Move, page 20
If any people were born to move, it’s the Eritreans. Severe poverty, decades of drought, and a late 1990s war with far larger Ethiopia forced about 1 million Eritreans to flee into neighboring Sudan. Two decades later, the number of Eritrean refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants still stands at more than 750,000, about one-quarter of the total population. Some cross Sudan to Libya followed by rafts to Europe. Others make it to Uganda, from which a haphazard series of flights lands them in Uruguay, where they set off to walk or hitchhike all the way through Brazil, the Andean nations, and Central America until they reach the US and settle in California. As crossing to the Mediterranean and Atlantic becomes more perilous, they can opt to cross Sudan into Egypt, or take rafts across the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia. With an overwhelmingly young population, most Eritreans have grown up seeing those older than them leave the country as soon as possible. Migration is their life—and they have no idea where it will take them next.
Africans are clamoring to get to Europe, but most will have to content themselves with frequent internal migrations instead. Even that has proven more difficult due to the devastating impact of the coronavirus on public health systems. Nonetheless, Africans circulating within Africa already represent one of the largest migrant groups in the world, and the continent’s ill-defined borders are transit zones for people, goods, food, minerals, drugs, and weapons. African governments have all agreed to a continent-wide free trade and mobility area by 2025—a move that both ratifies the obvious and also represents a noble effort to untangle Africa’s arbitrary colonial borders. With a $2 phone coming into their hands and mobile payments spreading to every country, Africa has an opportunity to use mobility in all its forms as a springboard to reinvent itself.
It may seem obvious that the path forward for Africa’s development lies in manufacturing and trade, services and skills, urbanization and digitization. The bustle of Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, gives off this positive vibe. But most African youth don’t enjoy even that minimal level of entrepreneurial bustle. Does Africa need more people stuck in traffic jams, or selling Chinese toys and Nestlé chocolates?
The African Development Bank has a better idea: It wants to turn agricultural areas into major job-creating zones for more efficient food production, powered by renewable energy. Africa has almost half the world’s uncultivated arable farmland, and is the largest exporter of phosphate fertilizers, yet tens of millions face acute food shortages. Smart countries such as Ghana have launched programs to professionally train more farmers and get them better equipment. Rather than grow flowers for Europe, Africa should grow more food for itself.
To do so, Africa will need to conserve its water. Already the drying of Lake Chad has exacerbated tribal tensions across Chad, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Niger, driving nearly 3 million people from their homes. Droughts have also reduced the flows of the Zambezi River, and hence the once majestic Victoria Falls at the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe may gradually be reduced to a mere spout. This means less farming, less tourism, and less electricity from hydropower. Africa also exports water when countries such as Sudan sell farmland to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states buying up the upper Nile, leaving Sudan to borrow money to import wheat from other countries. Eventually, as East African countries dry out, their people may flee south to Kenya, north to Egypt, or east across the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia’s coastal cities with their desalinated water. It’s as if the African mega-drought of a hundred thousand years ago is repeating itself.
Some parts of Africa have the potential for medium-term livability, such as Gabon, which is 80 percent rain forest, as well as coastal Congo and Botswana, each representing natural ecosystems still in balance. These are the places where Africans can build sustainable new enclaves along the lines of those imagined for Wakanda in the futuristic film Black Panther.4 And if they do, African youth will surely move there.
Scenarios for the South
The fact that most people may never leave the country, region, or continent in which they were born is particularly damning for 1.2 billion Africans and 450 million South Americans, who are less likely to be able—or allowed—to leave. This is a tragic irony, for Africa and South America are projected to have the largest number of people displaced by climate change. Recent decades of economic growth in developing countries brought about a slight reduction in the stubborn North-South divide, but climate change and the coronavirus will widen it again with a vengeance. One UN official has stated, “We risk a ‘climate apartheid’ where the wealthy pay to escape overheating, hunger, and conflict while the rest of the world is left to suffer.”5
There are wildly divergent scenarios for the fate of the global “South.” If south-to-north migration remains heavily restricted, then South America and Africa will continue to be victims of climate change (mostly the North’s fault) and political decay (mostly their own fault). They could invest in infrastructure, industry, agriculture, education, clean energy, and healthcare, building greater self-sufficiency in making things for themselves while exporting to the world—or they could suffer an accelerated combination of ecocide and fratricide, fighting over scarce water and food resources while many millions perish each year.
Either way, the North will still want to have its cake and eat it too: extracting minerals, negotiating access to its food supplies, and siphoning more capital out in profits, debt payments, and illicit money laundering than it contributes in investment and aid. As decades pass, Northern countries will either rapidly automate most functions for which they once imported Southern laborers, or they’ll selectively recruit South American and African migrants for functions not already filled by Asians. The likely outcome is some combination of all of these scenarios.
South America: Forever the “lost continent”?
South America has the largest freshwater reserves in the world, but that doesn’t mean much in São Paulo, the continent’s largest city, where the taps have run dry. For the Amazon River and its tributaries to reach the continent’s overwhelmingly coastal populations, they must be allowed to flow freely—something the pernicious cycles of deforestation and drought have prevented. Brazil continues its swings between left-wing socialism and right-wing populism, the latter currently accelerating the devastation of the Amazon. Brazil could well leverage the Amazon to promote biomedical and pharmaceutical innovations, but as it torches its own future, more and more Brazilians are taking their families and money and moving away.
Hardly any Latin American country (save for small-size Costa Rica and Uruguay) appears free of rebel groups and sinister gangs; the region has the world’s worst homicide rates. Latin youth cherish the digital tools that give them a medium for self-expression, but the Internet also shows them a better life if they can escape the plight of poverty, violence, and corruption.
None of South America’s other largest countries give reason for optimism about the continent. In the nineteenth century, Argentina was so certain of its economic ascendancy that it became popular to display upside-down world maps in which the southern hemisphere was on top. But many decades of ideological seesaws made it an economic basket case, saddled with debt and unable to make essential investments without raising taxes on its already strapped population. No wonder desperate citizens have turned to Bitcoin to evade capital controls and get their money out of the country. Even worse, the capital, Buenos Aires, home to one-third of the population, has to worry about rising seas. Meanwhile, much of the rest of Argentina is receiving torrential rain—one year’s worth in two weeks—causing flooding so extreme that cattle must learn to swim. Glacier melt will bulge rivers even further, until they disappear entirely—after which severe droughts may follow. Argentina produces enough food for 100 million people, but it will have to master agricultural engineering for its lush Patagonia region to remain a grocery store for the world—as well as to absorb climate migrants from the rest of the continent.
In the 2000s, Venezuela under Hugo Chavez fancied itself the successor power to both Argentina and Brazil. Instead, today it embodies one of the world’s most acute refugee crises as malnourished Venezuelans flee to Colombia and other Andean nations. The mighty Orinoco River has suffered from a 50 percent decline in annual rainfall in the past decade, resulting in both water shortages and power cuts from its hydroelectric dams. The country also once had five glaciers in its western mountains, all of which have melted. It’s conceivable that Venezuelans could one day return under new leadership to harness their country’s enormous energy reserves, but nobody has any idea when that will be.
Even more promising Andean nations, such as Colombia, are headed for water shortages due to drought and excessive mining that have depleted their water basins. Peru’s glaciers are all melting fast—resulting in floods at first, then nothing, especially for the country’s 10 million rural poor. The populations of Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia may have to move inland toward their tri-border region to benefit from what remains of the rain forests—but only if they can control the fires there first.
The Andean nation of Chile exhibits a misalignment of resources and demographics that will have to be corrected for its people to adapt to climate change. Perpetual droughts in the country’s arid north have forced farmers to migrate their livestock south toward more fertile terrain. The capital, Santiago, has gained more than a million people in just the past decade, and now has half of Chile’s entire population of 18 million. Yet the city is running out of water, with ever more frequent droughts because of its high elevation. The government will have to channel Andean glacier melt and ramp up desalination on the Pacific coast, but still much of the country’s population may have to migrate southward, where the majestic fjords in Antarctica-facing Magellan Province (named for the sixteenth-century Portuguese explorer who first circumnavigated the world) make it the southern hemisphere’s answer to Norway. Snow-less seasons have already forced skiers to the southern Andes, and while summers in southern Chile are getting warmer, mountains and sea mitigate the heat (making it far more tolerable than scorching Australia across the South Pacific). It was German immigrants who primarily settled southern Chile, starting in the nineteenth century, and Chileans will need their inherited engineering prowess to expand the currently two-lane north-south Ruta 5, Chile’s 3,400-kilometer section of the Pan-American Highway.
Can you live in Antarctica?
Antarctica has just witnessed its hottest year on record (crossing 18 degrees Celsius in February 2020), accelerating ice melt, increasing precipitation, and growing patches of vegetation. Antarctica has no permanent inhabitants yet, though during the summer months its various research stations host about five thousand scientists and staff, and New Zealand has begun expansion of Scott Base to make it a year-round livable facility. The lack of direct sunlight for half the year, however, makes self-sustaining agriculture difficult, though hydroponic production with indoor light is feasible. Antarctica may nonetheless help southern hemispheric countries cope with freshwater shortages: South Africa has made attempts to tow icebergs from there to its shores. The ice continent is most attractive to China for its mining potential, though the 1959 Antarctic Treaty bans mining activity. China may push to revise that rule when it’s due for reconsideration in 2048—if not sooner.
Australia: Too hot down under
For decades, two large nations on opposite sides of the planet have had remarkably similar trajectories. Both resource-rich continental expanses, Canada and Australia’s commodities booms have delivered decades of uninterrupted economic growth for their small populations. But now their paths are diverging: Canada will be as close to a winner as there can be from climate change, while Australia will be a loser.
In the mid-twentieth century, Australian scholars raised concerns that global overpopulation and food shortages would prompt international agencies to seek to take possession of its agricultural bounty. This is no longer a scenario Australians need to fear. On the contrary, unlike Canada, whose vast interior is rich in forests and arable land, most of Australia consists of desert that is rapidly encroaching on coastal life. So too are wildfires and rising sea levels. Could Australia’s climate misfortune scare away its long-standing immigrant surge—and even the descendants of its original settlers?
Climate change is ravaging the lucky country. Australia’s outback rivers and reservoirs have dried up; no new crops are being planted, animals are dying, and people are leaving. The 2019 bushfires that ravaged Victoria Province scorched an area larger than Switzerland, killing hundreds of thousands of animals and dozens of people, reducing thousands of homes to ash, and requiring the country’s largest ever peacetime evacuation. The fires were so large that they generated “pyro cumulonimbus” clouds that caused their own storms and lightning that caused new fires. In the words of one academic, the Anthropocene is more like the “Pyrocene.”6 Across New South Wales, Australia’s most populous province, bushfires cut off major roads in and out of Sydney—after which it suffered cyclone-induced flooding in early 2020. Most of the year, however, its reservoirs are at low capacity and residents face significant water restrictions, even as industrial activity sucks up the water supply while generating a terrible carbon footprint.
Australia is a rich country. It has few people but generates enormous revenues from mineral and gas exports. Both its money and its energy could be used for water desalination to rehabilitate its agriculture. But Australia also has climate-skeptic politicians, as well as powerful industrial lobbies, that interfere in forward-looking regulation. As a result, strategic hydro-engineering projects like a north-south water canal linking Queensland and New South Wales (NSW) have been left unattended even though they’ll take many years to deploy. Who knows if either the migrants or the Australians will stick around that long.
Australia has long been a favorite destination for middle-aged Brits, Mediterranean and Arab migrants, and ambitious Asians, absorbing Chinese, Japanese, and South Koreans ditching social hierarchies, rigid educational systems, or suffocating politics (or all three). Australia already has the highest foreign-born share of its population among OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries, and takes in about two hundred thousand new migrants each year. The country is becoming more Asian than white: Currently just over half the population has two native-born parents, but China, India, Malaysia, and the Philippines are the fastest-rising origin countries for the parents of new Australians. Key city centers give a far better glimpse into the future demographics than homogenous rural areas: Immigrant youth flock straight to downtown Sydney, while older white families have moved out to the suburbs. As former foreign minister Gareth Evans wisely puts it, “Australia’s future will depend much more on its geography than its history.”
Australia’s tech sector wouldn’t exist without immigrants drawn to its comfortable cities such as Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane, and Melbourne, cities whose investments in walkability, education, and public services have made them attractive and productive hubs for both Australian and foreign talent. Given Australia’s dependence on foreign brain power, the fringe One Nation Party does the country no favors with its xenophobia. Nor did the coronavirus, which did not kill many Australians but certainly dented the appetite of foreign students and property investors—two constituencies on which the economy depends. If and when Australia’s lucky economic streak ends, geopolitics gets tense, or climate change drives migrants away—or all three—many might take their Australian passports and resettle elsewhere.
Don’t be surprised if even proud Aussies do the same. Australia has a long tradition of restless youth wandering abroad, with many never returning. Now the government is actively subsidizing Australian students to study abroad and learn Asian languages so that they can be more useful overseas employees of Australian mining companies, universities, and hospitals—all of which are waking up to the need to expand abroad. The students are happy to oblige, since it takes them on average nearly three years after graduation to find a full-time job. No wonder so many Aussie youth go walkabout in the first place.
CHAPTER 9 THE ASIANS ARE COMING
The future is brown(ish)
On the eve of the late-eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution, Asia—especially China and India—accounted for nearly 60 percent of the world economy. Two hundred and fifty years later, it does again. Western mastery of technology, rapid industrialization, population growth, and imperial ambition propelled Europe and then America to global dominance for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But as Asia’s resurrection illustrates, in the long run societies with larger populations tend to become wealthier, as they aggregate and spread innovations that make their citizens more prosperous. Collecting people equals collecting power. Asia’s population is now five times larger than the US and the European Union combined—and Asian powers command the latest technologies as well. Western societies, then, will continue losing their economic advantage to Asia unless they replenish their populations—most likely with Asians.
The colonial legacy has already woven Indians into the fabric of countries around the world. The Indian diaspora is the world’s second largest (behind China) but the most geographically diverse, with a large presence on every continent (except South America). India already has the largest number of migrants living abroad who remain citizens of their home country (more than 17 million), far ahead of Mexicans (under 12 million) and Chinese (under 11 million). Indians are so settled in the UAE that the embassy there collects an expatriate tax that it pools to support nationals who run into trouble or need repatriation. The former president of Guyana, the former prime minister of Ireland, and the current prime minister of Portugal are of Indian descent.
