The Central Omission in Immigration Discourse: Redistribution as Root Cause

Abstract

This heterodox study identifies redistribution as the central omitted variable in contemporary immigration discourse. It argues that fiscal magnets created by taxation and open-ended transfers in host countries, combined with extractive redistribution in countries of origin, shape the scale, composition, and political intensity of contested migration far more than absolute poverty or humanitarian flight. Migration is treated as a neutral evolutionary and historical phenomenon whose effects depend on institutional rules. Under residual claimancy, entry tends toward selective, meritocratic, and mutually beneficial outcomes; under compulsory redistribution it becomes politicized and fiscally destabilizing. The paper critiques both expansive and merely rhetorical-restrictive party strategies as variants of populism and maintains that the relevant distinction is not between migration and non-migration, but between migration under residual claimancy and migration under redistribution.