Migration: Large-Scale Flows in Our Civilisation
Civilisational thinking requires a change in the mindset about who belongs in countries and regions. Climate change is going to cause changes in ecologies. These ecological changes are going to affect agricultural and fishery producers. People are going to be affected as climate change bites into these communities. People are going to have to move, and they will move in large numbers and even large distances.
These large movements of people are going to change countries and communities. This would involve communities changing their composition at short notice. There would have to be difficult conversations about whether the communities can think more fluidly about their own identities as new people enter into these communities.
Can communities adjust their identities quick enough?
In many places there will need to be an overhaul of local identities. Parag Khanna has catalogued a few of these unexpected changes in recent years and postulates that there will be more of these in the next few decades. The macro trends driving these are already clear. Climate, as I’ve described is one driver but there will also be clear demographic, economic and governance drivers that will prompt these changes. Existing patterns of movements and identities will also be part of the mix.
Ageing and Care Workers
Ageing will be an important driver for the movement of people. Ageing in the advanced countries creates demand for care workers from other parts of the world when their own societies cannot meet that demand. Advanced societies will be able to pay the amounts that can attract migrants to come and work. There might be some soft competition between countries on who can offer the best terms for these workers. Advanced countries will have to dampen xenophobic and racist tendencies. It’s harder to be racist when people of different skin tones are taking care of the people you love. Over time, as people take roots in those places, there will eventually be social and then political integration, and then they become accepted as part of the community. There might still be lingering racism, but then over time it would become the norm and accepted as part of the community. Communal and national identities are more fluid more than we think, and these things can change over time.
The people flows of the future might reinforce the flows of the present. We can imagine people from other English speaking or Spanish-speaking, such as Mexicans, people from the Philippines, and India moving to the United States, Canada or the United Kingdom to serve as care workers in various contexts; they already do so today. Eastern Europeans might move to Germany and France and elsewhere for cultural proximity. But other nationalities might move as well. Countries that accepted refugees from a previous era might now have established diasporic communities that can continue to accept those countries as well.
What might emerge, uncomfortably, will be a hierarchy of countries and partners. At the top of the hierarchical structure of people flows will be the richer, advanced countries that can pay; the rest of eastern and central Europe — also ageing rapidly, will then take on countries from developing economies who are eager to move. At the bottom of the tier will be developing countries that are ageing and might not have great options. That will be the reality in perhaps two more decades. It will be unclear where China will get their own healthcare workers from, as their population ages dramatically after 2030. Other developing countries that are ageing rapidly will also face steep challenge in attracting workers to care for their own aged peoples.
Should care workers around the world decide to move to somewhere outside their own country, they will have a wide variety of options. They will be able to choose from countries at different levels of economic development, domestic political stability, climate stability, and level of social welcoming towards foreigners.
Climate Change
Climate change will interact with this care demand. The climate crisis will force people to move, to move to other parts of the country that are more hospitable in climate, or where it is more stable. Frequent extreme weather episodes might make marginal agricultural land difficult to sustain. Farmers in those places might have to move to cities, or even to another country. In a crisis, cities might find it difficult to support so many jobseekers all at once with skillsets different from typical urban workers. We might see countries struggling domestically with political unrests. And the ability of these countries to cope with new surges of workers will be a key test of how attractive they might be for care workers. Some of the migrant workers themselves might have to change their occupation and become care workers. While that might happen, food security will become an important issue.
The most acute challenge will happen during large-scale extreme weather events that might cause mass casualties and involve people moving across different national borders at large scale. Left unquestioned is what would happen if people were abandoning previous places entirely and leaving to start life anew. We would need some kind of global financial facility to assist receiving and originating countries with the infrastructure and economic development.
The influx of refugees will force people to have to accept a change that they might be unprepared for. Anxiety of a perceived large-scale change might induce a sense of helplessness, causing people to react in fear and anger and the need to “do something.” This “do something” might be something negative — joining an anti-refugee movement, for instance, as a sign of agency. It might disturb whatever existing social fabric that might exist.
There are no shortcuts to this.
People have to reconsider the fixedness of their identity. They have to think about accepting people from places near and far, with identities of varying distance from them as well. How fluid and quick these identities can shift will be a huge question.
Countries might have to think hard about how to adjust their communal narratives. They might have to recover historical narratives about adaptability, change and compassion. On the other hand, countries that hew closely to history and ethno-nationalism are going to find migrations tricky especially if they are people who are from different ethnicities and different historical backgrounds.
There might also have to be more flexible provisions for how people could choose to stay or return to their home country, and on terms that will be fair to the receiving countries and incoming migrants. There will have to be more flexible terms of visitorship as people might want to return to their home countries, and to move again should disaster strike again, as would seem likely.
Global humanitarian agencies would have to draw up some kind of plan to prepare and sustain some kind of surge shelter capacity, together with infrastructure. We might be seeing weather disruptions at very large scales and frequencies undocumented in history. The challenge of migrants at large scale will also test infrastructure provisions.
More difficult to adjust would be the prospect of economic absorption. A sudden spike of people would drive down wage costs for the rest of the population, an unwelcomed feature of accepting a whole lot of new people. Could economic development keep up with the increase in the number of people? Could they possibly connect with the labour needs of the receiving country? It is one thing for an advanced ageing population to accept migrants, many of whom could be trained for the more menial tasks in healthcare settings. It is another thing for a developing country to absorb at large-scale, the migrants from another country. Economic support will have to be available for these developing countries, and options will have to be provided for people to move to other countries to ease burdens on a single country.
A global refugee and migrant organisation will have to be more than about coordinating aid and people movements; it will have to be about assistance for economic development.
