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That, of course, would be absolutely unrealistic — and so are expectations that tougher enforcement or a war on people smugglers will significantly reduce irregular migration. A recent University of Chicago study calculated that Italy’s major, European Union-backed 2017 anti-smuggler operation that involved funding the Libyan coast guard reduced migrant arrivals by 343 per week in the second half of 2017 — a time when between 5,000 and 12,000 of them arrived every month. 

This is a difficult situation because you are talking about, what we describe in the book as, a despotic leviathan where the state dominates society and society does not control the state because elites are controlling state power. It is a matter of people organizing collectively to demand their rights and greater accountability like the people of Hong Kong are trying to do now. You can see this pattern in the history of most countries that live in the shackled leviathan, countries that have both strong states and society, and the history of democracy in Western Europe where people organized and collectively demanded public goods. However, getting to a shackled leviathan is not an easy process. 

American political science in the 1990s and 2000s was rife with celebration: The end of the Cold War seemed to herald an "end of history" when free markets and liberal democracy were in ascendance. That triumphalism is now overrun by widespread concern and anxiety: After recurring financial crises, rampant economic inequality, and the rise of ethnonationalist violence and authoritarianism around the globe, the ideal of democracy seems more precarious than ever.