Global Immigration 101, with Parag Khanna

There is more global immigration than ever before because we live in a dispersed, and therefore connected, world. Great societies have always depended on immigrants, and today is no exception. Khanna’s latest book is Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization ().
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Transcript - Global migration is a pervasive reality. We have more migrants than ever in history. We even have more migrants as a percentage of the world population just creeping up to about three plus percent of the world population are people who live outside of their country of origin. They’re ex pats, economic migrants, whatever you want to call them. And that’s three percent of a much larger world population than was the case in 1950, right. We’re approaching a world of seven-and-a-half, eight billion people more than three percent of whom are now migrants. So that’s nearly 300 million people who are living outside their country of origin who may be temporary. They may be permanent. I believe that this global migrant hoard if you will is always chasing the supply chain, always chasing jobs, always chasing a better life, always chasing good cities to live in. And in fact, most places in the world are reducing the barriers to entry for migrants. In 2015 Europe let in one million migrants, right, particularly political refugees from the Middle East. Now they’re talking about some limited migration controls from the Middle East and within their own territories across European borders.This is a very limited process because European countries are of course largely open to each other and generally very integrated. Their supply chains, their economies are very, very interdependent. But even if Europe were to impose very strict migration restrictions that does not tell us about the global picture. The same year, 2015, ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which is ten countries and 700 million people which is greater than the population of Europe passed an ASEAN economic community and ratified a treaty to allow the free mobility of labor across its countries.
So even if in one year 600 million people in Europe decided they want to limit mobility the same year 700 million people in Asia decided they want to increase mobility. So only from a totally Eurocentric standpoint are walls going up and migration becomes more difficult. That’s not actually what is happening on a worldwide basis. In fact we’re going into a period that I describe as a great demographic dilution, even a genetic dilution. There is so much more intermingling of different ethnic populations happening around the world that there are very few countries left that you could even define as nation states. Traditionally we think of a nation state as a country where 85 or 90 percent of the population belongs to the same ethnic group.The number of nation states is declining because more and more countries are becoming more ethnically diverse. Even in Europe where the idea of the nation state really began in the Middle Ages and into the modern nation states of Western Europe today there you see a growing percentage of migrants and therefore those countries are no longer even nation states. So in fact, we have this genetic intermingling and we see this particularly in global cities that are melting pots. Places like Singapore or Hong Kong or Dubai or Toronto or London. Places where the foreign born percentage of the population, maybe 40 percent, 50 percent. In the case of Dubai even 85 or 90 percent of the residents actually don’t come from that place. And so we see literally mingling of ethnicities, mixed birth children and this mingling of populations that has never taken place before at this rapid rate. So yes, populism is a feature of our politics. There is a backlash against immigration to some degree in quite a few places. But the global picture is one of more mass migration and integration across societies. Read Full Transcript Here: .