Move, page 2
Today’s Human Geography
The current human population is just under 8 billion. Nearly 5 billion people reside in Asia, 1 billion in Africa, 750 million in Europe, 600 million in North America, and 425 million in South America.
Migration makes nations
Most of humanity has never crossed a border. Even today, most people live their entire lives within the country where they were born—but that doesn’t mean they’re not migrants. Counting the number of people crossing borders is a terribly incomplete and skewed way to understand migration. According to the International Organization of Migration (IOM), about three times the number of people migrate internally as internationally.2 That includes those who have no choice but to uproot themselves: the estimated 40 million internally displaced peoples (IDPs), mostly due to political violence but also climate change, who have by definition been forced to migrate domestically. The story of people on the move is equally about these migrants as it is about the international jet set.
Arguably the greatest migration in human history has been unfolding for decades just due to urbanization within countries. In 1960, only 1 billion people lived in cities; today that figure stands at more than 5 billion. For the vast majority of the world population, moving from countryside to city has brought unimaginable changes in life experience, from education to work to health.I The influx of manpower into coastal Chinese cities doesn’t just track to China’s rise into an economic superpower—it was the engine. China has more internal migrants than the world has migrants. The same process is well underway in India as youth stream into Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and other up-and-coming commercial hubs. None of this appears in statistics as international migration, yet it has been one of the primary drivers of growth through wage gains and remittances to rural families. One doesn’t have to cross a border to feel the power of migration.
Yet urbanization also feeds greater international migration. As the German geographer Ernst Georg Ravenstein explained more than a century ago, many people come to major cities as a stepping-stone to further opportunities abroad. With the relentless growth of the world’s four-dozen megacities (those with more than 10 million inhabitants) and teeming second-tier cities, approximately 1 billion more people are predicted to move into cities in the coming decade. It’s a safe bet that many will arrive there to get a passport.
To move is human
The story of mankind begins with a single step. The first upright beings set foot out of Africa nearly 2 million years ago, crossing a land bridge to Eurasia in the geography of today’s Red Sea and Sinai Peninsula. Over the thousands of millennia that followed, our protohuman ancestors interbred and gradually emerged as a unique species—Homo sapiens—about 300,000 years ago. Paleontologists believe that between 135,000 and 90,000 years ago, a severe African drought spurred Homo sapiens to fan out of Africa into the terrain of the Neanderthals in Europe. But unlike our Neanderthal competitors, Homo sapiens used their lighter, more upright bodies to cover longer distances when hunting and gathering with their bone (then stone) tools. Early man outran and outlasted his rivals.
We are told that speech is a key differentiator between humans and other primates, but why did we learn to speak at all? Linguists believe that human languages developed about a hundred thousand years ago, not incidentally because of the increasing interactions among these migrating Homo sapiens, who needed to communicate while covering several hundred kilometers of hunting range. Climatic events such as the Last Glacial Period of twenty-five thousand years ago pushed humans all the way across Siberia and over the land bridge to North America. But as northern latitudes once again became habitable just over eleven thousand years ago, intensifying Eurasian migrations gave rise to the entire Indo-European family of languages that boasts 3 billion speakers today.
Great migrations permeate all of recorded history and our oldest mythologies. According to the Hebrew Bible, the Jews suffered a long period of slavery under Egyptian pharaohs, until a great exodus miraculously returned them across the Sinai to their ancestral land of Canaan. We use the German term Völkerwanderung to describe the early centuries AD during which Germanic, Slavic, and Hun tribes invaded the declining Roman empire. Facing persecution in Mecca, the followers of the Prophet Muhammad sought refuge in the African kingdom of Abyssinia, but also became missionary conquerors, establishing the early caliphates and converting followers as far as Southeast Asia. The reason that allegedly up to 10 percent of Asian males between the Caspian Sea and the Pacific Ocean claim lineage to Genghis Khan is because the Mongols were nomadic and polygamous conquerors who intermarried with local tribes.
The fourteenth-century Black Death killed an estimated 100 million people and led to the splintering of the vast Mongol empire. In Europe, farmers and laborers moved to places where land quality was better and to towns where wages rose due to worker shortages. Up to 90 percent of the population in some Arab territories vacated their infected villages and fled to cities. During the centuries-long Little Ice Age that followed, expanding glaciers and crop failure pushed Eurasian populations to search for more reliable farmland, and also inspired the Dutch and Portuguese to undertake oceanic navigation, spurring their colonial expansion.
Migrations of the colonial era were both voluntary and involuntary. English immigration to establish colonies in America began in the late sixteenth century. Throughout the seventeenth century, these early settlers were joined by pilgrims in search of profit and Puritans and Quakers seeking religious freedom. Over the four hundred years of the transatlantic slave trade, an estimated 13 million Africans were shipped to North America, the Caribbean, and South America. In Asia, the British and Portuguese empires moved millions of Malay and Indian merchants across the Indian Ocean, and East Asians spread across the Pacific to both North and South America. More than a millennium of Chinese emigration into the Malay peninsula, across the Tang, Ming, and Qing dynasties, dramatically contributed to making Southeast Asia the ethnic melting pot that it is today.
The nineteenth century is widely referred to as the “age of nationalism” due to ethnonationalist movements resisting Europe’s dynastic empires. Yet it was also the age of mass migrations, as the Industrial Revolution created huge demand for both agricultural and manufacturing labor. Millions of farmers were lured to factory jobs in cities, while steamships and railways transported millions of workers, slaves, and criminals across the British empire—especially across the Atlantic to North America. Sixty million Europeans moved en masse to America, including 1.5 million (40 percent of the population) fleeing Ireland’s potato famine, followed by several million Italians escaping rural poverty.
Nationalism had a phenomenal run of success in the twentieth century as well, with decolonization movements bringing an end to Europe’s global empires and giving birth to dozens of new countries. And even though the end of World War II settled much of the world map—it did not settle the world’s people. Millions of refugees shifted from Eastern to Western Europe, and from Europe to America. Both before and after the Holocaust, hundreds of thousands of Jews fled Europe to America and Palestine, with even more arriving after the creation of Israel in 1948. The partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 displaced an estimated 20 million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs—still the largest mass migration in human history.
Postcolonial ties brought millions of Indians and Pakistanis to England, as well as Vietnamese, Algerians, and Moroccans to France. During these postwar decades, severe labor shortages in Europe combined with high unemployment in Turkey lured waves of Gastarbeiter (guest workers) to Germany (and its smaller neighbors). In America, the 1965 Immigration Act repealed quotas on the national origin of immigrants, leading to a surge of Latinos from the Caribbean and Central America and waves of Asians from China, India, Vietnam, and elsewhere.
Recent decades have added yet more impetus for large-scale resettlement. Civil wars and state failures, such as Afghanistan in the 1980s and more recently Iraq and Syria, have forced millions to become refugees. The Soviet Union’s collapse three decades ago continues to drive millions of people across its former republics spanning Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The Gulf oil boom brought millions of Palestinians and South Asian migrant laborers to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Migrants physically built some of today’s most modern states. To move and to build—this is the essence of being human.
Migrants make the world go round
Many believe that protectionism, populism, and the pandemic mean we have reached peak migration, but let’s look at the economics. Over the past half century, governments have borrowed to the tune of $250 trillion (more than triple global GDP) to finance everything from roads to retirement plans. While this has paid for modern civilization as we know it, aging countries are now staring down the barrel of economic stagnation unless they attract migrants and investors, and the tax-paying activities they bring. Without younger generations to make use of homes, schools, hospitals, offices, restaurants, hotels, malls, museums, hotels, stadiums, and other facilities, many countries risk permanent deflation—both demographic and economic.
Migrants are a small share of the world population, but their weight has only grown over time. By the late nineteenth century, international migrants represented a sizable 14 percent of humanity, about 225 million out of a total population of 1.6 billion people. Then World War I and the Spanish flu flattened those waves. A century later, we stand at approximately 275 million migrants, a lower share (3 percent) of a much larger population (8 billion). It might therefore seem that we have not come very far, yet today’s figure in fact represents a far more meaningful accomplishment. Why? Because unlike nineteenth-century migration—comprised of the desperate exodus of Europeans and Chinese, as well as British colonial subjects forcibly circulated across the empire—today we have mostly voluntary movement of peoples among nearly two hundred sovereign nations. Furthermore, whatever their number, migrants today represent 10 percent of global GDP (slightly less than that of China or America), including almost $550 billion in annual remittances transferred across borders in 2019. (This figure also dwarfs total foreign aid, which has remained stagnant at around $100 billion per year since 1980.)
The Rise of Remittances
Remittances have been rising in lockstep with international migration, while aid has stagnated. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has been volatile due to financial crises and protectionist policies.
Unfortunately, humans have a much more difficult time moving across borders than money does. Countries have been open to the (relatively) free movement of goods and capital—but people, not as much. Migration is one of the primary, and most sensitive, arenas of sovereignty: controlling who comes in and out of one’s territory. The US has imposed significant restrictions on asylum seekers and chain migration (especially Latino families), and Australia has set up migrant processing centers in the jungles of Papua New Guinea that have become semipermanent holding camps. Italy and other European countries have paid off Libyan militias to keep migrants from crossing the Mediterranean. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights doesn’t guarantee anyone the right to reside in another country—only the receiving country decides that.
We do not have a binding global migration framework—and probably never will. But there are deeply rooted regional patterns in the flows of people, shaped by family histories, business needs, and cultural preferences. Half of all foreigners in America are Mexican or Latino; members of the European Union enjoy almost fully free migration and other privileges in one another’s country; Southeast Asia has largely open borders, and most cross-border migrants are from within the region or from China and India. We use terms like “insider” and “outsider” to denote national distinctions, but in reality, our world is already a collection of regional mélanges.
People on the Move: More Regional Than Global
Most migration takes place within regions or between adjacent regions. The largest migrant stock remains among the former Soviet republics of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, followed by the South Asian population in the Gulf countries
The largest flows of people in the world are within these organic regions. The former Soviet Union region spanning Eastern Europe and Central Asia represents the biggest migrant pool at 25 million people, followed by the circulation of primarily Latinos around North and Central America (20 million), sub-Saharan Africans within Africa (15 million), South Asians to the Gulf countries (15 million), EU citizens within the EU (12 million), Arabs and North Africans within the Middle East (10 million), Eastern Europeans into Western Europe (10 million), Southeast Asians within their ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) group (just under 10 million), and lastly the fewer than 10 million Arabs and North Africans that have moved to Europe.3 This also suggests that the two-tiered division of humanity into “North” (North America and Eurasia) and “South” (Africa and South America) persists. Five point five billion people live on continents with reasonable prospects, while 2.5 billion don’t have a plan or opportunity to escape. Most migrants don’t make it very far—yet.
Voting with the feet
The coming age of mass migrations won’t just be a continuation but an acceleration. The swirl of humanity will only get more intense as each of the forces shaping our human geography gathers steam:
Demographics: Lopsided imbalances between an aging North and a youthful South able to provide the labor force the North needs
Politics: Refugees and asylum seekers from civil wars and failing states, as well as those fleeing ethnic persecution, tyranny, or populism
Economics: Migrants in search of opportunity, workers laid off due to outsourcing, or employees forced into early retirement by financial crises
Technology: Industrial automation displacing factory and logistics jobs, while algorithms and AI make skilled jobs redundant
Climate: Long-term phenomena such as rising temperatures and sea levels and falling water tables, but also seasonal disasters like floods and typhoons.
In day to day life around the world, all these parallel trends amplify each other—so much so that we can even state their relationship as an equation:
demographic imbalances
+ political upheaval
+ economic dislocation
+ technological disruption
+ climate change
×
connectivity
=
accelerated mobility
These variables also interact in complex and unforeseen ways. Pandemics wipe out millions of people within the span of a few years, while climate change does so cumulatively via droughts and other natural disasters. Both heighten economic and social uncertainty, which drives down fertility. So, too, do financial crises and labor automation, which also force people to move in search of jobs and an affordable life. The bottom line is that everything drives migration, alone and together.
The Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath will reinforce these pre-existing trends. To be clear: The coronavirus lockdown was a stunning break from recent decades of intensifying resettlement—but it was artificial and temporary. It did, however, prompt people everywhere to rethink where they live and begin looking for better options. People are ditching “red zones” with inadequate healthcare for “green zones” with better medical systems and “blue zones” offering greater climate resilience. We are all in search of the right combination of latitude and attitude.
The future of human mobility points in just one direction: more. The coming decades could witness billions of people on the move, shifting from south to north, from coast to inland, from low-lying to higher-elevation, from overpriced to affordable, from failing to stable societies.
No doubt there are billions of people who will die in the countries in which they were born. Indeed, let’s assume that more than half of the most populous countries are too sedentary, old, infirm, unwilling, or unwelcome elsewhere to leave home. That means that at least 1 billion Indians, 1 billion Chinese, 700 million Africans, 200 million Brazilians, the same number of Indonesians, 100 million Pakistanis, and another 1 billion others remain geographically immobile. That still leaves 4 billion people who may be both eager and capable of migrating.
Almost all of those 4 billion are young. Just over half the world’s population was born in the three decades since the Cold War ended. This includes most millennials (Gen-Y) and all of Gen-Z. As of 2020, they represent more than 60 percent of the world population. We often talk about a world that’s aging, but right now, the world is more young than old—and the primary reason humanity is getting statistically older is because today’s youth are barely having any children. Thus, when we talk about “the people,” it’s wrong to envision yuppie, middle-class, two-income, two-child households living in suburbia. That isn’t true in America, Europe, China, or anywhere. The largest category of people in the world is best described as young, single, childless, and struggling in cities. If you are not one of them, you are in the minority.
Furthermore, if you are not Asian, you are definitely in the minority. Asia represents not only 60 percent of the global population (versus only 25 percent combined for North America and Europe), but also almost all of the countries with the largest number of young people in the world. China and India each have more millennials than America or Europe have people. In recent years, about two-thirds of Asian migrants have remained within the region, but as the West’s demographic imbalances become more acute, Asians will be in ever higher demand worldwide. There are presently more Chinese outside of China than Indians outside of India, but soon that will reverse: Whereas China’s population will soon begin to decline, India’s is much younger and continues to grow—and with all of South Asia (including Pakistan and Bangladesh) much poorer than China, its youth are much more motivated to move. Geopolitically, the world seems like it’s turning yellow, but demographically it’s unquestionably turning brown.
