When the People Follow

Money moves first. People move second. The movement of people, when it comes, is larger in its consequences, because people bring not only their labour but their cultures, their memories, their wounds, and their stories of why they had to leave.

Two kinds of movement tend to happen at once, and they are not the same movement.

There are the skilled and the wealthy, who move to the places they have chosen. They bring their money. They bring their children to good schools. They are welcomed, mostly. They are a small flow, but their effect is large, because they take, from the places they leave, the people those places most needed.

And there are the desperate, who move to the places that cannot easily turn them away. They come from wars, from food failures, from collapsing economies, from climate pressures that have made their land no longer workable. They are a large flow. They are not, mostly, welcomed, because they arrive in numbers that strain the places they reach.

Different countries handle these two flows with different success. Few handle both well.

There is a thing about the desperate flow that very few people in public life are willing to say. The countries they are coming from are also ageing. The birth rates there, as we saw in the kitchens, have fallen too. Within a generation or two, those countries will be struggling to hold on to their own young people. The flow of desperate movers will slow, not because anyone has solved their reasons for moving, but because there are not enough young people left to move.

The rich countries that have been relying on the flow will find, one day, that the flow has stopped. And they will find they have not built the alternatives they should have built while the flow was coming.

That day is not today. But it is closer than anyone in charge wants to admit.