How to stop illegal aliens

It's another busy day for the Saudi patrol groups monitoring their country's southern borders with Yemen. Yet as much as they try to secure the borders, many human traffickers in Yemen may tell you, they are far from their ambition of significantly reducing the massive influx of illegal immigrants entering into their country. The problem is growing, and patrolling borders is failing miserably.

In this era of globalisation and jet-age, cross-continental travel has never been easier. Just as these developments helped the movement of people and goods in legal ways, they also boosted illegal immigration, which has now become one of the most troublesome global problems, particularly in a post-9/11 world. It is estimated that there may be up to 40 million illegal immigrants around the world, and the number is still on the rise.

As a person who had lived in many countries in North America and Europe, I got a sense of the trend of illegal immigration, which is in many ways one of the election campaign issues that successive governments would raise. Many believe that Nicolas Sarkozy's pledge to tighten immigration laws helped him win the French elections last year.

Though there are many reasons for illegal immigration, one of the unrelenting is poverty. More than any time in the past, poverty-stricken countries are involuntarily exporting an enormous number of people to the richer world.

If you think about it, this is to be expected because people who live in poor conditions, with virtually no healthcare and weak education and no decent employment opportunities will consider moving to a country where their children could get a better shot at live and hopefully have a more promising future.

"It is mostly to secure a better life for my kids" is what you would probably hear when interviewing Hispanic immigrants when asked why they risked their lives to arrive to "the land of opportunities." Although the United States has been discussing this problem for decades, the population of what are referred to as 'illegal aliens' is now more than that of legal immigrants, raising doubts about the effectiveness of the policies the US has been implementing in this respect.

We in the Gulf are no strangers to this phenomenon. With an influx of illegal immigrants from poor countries from Asia, the Middle East and Africa, many GCC countries are struggling to find new ways to tackle the problem. But ironically however, they seem to be using the wrong methods.

A clear example of this problem is demonstrated at the Saudi-Yemen border as I illustrated earlier. Every month, there are tens of thousands of cases of infiltrators including smuggled children crossing the border to Saudi Arabia from Yemen whose annual GDP per capita income is less than $1,000. Hardly does a week pass by without hearing about deported Yemenis, border arrests, clashes, etc.

Standing at 400,000 yearly, the number of illegal immigrants crossing the border from Yemen is on the rise, and policies that have been taken so far, such as building a fence and tightening laws, seem to have not yielded the desirable results.

So, where have we gone wrong? Why is the problem persisting or even worsening?

Causes

Common sense suggests that in order to solve a problem, you need to look into their causes. This is precisely what has been lacking in the case of illegal immigration across the world as is the case of Yemenis illegally crossing to the GCC or overstaying their visas.

Why would Yemenis have to leave their country, if they would have had a relatively comparable GDP level to its neighbours? Why would some Yemeni parents tolerate the idea of having their kids enslaved and practice begging or other illegal activities in neighbouring countries if they had the elements of a decent life in their own country?

When raising this cause, Gulf countries often explain that they must respect the sovereignty of other countries and hence refrain from interfering in the internal politics of its neighbours. But there will definitely be a time when the fate of all countries living in the same geographical reasons would be similar if not identical and interference then would be too little too late.

GCC countries like all other rich countries in the world, need to understand that maintaining a bizarre status of economic inequality between neighbouring countries would inevitably mean more illegal immigrants and hence more problems for all.

Whether we like it or not, the solution will have to be long-term and would involve collective measures that would help people of the region realise economic stability.

Averting the illegal immigration time bomb has today become a necessity not only for the sake of immigrants themselves, but for the sake of recipient countries as well as they would spend much of their resources on temporary solutions to a persisting problem.

Solving illegal immigration starts by thinking about the plight that poorer neighbours are going through. Then they need to act to help them help themselves.

There simply is no other way.

Walid Al Saqaf is an information communications technology and media consultant.