Will borders hold?
by digby
So far, they mostly have. But you can feel the tension, all over the world:
The Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit research group, has used United Nations migration estimates to produce this fascinating, and somewhat addictive, interactive map. Choose from the “Select Country” pull-down menu below the map, and it will show you (to the nearest thousand) how many immigrants to and emigrants from that country there were as of last year, along with those migrants’ countries of origin or destinations.
We learn, for instance, that Russia and Ukraine are each other’s leading sources of migrants, with more than 2.9 million Ukrainians now living in Russia and nearly 3.5 million Russians living in Ukraine. Saudi Arabia and the United States are the top destination countries for Syrian migrants (139,000 and 76,000, respectively). The U.S. draws immigrants from nearly every country in the world, from Mexico (nearly 13 million) to Mauritius (3,000).
Borders are an organizing construct and have proved very useful. But humans will migrate. They always have and they always will. And when our system destabilizes because of greed, rapid cultural change or something as catastrophic as global warming, you can bet that borders are not going to hold them back.
This is what our species has always done to survive --- when the going gets tough, the tough get going.
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