Populist and nationalist parties fuel people’s fears about the impact of migrants on jobs and economies. However, numbers show that such an impact can be very positive. In the United States, for example, skilled immigrants account for over half of Silicon Valley start-ups and over half of patents, even though they make up less than 15% of the population.
Such an unprecedented crisis has led to severe difficulties in many EU Member States and has revealed serious deficiencies in ensuring the efficient external border and in the reception and processing of arriving migrants.
The estimated number of migrants around the world is 230 million, that is about 3% of the global population. Even if this share has not changed much in the past 100 years, the number of migrants has increased mainly for two reasons: the world’s population has quadrupled and, since the early 1900s, the number of countries has increased from 50 to over 200 – then, the number of borders increased.
