I’m an immigrant, born and educated in Eastern Europe. Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I moved to Liege, then Wales, then Montreal, then Oxford and I finally settled in the UK about 20 years ago. Moving so much around, I have had two rules: first, try your best to be positively motivated. Not to avoid or run from something, but to have some understanding of where I’m going and to really wanna try the new place, and fit too. Second, to push the economic motivation as low as possible in my list of priorities. I’m not saying that I have always succeeded in following these rules (reality check can be painful at times), but at least I know the rules, and I have tried…
Migration, while disregarding these rules, leads to a paradox. Let’s say a person may have a strong motivation to move to a new place, but they do not share (or are not willing to share) the basic values and the culture of the new place. They would bring their anthropological conditioning with them, the same anthropological conditioning which has the critical factor in creating the troublesome society (and/or economy) they are running from. The same social and cultural features responsible for the unfavourable conditions of the old place.
I don’t blame people for wanting to be happy. They are unhappy somewhere, and they have seen pictures of a beautiful place with a lot of seemingly happy people; what’s wrong that they would like a piece of that beauty and happiness for themselves. But in practice, it is like you are buying a random pair of shoes because the shoes seem nice and comfortable; on a rare occasion, the shoes may fit, but more likely, you are going to enter a world of pain, or you will always be losing one or two of your shoes. I suppose I sound xenophobic but there is a limit a society can accommodate and stay healthy newcomers.
There is a saying that the first generation of immigrants is always lost, so people usually comfort themselves by saying that they are doing this for their children. Even in many cases, that may be true, I do think that one can and ought to change one’s anthropological conditioning to the new environment.

If we step back, the incoming (pick your favourite kind here) global crisis will speed up migration to levels never seen before, so buckle up, what I’m talking about here may seem the least of our problems…