Great transition network
June discussion : The population debate revisited

Migration, a revolution to come

Gustave Massiah
11-06-2022

I greatly appreciate Paul Raskin's decision to organize a debate on the issue of world population in connection with the environmental issue. I would like to emphasize a central issue that is directly linked to the question of world population; it is the question of migration. It seems to me that we are in a period of bifurcation in the long history of migrations.

The History of migrations is inseparable from the History of Humanity. They are part of the long and structuring time of human history. This history began in Africa with the migrations of Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens. Migrants are not intruders; they are part of the history of each society. Migrations mark the imagination of our world: let us quote among others nomadism, sedentarization with the mastery of agriculture, exile, colonizations, diasporas, rural exodus.

Migration, along with industrialization and urbanization, is one of the strategic issues in the population of the planet. We must return to the question of settlement. The fear of a demographic explosion has marked the last fifty years. Since the report of the Club of Rome in 1970, the awareness of ecological limits has caused the conception of development to explode.

In the history of capitalism, the deep traces of slavery and colonization still remain. Today, with capitalist globalization in its neoliberal phase, three important forms of migration can be defined. Economic migrations characterized by the difference of situations that can be defined, to simplify, by imperialism and neo-colonialism. As Alfred Sauvy[1] expressed it very well in 1950, "if the richness is in the North and the people are in the South, the people will go where the richness is and you will be unable to do anything to stop them". Political migrations are the result of wars and conflicts and result in the displacement of refugees. The environmental migrations that are beginning will upset the balance of the world population.

We are living in a period of profound rupture marked by a succession of crises. The financial crisis that began with the subprimes in 2008 marked the beginning of the exhaustion of neoliberalism. Austerity policies, combining austerity and authoritarianism, have undermined freedoms without renewing the economic model. The ideologies of identity and security respond to the emergency of social movements carrying new radicalities: feminism, anti-racism and revolts against discrimination, the first peoples, migrants and diasporas. The awareness of the ecological crisis is deepening, combined with the crisis of the pandemic. Kyle Harper reminds us that the fall of the Roman Empire[2] was facilitated by the pandemic crisis, the rabies, and the climate, an episode of glaciation. This is a combination that accompanies crises of civilization. The crisis is accompanied by a geopolitical crisis, bringing multipolarity, which reactivates military gesticulations.

In the field of migration, there have been considerable ruptures. Take, for example, the contradiction between nomads and sedentary people that has accompanied human history since the invention of agriculture in Mesopotamia. Today we are living through the transition of agricultural populations in practically all countries from the majority of the population to around 5% of the total population. This development will change the situation and the very image of migrants.

The same applies to the notion of borders. In the long history of migration, an important change took place between the 17th and 18th centuries, with the transition from the Empire-State to the Nation-State. Nation-states have not always existed and are not an eternal form. National identity is a recent invention; as Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau[3] so well put it, each individual has multiple identities; it is reductive and wrong to want to reduce them to a single identity, that of the national identity. Freedom of movement and citizenship of residence are among the emerging rights that will be strengthened in the future.

Migrants are already actors in the transformation of societies and the world. The financial flows of migrants and diasporas to their countries of origin represented 630 billion dollars in 2021, while public "aid" reached a ceiling of 179 billion dollars.

Let us accept the hypothesis of two Canadian demographers, Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson[4], who analyse the shock of global demographic decline in their book, The Empty Planet. They question the United Nations' predictions that the world population will rise from 7 to 11 billion by the end of the century before stabilising. They estimate that the peak will be 9 billion between 2040 and 2060. And that the population will be decreasing in about thirty countries in 2050 (compared to about twenty today). Fertility rates are not astronomical in developing countries. Many are at or below replacement level. The reason for this is women's emancipation, which explains why the reproduction rate is stabilising at 1.7 children per woman. Social ageing is becoming a key issue. The countries that would fare best are those that, like Canada with 20% of its population born outside Canada, would be culturally inclusive of diversity and migrants.

[1] Alfred Sauvy, Théorie générale de la population, Paris PUF 1952

[2] Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, Princeton University Press, 2017. Publié en français aux Editions La Découverte en 2019.

[3] Edouard Glissant et Patrick Chamoiseau, L’intraitable beauté du monde, Essai broché, Paris 2009

[4] Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson, Empty Planet. The Shock of Global Population Decline, Robinson, 2019