Move, page 29
When acting in their own interest, countries have not been shy at environmental engineering. The US has been using cloud seeding to combat drought since the 1970s, and more recently to precipitate snowfall to improve ski conditions. India and Arab countries from Morocco to the UAE have been seeding clouds since the 1980s to compensate for weak rainfall; the UAE now seeds clouds almost daily and captures rainwater in giant dams and reservoirs. In Indonesia and Malaysia cloud seeding has been essential to quell the polluting haze from brushfires. A global cloud seeding initiative could bring at least temporary relief for water-stressed farming regions.
Reforestation initiatives could also benefit entire regions and the atmosphere. Trees are active cooling agents that absorb CO2 and capture water evaporation, especially in tropical countries, where they grow much faster. (Hence cutting down the Amazon is worse than logging in Canada, and replanting the Amazon is more important than planting more trees in Canada.) According to ETH Zurich, extensive tree planting, totaling 1 billion hectares (about the size of the continental US), across Russia, Canada, America, Australia, Brazil, and China would capture two-thirds of our carbon emissions. But despite a recent global campaign calling for the planting of 1 trillion trees, we are currently losing more than 10 million hectares of forest per year, and newly planted trees still take decades to reach their full carbon absorption capacity.
Progressive powers may take the lead in launching geo-engineering schemes such as carbon sequestration (fertilizing the ocean with nutrients to enhance CO2 absorption), high atmosphere deployment of sulphur dioxide particles to deflect sunlight, or coating fresh ice with white sand that reflects more light, so the ice can strengthen rather than melt. One hopes the world’s philanthropic billionaires (such as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos), NASA, and other bodies are already working in secret to launch such schemes. Scholars have argued that reflecting solar radiation across a range of latitudes could buy the whole world time and reduce climate injustice. But solutions benefiting just one region could have adverse effects. If people find out what these geo-engineering plans are and which places will benefit, they’ll go there. Unless we find a solution for everyone, both mass migration and mass suffering will continue.
Mass migrations and morality
Twenty years ago we still feared rampant overpopulation. Yet today’s most urgent task is almost the opposite: We need to nurture those alive and yet to be born to ensure the maximal survival of humanity through this century. This means people will have to move—but will we let them?
What justification is there for a system in which large and resource-rich but depopulating countries close their borders, while those countries least responsible for climate change are sinking or running out of water? To lock the world population into its present position amounts to ecocide—yet it won’t make those who survive better off. Our economies will still face acute labor shortages, and the wealth created from global exchange will halt. Instead, we should sustainably cultivate the planet’s habitable oases and move people there.
Moral philosophers have nonetheless put the nation ahead of mankind in their inquiries. Seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke, for example, made a pragmatic case for naturalizing immigrants to enlarge the labor pool and expand production and trade. He was clear, however, that migration should not deprive locals of their property rights. The eighteenth-century Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant went a step further in advocating a right to hospitality for all people, but this was understood more as a temporary sojourn rather than permanent residence, and as with Locke, it was conditioned on the visitor not causing harm to his hosts.II
Kant’s ideas continued to animate twentieth-century debates about migrant rights. Living through the postwar decades of significant migrations between Britain and its former colonies, the late Oxford philosopher Michael Dummett echoed Kant in his view that a moral state should provide fundamental rights to both citizens and noncitizens alike. The right to migrate is itself such a right, as is the right of stateless people to become citizens of some state. Jacques Derrida similarly argued for strict national sovereignty to soften in favor of a more ethical hospitality toward foreigners. But even for famed philosophers such as John Rawls, migration played little role in his thought experiments about self-contained states. He supported people’s right to move, but not any imposition on national sovereignty. Instead, a just global system would eliminate the root causes of poverty, corruption, or other motivations for migration.
But the time for mere thought experiments has passed—our global system is far from fair. Humanity shares one climate that the North’s industry has cataclysmically devastated, with the South bearing the brunt of the consequences. We have desertified lands across the South and agriculturally abundant terrain in the North. We have abandoned towns full of modern homes in the North and millions of displaced refugees in the South. We have huge labor shortages in the North and labor surpluses in the South. Bryan Caplan’s wonderfully illustrated narrative Open Borders argues that most migrants are neither school age nor retirement age but rather working age Gen-Xers and millennials whose long-term fiscal benefit amounts to about $259,000 per migrant in just the US alone. Economist Michael Clemens of the Center for Global Development estimates that opening the world’s borders to even temporary migrant workers could literally double world GDP.
Despite all ethical and economic arguments in favor of mass migrations, we have no global migration policy. Instead, we face a growing number of moral tests: Africans crossing the Mediterranean and Latinos crossing the Rio Grande, and other crises. Migration has become a political Rorschach test in almost every Western democracy, yet still not enough migrants are let in while too many die on the way. Nor is enough done to repair their homelands in light of the external pain inflicted on them (such as military interventions and ecological ruin) and their own internal failings (such as corruption and reckless population growth). Both Kant and Rawls would be very disappointed in us.
Few other living philosophers have thought harder about what our obligations are in light of our failures than Peter Singer, who argues that the logical conclusion of holding all people as equal (cosmopolitanism) as well as striving for maximum collective happiness (utilitarianism) is that the fortunate give as much as possible to those less fortunate, irrespective of their geography or nationality. The maximalist version of this thesis is open borders and mass wealth redistribution, while the minimalist case is far greater aid to poor countries.
We have ample evidence, however, that aid barely keeps people alive, while moving people gives them a chance to live. For most of the world population that lives in poor countries, 3D-printed homes won’t magically materialize after a cyclone, nor will hydroponic food after a drought, nor will large sums of money appear in their mobile wallets during civil wars. The truest way to care is to let victims become neighbors. Western countries promote human rights abroad knowing that their pressure will yield few results, whereas the surest path to improving the human condition is migration. Migration is as much a human right as freedom of speech or due process—and indeed, for many, crossing a border is the only way to attain these rights. Mobility thus ought to be one of the paramount human rights of the twenty-first century.
If there is a term for my position, it’s “cosmopolitan utilitarianism”: We should realign our geographies to bring maximum welfare to current and future generations. It’s also a cosmopolitan realism: States make their own decisions, but more migration is very much in the national interest. Indeed, smart governments don’t talk about immigration as an all-or-nothing proposition. Instead, they forecast labor demand by sector and recruit foreigners to fill those gaps so that domestic unemployment remains low even as the population grows. Remember there is no zero-sum competition between local and foreign workers: A greater influx of labor itself stimulates the economy and creates greater demand for labor. At the same time, compromises can be made to maintain support for openness such as stronger curbs on illegal immigration and local preferences in hiring. Another way to sustain a pro-migration orientation: distribute the revenues from foreign investment to native citizens as a dividend. Such measures are a small price to pay to achieve a more productive and humane distribution of people around the world.
To achieve a more fair and sensible human geography will require arguments based on both rights and obligations—especially since politically, neither is sufficient. In 2018, governments agreed to a “Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration” that recognized the rights of migrants to work and contribute rather than be a financial burden. But the US has rejected both the Migration Compact and a parallel Global Compact for Refugees. During the 2016 wave of Arab migrants into Europe, German chancellor Angela Merkel initially advocated for the rights of asylum seekers, but later shifted toward stricter controls to avoid losing political ground to far right anti-immigrant parties. Perhaps then the dilemma is less about morality than the contrast between ethically sound and demographically necessary immigration and the self-defeating shortsightedness of democratic politics.
Almost no Western democracies are prepared for the new age of mass migrations. As the Indian-American novelist Suketu Mehta points out, “Never before has there been so much human movement. And never before has there been so much organized resistance to human movement.”2 Mehta argues for reparations as a form of North-South atonement, but also points out that the North needs migrants more than ever anyway. The brain drain may as well continue. But reparations arguments have long fallen flat among historically ignorant and fiscally constrained Western publics. Furthermore, the countries that may be absorbing the most migrants in the future, such as Canada and Russia, never colonized Africa and South Asia. Reliving past disputes won’t bring us to our collective senses about the future.
We also can’t pretend that population control will revert us to a less burdensome demography anytime soon. American Geographical Society chairman Chris Tucker argues that the ideal world population is 3 billion, roughly what it was in the mid twentieth century, a time when we benefited from industrialization but before the acceleration of global warming. But today we stand at nearly triple that number of people, making the question of how many people there should be somewhat moot. Whatever the human population settles at in the future, we still should move those we do have now.
The fact is that there has never been a status quo where mankind stood still, comfortably confined to predetermined national boundaries—and there never will be. Today we debate whether or not migrants should be allowed; tomorrow we will focus on our absorptive capacity for new migrants. Each country and regional group should proactively be formulating answers to questions such as: Where should migrants go? What work can they do? How can they be assimilated? How can we design expanded habitats in the most sustainable fashion? As anthropologist David Graeber wisely noted, “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”3
Many large and wealthy countries across North America, Europe, and Asia already require mass immigration to maintain their standard of living, yet none are absorbing nearly as many migrants as they need. Demographic decline in rich countries sparks socioeconomic tension, while booming populations in poor countries retard equitable development. More migration could balance these out, preventing the world from collectively becoming poorer and more unequal at the same time. A large-scale re-sorting of the global population would therefore be in everyone’s best interest. Our choice is either a progressive redeployment of especially the world’s youth to geographies where they can be gainfully employed or a global underclass revolt. Recent years have given us a taste of what the latter looks like. Are we brave enough to take the other path?
Repopulating the world
The world is running out of people and places to live at the same time. Moving resources to people has been environmentally catastrophic; now we must move people to resources, without destroying them in the process. The major states of the North—America and Canada, Britain and Germany, Russia and Japan—need more expansive immigration as well as substantial new investments in agriculture and infrastructure to prepare for what lies ahead. But the generosity of countries in accepting migrants must be weighed against the potential tragedy to the commons of having too many people arriving at once.
The constant movement of especially young people around the world combined with aging demographics and climate stress also mean we need to actively repurpose existing infrastructure and other facilities to serve humanity. Idle planes can airlift the poor and stranded, empty cruise ships and hotels can house refugees and the homeless, shopping malls can become warehouses and makerspaces, and golf courses can become farms. One wonders if we can spare land for all the cemeteries that will be necessary as today’s baby boomers expire.
Where to Now?
Mankind’s migrations over the past 100,000 years brought us out of Africa and onto every other continent, where we have concentrated along coasts and rivers. Where will we move over the next 100 or 1,000 years?
There is something demographically poetic about populations organically dying off in our prime geographies yet being dynamically backfilled by youth from far and wide. If we allow ourselves to go with the flow—moving inland, upland, and northward, and taking advantage of the latest advances in sustainability and mobility—we will not only evolve toward a new model of human civilization, but may even regain the confidence to revitalize our population. As Mohsin Hamid poignantly writes in National Geographic, “A species of migrants at last comfortable being a species of migrants. That, for me, is a destination worth wandering to.”4
“Map of the Modern World,” that coveted undergraduate class at Georgetown, was pass/fail. Today we can either pass or fail the test of devising a new philosophy of geography. In 1946, American geographer John Kirtland Wright coined the term “geosophy” to signify the intimate and ever evolving relationship between geography and human nature.5 Geosophy inspires us to overcome artificial authority: Borders can bend, infrastructure can shift, people can move. Satellite imagery of our changing climate fuses with billions of political, economic, and social data points to produce vivid scenarios for how humankind can relocate and thrive. No wonder geography is once again gaining popularity in high schools, and Earth Observation (EO) and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are sought-after courses in universities, with their graduates getting jobs that have tangible positive impact. There is nothing more important for youth to study. These fields hold the key to how we survive the complex decades ahead. Geography evolves, and human society must evolve with it.
I. Especially countries rich in granite and not seismically active are crucial locations to bury nuclear waste. Currently, most of the world’s nuclear waste is stored in non-seismic granite mountains in countries such as Finland, Sweden, France, Spain, and the Czech Republic, or on-site of existing reactors in the US (due to local opposition to burying it in places such as Yucca Mountain, Nevada, near Death Valley and Las Vegas). But as these countries gain population from global migration, nuclear waste is better stored (and relocated) to places such as Sierra del Medio in Argentina’s Patagonia region, which is depopulated and drying out due to climate change.
II. Kant was, not incidentally, one of the first philosophers to treat geography as a discipline, outlining its subcategories, such as physical, economic, and moral. He wrote of a “philosophical topography” to explain how spaces and places shape human experience and knowledge. Malpas and Thiel, “Kant’s Geography of Reason,” Reading Kant’s Geography (2011), in Robert B. Louden, “The Last Frontier: The Importance of Kant’s Geography,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32, no.3 (January 2014): 450–465.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is dedicated to the memory of David Held, the celebrated political theorist who supervised my PhD thesis at LSE (London School of Economics and Political Science). David was the selfless mentor and friend, and his authentic but realistic cosmopolitanism remains a perpetual source of inspiration. It does not seem common to have warm memories of doctoral struggles, but it is a testament to David’s character that I miss him every day.
As with my previous book, the faculty and students at Yale-NUS in Singapore have proven to be an invaluable intellectual resource. Conversations with my good friend Ravi Chidambaram again required my nonstop note-taking, and his masterful lecture on “the good company” and our joint article on redefining human capital were very useful in shaping this narrative. Anju Paul’s deep scholarship on the realities of low-income migrants was equally impactful for her on-the-ground perspective. Both Ravi and Anju’s brilliant cohorts of Yale-NUS students were a pleasure to engage with and learn from. I’d also like to thank my old friends Brian McAdoo and Paul Wilt for being consistent sounding boards intellectually, and directing me to the Yale-NUS undergraduates who made such a deep contribution to this book. Helena Auerswald, Raya Lyubenova, and Anmei Zeng have my deepest appreciation for their meticulous and insightful research as well as their cheery outlook. Xiao You Mok, Adity Ramachandran, and Sai Suhas Kopparapu were also once again unflappably diligent and creative in steering me down interesting cultural avenues.
My team at FutureMap, composed of colleagues and friends old and new, has been invaluable in professionalizing every aspect of this book. Kailash K. Prasad is an interdisciplinary thinker who found novel ways to combine qualitative insights with data. Jeff Blossom and April Zhu produced superb maps and visualizations to bring ideas to life, and Scott Malcomson once again provided substantive feedback, on almost every paragraph of the book. And without Jennifer Kwek, I don’t know how I would even find time to write.
