What this 'immigrants' World Cup tells us about migration

The French football team, traditionally known as Les Bleus (the blues), were nicknamed "Black, Blanc, Beur" (Black, White and Arab) in the media after France won the 1998 World Cup. 

Why? 

Led by second-generation Algerian immigrant Zinedine Zidane, the French team consisted of players of diverse descent, such as Senegalese, Armenian or Guadeloupean. The nickname was coined to celebrate the successful integration of players from different ethnicities and skin tones under the French umbrella.

Twenty years later, when France repeated its World Cup victory feat in Russia, the team was full of diversity, yet again, with 17 of 23 players eligible to play for a different nation. Also, in Qatar, as they qualify for the quarter-final by crushing Poland, five of the nine players who have played over 100 games for the team are of non-French descent. 

Qatar World Cup has also seen a whopping 59 French-born players. Except for those playing for the French squad, more than half of them represent African teams. 

The ideal beneficiary of this reverse migration is Morocco. For the first time in 36 years, Morocco qualified for the knockouts in this world cup. 

How they outplayed European powerhouses like Belgium and Spain says everything about how the reverse migration benefited the African team. Born and raised in European footballing nations such as the Netherlands, France or Spain, these players cut their teeth in the most competitive football culture because of their ancestors, who migrated there earlier. 

This World Cup has been the world cup of migrants, because it started off with 136 players representing countries beyond the borders of their respective birthplaces. 

At a time when the western world, and in some parts of the eastern world too, such as India, we are witnessing the rise of far-right politicians – shaping their politics mostly against immigrants and migration – this World Cup has been an exquisite advocate for migration, immigrants and a testament to how they contribute to making the world becoming more diverse and better. 

Moreover, in a forgetful world where the migrants' integral contribution to the development of economies is often eclipsed by the stereotypical notion that immigrants take more than they give or contribute, this Fifa World Cup has become the latest antidote to this long and tired narrative. Proving, yet again, that migration spanning a millennia should be appreciated not feared. 

A history spanning 200,000 years 

Economists Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron, and Meera Balarajan, in the book 'Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future' detailed the voluminous human migration that make up our collective history. 

According to this book, migration and its contribution to human advancement began some 150,000 to 200,000 years ago. "Our biological evolution culminated in the homo sapiens species, whose capacity for language and propensity for trading accelerated a new stage of social evolution that allowed humans to displace other hominids and eventually to develop advanced civilisations" since time immemorial, the book says. 

Only when "exploration" (a common interchangeable word heavily used by the West to mean colonisation) began during the European colonial period, people started to look at migration through a more conservative lens. And, it was in the 19th century when much more conservative take on migration or immigration started to aggressively belch out in the form of policies and laws taken up by some governments.  

In a world that became riddled with war and nationalism, increasingly effective state bureaucracies only increased, meaning the "conservative take" became more intense and restrictions became more rigid in the 20th century. 

This gradually paved the way for managed migration, which means state control over how many people would enter a country and from which countries these people would come from, and what rights they would have. And simultaneously, anti-migration and anti-immigrant-centric politics flourished in the following years. In fact, it took an aggressive and violent form. 

However, technology brought in a twist. Because of it, cross-border movement is not the only way people of one country gain access to another country's resources and ideas in this inter-connected digital world.

The Elon Musks are 'an immigrant story'

If we look at the UN Population Division data from 1960 to 2020, migrants make up roughly 3% of the global population. According to the IOM World Migration Report 2020, as of June 2019, the number of international migrants was estimated to be almost 272 million globally. This was 51 million more than in 2010. 

This huge number of migrants are not the only ones who work abroad to send foreign currencies home or what far-right politicians decry as the people who are bad for their country's economy. 

Instead, if you look at Silicon Valley, skilled immigrants account for over half of the start-ups and patents. With less than 15% of the population, this is the people who built Google, Paypal, eBay, Yahoo, Tesla and the list could go on. 

Another fact that establishes migration's necessity is the world's ageing population. In 1950, there were 14 million people over 80, and today that number is over 100 million, and by 2050 it is projected to hit 400 million, which means that the workforce needs to be augmented by foreign workers. 

Contrary to popular belief or far-right political propaganda, "immigrants expand the economy's productive capacity by stimulating investment and promoting specialisation, which produces efficiency gains and boosts income per worker," observed a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. 

And where else to look for proof than on the pitches of the ongoing FIFA World Cup in Qatar. Not just how migration adds to technical and economic prowess of a country, but also to human values as communities become more diverse, as people learn more of the world outside their borders, as they step out of the conditions and limitations of homogeneity. 

And with every match, when the football rolls onto the field at the greatest show on earth in packed stadiums, the whole world witnesses how diverse national football teams, consisting of players of diverse origins or heritage, can successfully bring pride to the flag they represent. 

This may not be a watershed moment for those who are sceptic of the benefits of migration or the far-right, anti-immigration beliefs religious held by those in positions of power and influence – just like how the 2018 World Cup win or even the 1998 World Cup victory failed to thwart the far rights' political advancement in France. 

But still, above all else, this "migrants" World Cup and its successes thus far, show how far we have travelled and has given us another antidote to anti-immigration rhetoric.