Migration in knowledge aging societies. Differentiating labor force and discriminating people

Abstract

Although populism in the global North countries has advanced during the last two decades as an anti-immigrant ideology, demographers have shown concerns about the aging of populations in those countries and have suggested encouraging replacement migration policies to mitigate such aging effects. It is the classical liberal paradox – to claim the general need for immigration and then to reject immigrants. From a political and economic point of view, we are called to bring to the fore the relationship between labor and productivity transformations, on the one hand, and demographic crisis, on the other. In fact, the need for migrations is never generalized, but specific. Over the last decades, qualified and highly qualified migration has boomed, consolidating globally the presence of migrant labor in technological, scientific and financial sectors. We attempt to investigate migration in aging knowledge societies, as a result of complementary processes whereby immigrants are differentially included as labor force, and socially discriminated via selective immigration policies, which barely consolidates the reproduction of global social injustice.