There are many concerns and worries over immigration in the West. It is one of the political issues that seems to create the most worries in this part of the world today. In three recent cases, the negative reactions to immigration have been particularly powerful and politically far-reaching. Resistance to immigration from Eastern Europe appears to have been a major component behind the British decision to leave the EU. Resistance to illegal immigration, most of all from Mexico, appears to have been a major component behind the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States. And resistance to refugee immigration has created animosity and inability to reach agreements between countries in the same EU that only a few years earlier was so successful in compromising even on the intricate problems of its debt crisis.

These are examples of three quite different forms of migration. One is refugee migration, one is illegal economically motivated migration, and one is legal economically motivated migration. However, they share one aspect: they all represent recent cases where people have felt that the countries they live in do not have the ability to control their immigration.

How this factor unites these three cases, in spite of their differences, may indicate something important. Possibly it indicates that most people do not see very important problems with the immigration that has happened until now. Instead, it may first of all be the lack of control that has made resistance rise to these proportions.

Lack of control may of course constitute a problem in itself. People’s respect for the politicians in charge is reduced when these fail to implement policies that create the results they were elected to create. However, the really important problem with lack of control over immigration is of course that it creates worries about future immigration.

Therefore, this last chapter is about future migration. It aims not to predict what future migration will actually look like. That will depend to a large extent on policy decisions made in the West, and predicting those does not appear to be the most useful thing to do. Instead, the aim is to characterize the setting for those decisions.