Why Do People Migrate? Part 1: Facts

The 2007 financial ‘subprime crisis’ in the US has negatively affected the World, becoming an international economic long-term issue. Thus, richest countries are trying to boost their economic structure to solve stagnation and high unemployment rates. Unfortunately, results are not everywhere evident by now, especially in some relevant European countries.
For these reasons, national states are seriously concerned by refugees’ flows due to both the social and the economic impact they could have on their societies. The latter being the hottest one now.
The two main fields taken into consideration from an economic point of view are the labour market and the ‘welfare state’ system. Indeed, refugees could be able to slow down the average wage level, mainly in low-skilled jobs, and to drain resources from public assistance measures. This in a period in which policy makers are even rethinking the sustainability of the classic “from womb to tomb” European schemes.
Europe offers a wide range of political positions on this issue. Northern Europe countries, for instance, have been trying to keep the emergency as far as possible from their borders since the very beginning of the Syrian refugees’ crisis. It is possible to argue that similar reasons are moving the UK as well, all these countries sharing very high welfare state quality standards. Recently, during Cameron talks with the EU authorities about ‘Brexit’, the English Government obtained to be even ‘free of assistance burden’ dealing with European citizens. Germany, on the contrary, was in the front-line to host refugees, looking maybe for low cost employment opportunities for its industries; nowadays, due to security as well as economic concerns, Merkel is pushing for a European comprehensive strategy to face the problem together. Renzi shares the same position, looking for European support to peripheral countries, because the ongoing suspension of Schengen agreement in many member States is stopping people mainly in Italy and Greece making the weight too expensive for their sick economies alone.