Populations on the move
Rachman Review / Financial Times |
The FT's Gideon Rachman speaks to Parag Khanna about his new book MOVE and which societies are best prepared for the mass migrations of the future.
Read full transcript below
Parag Khanna believes that governments that attempt to stand in the way of large scale flows of people are fighting a losing battle. So, I began our conversation by asking him why he thinks the world is standing on the brink of a new age of mass migration.
Parag Khanna
Well, first of all, we have been nomadic for most of human history: 100,000 years of mankind wandering around the world and colonizing the continents. We became sedentary in the last several millennia, and particularly the last few centuries. But that doesn't mean that those centuries were not characterized by mass migration. They were even in the “age of nationalism.” The term we use to describe the 19th century was also a century of mass migrations. To take just one data point: The 60 million Europeans who migrated to North America. Not to mention: it was still a colonial era. So there were tens of millions of Africans and Asians that were moved around, particularly within the realm of the British Empire. So we've always had mass migrations, and they have been political: World Wars genocides. They've been economic: People in search of opportunity. Think about the late 20th century migrations of Asians and Latin Americans to the United States, and of course, Turks and others into Europe. And so we have the political, economic, and technological: Look at the Rust Belt in light of the financial crisis. And now with remote work, digitization allows people to move. And then, of course, let's talk about climate change. You know, climate has always been a determining factor in where we live. And as the “climate niche” as it's known moves northward and latitude, mankind will have to move with it. So it is inevitable that despite the ironic moment of this lockdown that we will be migrating again, in very, very large numbers.
Gideon Rachman
I can see the climate logic, the economic logic, driving all of the demographic logic, you know, much younger population in Africa or older population in Europe and Asia and so on. But already we're in the middle of a big political backlash against migration. I mean, what does Trump run on to build the wall? Do you think that that backlash can prevent this or slow it?
Parag Khanna
I think there are two important things here. The first is that the demographic imbalances and the labor market shortages as you know Britain has been witnessing as well are so severe that you cannot divorce that from the political logic. It will eventually impact political logic. Countries are waking up and saying: Oh my goodness, our xenophobia or populism, our aging population, our lack of labor and low fertility are affecting our economy. We therefore have to be more pragmatic about migration. So you can't hold these things to be rigid and separate the political logic of cultural unity and nationalism versus the need to have a pragmatic demographic strategy for your own national economic survival. That's one point. The second is who is the “we” that you're talking about? If you look at British immigration policy today, it's easier to migrate to Britain than it was before Brexit. An Indian student can just show his graduation certificate and he can gain entry into the United Kingdom.
You don't need to demonstrate as you did before your proof of employment. In other words, here's my letter of the job offer. Or you don't even have to pay a security bond. These are two of the conditions that used to affect Asian migrants to Britain. Today: if you have a pulse and a legitimate graduation degree, Britain is letting you in. A record number of foreign students have been admitted to the UK as well. So despite Brexit, you now have a very pragmatic immigration policy in this area, though not when it comes to truckers, but when it comes to young professionals. In America, the most recent census was just published, launched in September with new data. Despite the Trump administration, America became more diverse, more foreigners, larger than the Latino population, more people self-identifying as mixed race, more mixed race marriages, more mixed race children. All of that has been happening almost irrevocably, despite the Trump administration. So I do believe honestly, Gideon, from a demographic standpoint, in 10 years time will look back and say “Brexit, what?” and “Trump, who?”
Gideon Rachman
Did people keep moving? Well, that's okay. That's the West and I think by your logic, that it's kind of an unstoppable force, although there'll be backlashes. What about Asia, though? I mean, when I was last in Japan, there was an agonized debate in the days about what seemed very tiny openings to immigration were Western standards, and yet they have an enormous demographic crisis in which the population is shrinking. Why do you think even in Asia, or China's also seems very wary of letting foreigners in? They're also having a demographic crisis? Do you really think that they will have to swallow those things and become multicultural societies?
Parag Khanna
It's a great question. So it's hard to generalize about Asia, much as it is, by the way, about the West. We didn't yet talk about Canada and Germany, two countries that both are letting in hundreds of thousands of people a year, and there's very little political backlash. Now, it happened in Germany because of the refugee crisis. But the German government has just issued a paper saying that they need 400,000 migrants a year, which is an enormous number for that country. And they've just had an election where you know, where did you see the right wing AfD party in the German election? You didn't. So let's not generalize about the West because in fact, they're leading progressive Western societies that are becoming mass migration societies like Canada and Germany.
And of course, America has been and Britain has been, so again, I see a different picture. Now, Asia, it's also very hard to generalize because Japan has over 100 million people. China has over a billion people. They are not going to become diluted, deracinated, nationalized sort of melting pots. But that doesn't mean that they aren't going to bring in lots of foreigners. and Japan is such an interesting case. I have a whole chapter on Japan in the book, because I didn't set out to contradict the conventional wisdom that it is the Galapagos insular culture, because culturally, it will adapt much more slowly than it will, shall we say, you know, logistically, or statistically, because there are 3 million foreigners living in Japan today. Obviously, that's more than ever in history. And the number is growing. And it's Chinese and it's Korean and it's Vietnamese, and it's even South Asians. There is a story I tell about the first Muslim cemetery that's opening in Japan because it's not just temporary guest workers; people have moved to Japan and are settling in Japan.
They're doing it like Italy, with schemes where they're selling off villages, towns, homes, for practically free. There's an entire parallel banking system in Japan devoted just to subsidizing the purchase of dilapidated homes. Now that is initially for Japanese people. But of course, they're very few takers. But there are plenty of people in the rest of the world with cash with savings who want to retire, who want a stable climate, who will be open to that scheme, too. I bet they will. And like you say, it'll be agonizing in the parliament, right? Every little minor detail will be sweated, you know, to the Nth degree. But I have talked to quite a few politicians in Japan and looked at the survey data and looked at the numbers and looked at the people and the composition in the streets. Universities are changing the language of instruction to English; they are actually recruiting young people into the labor force. And it's construction and its nursing and hospitality. And it's obviously IT and engineers if you go to these thriving tech campuses in Fukuoka, companies like Rakuten, and others. Guess what the lingua franca is? English, right? And you've got some companies with a lot of the back office or IT programmers who are from China and looking for opportunities in livable places like Japan. So it's happening under the radar in so many places.
Even Russia, by the way. Now, let's take China, as you know, the most recent census, they got their total population figure off by a little bit, which is to say 120 million people: They overestimated their population, as you know, because of the one child policy of enormous demographic imbalances. So they are massively recruiting young people to do services work, menial work, labor, agriculture, elderly care, all of these things. There is a war for the Filipino nurse. One of the protagonists of this book is the Filipino nurse because the Philippines will never be able to produce enough to meet global demand. And so you will see this nursing industry spread massively across India, Indonesia and elsewhere, to recruit and train young single women who, as it happens, also want to get out of their countries. Neither you nor I are sanguine about the Indian political system, nor about the country's climate. It's a place where a young woman rightly wants to get out, you know, and wants to take a job elsewhere.
Gideon Rachman
I must say: What you have to say resonates a lot. My wife works in a London hospital, and her colleagues are, above all, from the Philippines, from India and from Nigeria.
Parag Khanna
That's right. And by the way, you know, much to the surprise, I suppose, in many Western European voters, and let's take Germany as an example. They may be anti-immigrant, and they may be trying to train more Germans to take jobs in those professions, but it's not working. Fertility, you know, promotion is not working, taking lower wage services work, even with higher wages is not working. So what the German government is doing is actually putting up billboards and placards in Manila, saying: Please come and learn German, you'll get a free ticket, you know, to move to Germany and become a highly paid nurse. So again, it's a war for young talent across all of these professions. And the question is not whether our populations are sentimentally xenophobic today, and how it might change tomorrow, and this party and that party, it's a numbers game. And there's those countries that have recognized the need for young people as taxpayers and entrepreneurs and, you know, services workers and those that haven't.
Gideon Rachman
So what you present so far, I mean, perhaps as the web guided the conversation is actually a fairly optimistic case in which you know, people looking for opportunities, find it, the West or other developed societies, or richest societies in Asia, find the labor they need. And yet, it seems to me there's a very dark subtext to your book, which is that you see quite large parts of the world where billions of people live becoming close to uninhabitable.
Parag Khanna
To be honest, this scenario that you and I've just been talking about are barely adequate to cope with the reality of the vast swaths of the world that are becoming unlivable. And you mentioned earlier that northern societies are wealthy, but depopulating. And those are also the places that are becoming more climatologically. livable, whereas the majority of the human population and the majority of young people live in places that are becoming uninhabitable.
Gideon Rachman
Is that an overstatement?
Parag Khanna
Uninhabitable: They're becoming decreasingly livable, and that is absolutely a factual statement. When we look at what's happened with falling water tables with floods, droughts, heat waves, and so forth. It doesn't mean that you can declare this country is dead, as of next year. But are those populations meeting their potential? Are they productive societies by any stretch of the imagination? No, not even close. And we would improve overall human welfare substantially by relocating those people rather than believing that they can continue to thrive in the environments that they're in, you know. If all of us spend today, or more time in the parts of Africa that have been so devastated by drought, the same thing has happened in South Asia, the same thing is happening in Central America, of course, which is why you have the migrant waves on the southern US border.
There's a huge difference legally. And I think this is worth talking about, between saying, okay, Syria is somewhat stable, therefore you Syrians that have sought asylum here in Europe can in fact, go back. And as you well know, the Syrians are saying, “Please do not send us back. This is not a country to which you should send us back politically, even if it meets the legal test of being stable enough that I as a Syrian national could be sent back.” You can't have that same conversation when it comes to a climate devastated country, a country that has no more water supply. You cannot in good conscience do that. Now, we don't have the legal mechanism per se, to determine what the exact trigger moment is when you would send back environmental refugees, but given that the number of climate refugees today, not in a future scenario, today, is larger than the number of political refugees in the world. So this is a problem that we needed to already be talking about.
Gideon Rachman
And where are they climate refugees now? And where are they likely to be in the future?
Parag Khanna
Well, most climate refugees are internally displaced people, right. Or we could say at a sub-regional level, people within East Africa in the Horn of Africa, of course, within Central America, and now they've been kept in Mexico. They haven't made it into the United States. And just because although it's a problem on the border for the United States, and Americans may complacently say, “Well, we've managed to keep them away.” It doesn't mean it's not a problem for Mexico to have three or four million effectively climate and political refugees from Central America. Let's spare a thought for a country with much less capacity than America having to deal with this and Mexico to be an environmentally stressed country. So subregionally concentrated climate refugees, but also, certainly across borders and internationally. You and I both know that there are aspects or trigger moments within everything from the Arab Spring to the Darfur genocide to Syria, and its revolution and civil war, that relate to climate change as well.
And one of the things I do is to look at the geographic constraints. We have to be realistic. We're not talking about mass airlift of people from Africa to Siberia. So within geographic constraints, what I've done is to look at the most at risk populations, which is very much South Asia, right, India and Pakistan and Bangladesh, where, can you imagine some measurable number of people but it could be tens of millions potentially relocating in the coming years. And I've identified those geographies. I call them “climate oases.” Also looking at the Near East. So for example, I kind of report from eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus region, right. And it's interesting because that region, which is the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, actually has been massively depopulating because of insufficient job opportunities. And those are the young people that have moved to Ankara and Istanbul and become a real headache for Erdogan in municipal elections. Meanwhile, it's this beautiful, verdant space, you know, it's the Turkish equivalent of the British, you know, Midlands and Scottish highlands. I call it the “Aspen of Anatolia.” You realize very well that this region abuts or borders: Iraq, Syria, and Iran, three populous and massively water stressed nations. And of course, Turkey already has 4 million refugees within its borders. But can you not for a moment, even with all the borders in the world, look at that map of human geography, and see 150 million people whose water tables are decimated, where there's scorching heat, and then see that a couple of degrees latitude north and eastern Turkey is one of the most livable geographies on the entire planet. And then tell me with a straight face that you expect that border to hold 10 years, 20 years, or 40 years from now?
Gideon Rachman
Yeah, and that's a very vivid example of where the desirable place becomes the undesirable and vice versa. And I guess we're gonna see much more of that. I mean, in the United States, the sunbelt has been the boom area, and presumably it may get just a little bit too hot, or indeed, in reference Siberia. Now being sent to Siberia is not generally thought to be a very good thing. But you're implying that maybe in 30 years time, I don't know what the time frame is. Siberia will actually be somewhere where people are moving to.
Parag Khanna
It's already happening today. You know, there have been heat waves in Siberia. So let's be clear that there's climatic volatility. One of the lessons I learned in the process of researching this is that, you know, the future of human mobility and migration is not just a one way street, it's potentially becoming more nomadic again and people moving multiple times. If you look at the climate risk that can afflict even places that the climate futurists tell us our livable, like Siberia, well, as you know, there are forest fires in Siberia, and there's no fire service to put them out. And you have subsidence in the ground as permafrost thaws, so vast crevices are emerging in the soil and sucking houses down with them. By the way, the same thing is happening in Florida, because of the topography of Florida. So people will have to move more and more. But yes, again, it's relative. It's better to be in Siberia as a farmer than to be in drought stricken India, right. And so Russia is important to Indian farmers. This is one of the things and I've talked to officials at universities and some of the provinces of Eastern Russia when I've traveled through there, and they've said: You know what, we've got Chinese infrastructure projects, we want to rebuild our dilapidated Soviet industrial sites and cities. And we want to have manufacturing. And of course, we need more industrial agriculture and all of these things, but we don't have any people because as you know very well, this is one of the most rapidly depopulating countries in the world. And what population Russia does have is west of the Ural Mountains. But five-sixths of Russia or more is east of the Ural Mountains. So all the time that I've spent in that region, I meet officials who say we need people, we need Chinese, we need Indians, we need Vietnamese, we need whoever we can find and they are actually bilaterally bringing in people at the universities. I've met officials who have said that they want to switch their medium of instruction to English, because they want to capture the Asian students, you know, who are a bit more cash strapped and are not coming to Oxbridge to study. So that's actually happening. You will never hear that from Vladimir Putin. But under the radar, again, the mid-level officials, the technocrats, the people who actually have to deal with the day to day challenge of fixing and rebuilding a country. They realize that you can't do it without people.
Gideon Rachman
Just to end on a point I touched upon. I mean, you I think are quite a forward looking person, quite an optimistic person. But I must say looking at your conclusions the future you paint seems to me in some respects, rather dystopian, I mean a lot of people moving a lot of times and not necessarily for good reasons.
Parag Khanna
Exactly, right? You know, the book has four scenarios. One is called “regional fortresses,” which kind of resembles today's reality where we're very guarded in the north about migration, you know, we're willing to offer some technology to help people to make do where they are. Another scenario is called “the new middle ages,” and another one is called “barbarians at the gate.” So that's three out of four not-so-great for much of humanity from a utilitarian perspective. Only the fourth scenario in this book is called “Northern Lights.” And that one is progressive. It speaks about a mass resettlement of the world population, but in an orderly, controlled, gradual, sensible, peaceful way. And we have to thread quite a few needles to get to that scenario.
Gideon Rachman
That was Parag Khanna, the author and strategist in this edition of the Rachman Review. Thanks for listening, and I hope you'll join me again next week.