In practice, they have to work and live in poor conditions. That provides higher risks for physical and emotional health. When immigrants try to get health assistance they are usually denied by health and migration authorities due to bureaucracy, language and administration barriers. Sometimes irregular migrants are afraid to be deported if they ask for medical health or government assistance. For example, in some places such as South Africa and Argentina, migrants in practice were reported to be excluded from health services and in China, migrant patients with tuberculosis were dismissed by their employers (International Organization of migration, 87). This situation can lead to transmission of diseases and influence the whole society. In order to keep the average level of health and medical services high in the country the government should provide access for migrants to health and medical care. The health protection services should be provided for every person in spite of the regular or irregular status in the passport. After all, tracking migrants is a Migration Department duty, but not the Health's one.
Besides, when migrants have access to legal services, entrepreneurship, banks and other infrastructure they can promote development in their countries of origin with their ideas, skills and investments. In that case, immigrants play an essential role of an international portal between countries, providing know-how, projects, new production and development to their home towns. It is also helpful in reducing inequality and faster development of third countries.
In addition, when immigrants are granted with all rights for health and social services, as well as for jobs and education they pay taxes and fees and thus provide a significant fiscal impact on the government budget. The OECD in estimated the fiscal impact of immigration in all OECD countries at the level of 2% of GDP in Luxembourg and Switzerland and at the level of 0,5-1% in Greece, Italy, Ireland, Belgium, the UK (The Migration Observatory, 8).
Nowadays people become confused misunderstanding the regular and the irregular migration, criminalizing the last as illegal. As the United Nations claim, "crossing the border of a country without a permutation and proper documentation, or overstaying a permit of stay does not constitute a crime" (The United Nations, 13). That means that being an immigrant does not mean being a criminal. Native citizens tend to connect the crimes with immigrants; however, irregular immigrants are less likely to break the law and to be involved in crimes than the native-born because of their fear to be deported. Now young immigrants stay at quite a low delinquency rate in comparison with other youth in the United States (The American Immigration Council). It is also important to distinguish refugees, who had to move due to dangerous, military and political situations in their countries. It is historically approved to receive and provide assistance for people escaping from the war. Otherwise, what can countries do if not to provide millions of people with basic rights for health, education, job? No one government has enough power and resources to turn 232 million people out just because of their residential status. It will need much more efforts, complicated bureaucracy and more staff to change the migration policy than to improve it.
The other crucial question is providing national and social security in receiving countries without neglecting human rights of native citizens. The situation that we can now observe in European countries proves that along with friendly-accepting migrant policy there should be a very well organized system of national protection. Evidently, immigrants, regular or not have all human rights, but, otherwise, they become amenable to law. From that time they had crossed the border they must have followed rules of that particular country. Being an immigrant or a refugee does not mean that they can violate people, defecate on the streets, commit crimes and stay unpunished just because of their poor education, social class and lack of knowledge of laws in the country.
The opened-door policy in Europe has led to a hard refugee crisis, following by inability of European governments to provide accommodation and finance, health and education services for more than 1,5 million of the refugees. At the same time, the increasing number of young men from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan became a reason of a number of violent rapes in European cities. The European Government vigorously discusses these topics today and some measures are undertaken, but the number of immigrants continues to grow and the situation comes out of control.
It will probably take a lot of time and efforts to regulate the situation and to find a reasonable balance between human rights, government security and native citizens' demands. However, the historical experience shows that global migration brings much more advantages than disadvantages to the receiving countries. Immigrants stay taxpaying, hard-working, low-paid workforce that is highly demanded at the developed economies. It is very important to provide immigrants with the same rights as citizens have in order to maintain a high level of development, keep growing and to smooth the inequality between and within countries. It is still necessary to control and regulate the migration processes. The government of the receiving country has to be sure that there is enough space, financial resources and staff to provide immigrants and refugees with necessary services as well as to provide the country and its native citizens with the security. However, coupled with rights and benefits all the immigrants have to follow the rules of a particular government and to be punished for all the violations without exceptions and infringement of native citizens' interests.
Works Cited
The Contributions of High-Skilled Immigrants. Migration Policy Institute. 16, July. 2006: 1-2. Web. 29 Jan. 2016. <http://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/contributions-high-skilled-immigrants>
"The criminalization of the immigration in the United States". American Immigration Council. 8, Jul. 2015. Web. 30 Jan. 2016. <http://immigrationpolicy.org/special-reports/criminalization-immigration-united-states>
The Economic, social and cultural rights of migrants in an irregular situation. The United Nations. 2014: 2-13. Web. 29 Jan. 2016. <http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/HR-PUB-14-1_en.pdf>
The Fiscal Impact of Immigration in the UK. The migration observatory at the Oxford University. 27 March. 2015: 8. Web. 30 Jan. 2016. <http://www.migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/sites/files/migobs/briefing%20-%20Fiscal%20Impacts.pdf>
World Migration Report 2015. International Organization for migration. 2015: 87. Web. 29 Jan. 2016 <http://publications.iom.int/system/files/wmr2015_en.pdf>
