Workers, foreign students, asylum seekers… whatever the indicators, records everywhere. Permanent immigration reached a historic level last year to OECD countries where six million people entered to partly fill “labor shortages”.
With 6.1 million “new permanent immigrants”, an increase of 26% year-on-year, “immigration in OECD countries reaches unprecedented levels” in 2022, according to a report published this Monday, October 23 by this institution.
Despite these record flows, “the majority of immigration is regulated, controlled”, starting with that of workers, tempers Jean-Christophe Dumont, who heads the migration division of the OECD, for AFP. “Immigration is a socio-economic phenomenon like any other, which must be managed,” continues the economist, taking the example of France where work immigration represented 54,000 people in 2022, “a level never seen since the 1960s.
Last year, more than one country in three recorded flows “unseen for at least 15 years”, including France (301,000 people), Spain (471,000) and Belgium (122,000), while that several others such as the United Kingdom (521,000) or Canada (437,000) broke absolute records, according to data compiled by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Figures to which must be added the approximately 4.7 million displaced Ukrainians recorded in June 2023 in the 38 OECD member countries.
Explosion of asylum requests
In detail, the request for asylum has exploded, according to the OECD, where two million new requests were submitted in 2022, “the highest number ever recorded to date”. This is twice as much as the previous year and significantly higher than the years 2015-2016, when the conflict in Syria generated a wave of exile towards Europe.
This global dynamic is “linked to the fact that many OECD countries are experiencing labor shortages,” explains the organization in its report. “Regulated immigration of foreign workers”, underlines the document, amounts to 21% of total flows and now represents the same proportion as people immigrating for humanitarian reasons. A share that is all the more significant given that the increase in family immigration, which remains the main category with four out of ten entries, is mainly “due to families accompanying immigrant workers”, observes the OECD. Last year, according to the organization’s data, nearly 80% of immigrants were “active”, including 70% employed and less than 8% unemployed.
All of this data does not take into account temporary workers, such as seasonal workers. A category which also experienced “a strong increase”. On all indicators, the OECD anticipates, preliminary data for 2023 already suggest “a further increase”.