The admonition that we must remember the past to avoid repeating it has always struck me as strange. If human history teaches us anything, it is that the unexpected keeps happening, and responding to utterly new circumstances with the tools and ideas of the past can lead just as easily to disaster.
Nowhere does this seem more true than in two major story lines that I have been watching closely over the past decade. The first is one none of us can avoid: the global surge in migration and the new era of hard-right politics it has spurred in some of the wealthiest countries in the world.
The other has been a much quieter saga, but has recently come to the fore as the data have become undeniable: Across much of the globe, fertility rates are plunging at an alarming rate. Last month McKinsey released a startling report that concluded that most countries, not just the wealthiest ones, could see their growth slow drastically as their populations sink.
These trends intertwine in ways that are both obvious yet underexamined. One data point illustrates the rapidity and inexorability of this trend. For decades, Mexicans have come to the United States in search of work and opportunity. But in 2023, Mexico’s birthrate slipped just below that of the United States, and today Mexicans make up a diminishing share of the U.S. immigrant population.
You would not know it from the vituperative politics aimed at keeping people out, but in the coming decades many countries that are hellbent on excluding migrants are likely to find themselves in a pitched competition to attract them.
And so for much of the past year I’ve been traveling the world — reporting in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America — to try to understand how this age of migration might unfold. I found a nascent but powerful reordering of the world map of opportunity and a political class utterly unprepared to manage and adapt to this new order. Migration is, in many ways, a sign of our hopes and fears about the future.
Above all I found that the figure of the migrant is deeply misunderstood. Yes, there are more migrants than ever, some 280 million at last count. But it is a very rare individual who chooses to leave his or her home country: Less than 4 percent of the world’s population does this, and only a tiny fraction of that group attempts to enter the West. If anything, we will need many, many more of these brave souls to risk it all to make a new life if we are to have any hope of thriving in the centuries to come.
Over the coming months, I’ll be sharing dispatches from this new world in our new series, The Great Migration. I hope you’ll follow along and share your thoughts.
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