Migration Continues

A broad generalization about the reasons for migration is a shift from seeking opportunity to avoiding disaster. The older paradigm is a numbers game of too many people in the same spot limiting economic opportunity. The emerging one is increasingly being driven by fleeing disaster, whether from conflict or climate change. Fleeing conflict is not new, although nature of conflict is morphing, but the emergence of the climate change threat is new.

The Future of Immigration: Four Paths by the Institute for the Future believes that climate change could push as many as 120 million people to migrate locally or between countries in the most at-risk regions of the world.

Re-Imagining Forced Migration Governance for 2030 by Global Governance Futures came to three considered crucial certainties:

• Existing multilateral organization working on forced migration will weaken.
• Sectarian conflict and Islamophobia will increase.
• An international process will emerge to address forced migration challenges, thus 'reinventing the wheel.'

Exploring Europe's Capability Requirements for 2035 and Beyond by Rand states that International and internal migration will continue to be high and even increase as people will be trying to seek better social opportunities, escape conflicts and flee the effects of climate change. While the global population is expected to continue to grow, albeit at a slower rate, the population increase is likely to be unequal across the world, with Europe being the only area with continuous population decline.

Thinking MENA Futures: The Next Five Years and Beyond by the Strategic Foresight Initiative notes that some 12 million internally displaced persons and over three million refugees and asylum seekers, in addition to some 365,000 stateless persons, are living in the Middle East. In Turkey, over 3.6 million refugees from Syria, Iraq, and other nationalities make up the largest refugee population hosted by any one country in the world. They have been dealt the misfortune to be caught up in large-scale conflict, often treated merely as pawns in domestic, regional, and global quests for control.

Categories: