The New Migration - the population numbers are overwhelming

Before the Neolithic Revolution began 10,000-12,000 years ago, we were all hunter-gatherers. The number of people on this planet at that time has been estimated to between five and fifteen million human beings. A single major city such as Tokyo, Beijing, Seoul, Karachi, Mexico City, Lagos, Mumbai or Cairo now has more inhabitants than this.

The global population reached one billion people for the first time around the year 1800. From the time of the Neanderthals, it took all of the Earth’s peoples hundreds of thousands of years to achieve this population size. Since the Industrial Revolution, the global population has, over the past two hundred years, grown dramatically.

In the coming three decades, it is expected that Africa’s population alone will increase by more than one billion people. Combined with a huge population growth, modern means of transport are now creating the largest and fastest human migrations the world has ever experienced since our species first came into existence.

Population estimates for the Roman Empire at the beginning of our era range from 45 million to over 100 million people. A relatively common estimate is 60-80 million. Various estimates suggested a global population growth of between 70 and 80 million in 2015. The world population is thus growing at a rate of roughly one Roman Empire every single year. Today’s migrations are much larger and faster than the Migration Period we associate with the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

200,000 more per day

Let us stipulate that the global population increased by 73 million people in 2015. This corresponds to a global population growth of over 6 million people per month, around 1.4 million people per week, nearly 200,000 per day, more than 8327 per hour, almost 139 per minute and 2.3 per second. If you spend 30 seconds on grabbing a cold drink in the fridge, the planet’s population will have grown with perhaps 69 people during this time. If you spend half an hour on eating lunch, there will be around 4,164 more human beings on Earth after your lunch break...

Demographers believe that the Earth’s population may grow to between 9.6 and 12.3 billion people by 2100, perhaps more. Africa’s population could grow tremendously to between 3.5 and 5.1 billion people. By 2050, it is estimated that four out of ten of the world’s children could be an African.

In 1897, there were 9.7 million Egyptians. In 1996, Egypt’s population numbered 59 million people. The country surpassed 87 million in 2014 and could have 137 million inhabitants in 2050. This huge population growth contributes to political instability. Between them, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland had, at the beginning of 2015, a population of about 26 million people, including recent immigrants. The population growth of a single Arab country in less than one generation is thus larger than the population of all the Scandinavian and Nordic countries combined...

Europe as a destination

Europeans are a global minority. We have always been a minority, but today, the European share of the world’s population is smaller than it has ever been in recorded history.

Let us stipulate that at least six billion people on the planet enjoy a lower standard of living than the average person does in Germany, Norway or the Netherlands. If just 9% of six billion people want to move to Europe or other Western countries, this would amount to 540 million migrants. This is more than the total number of citizens across the entire European Union (EU)...

If Africa were to send 100 million people to Europe over the next five years, Africa’s population would still continue growing. Muslim countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan also experience a large population growth. If the Islamic world and Africa were to send a quarter of a billion migrants to Europe over the next ten years, these regions would still increase in population.

Could lead to collapse

These figures are intended to illustrate population growth. In practice, the number of migrants will not be this great. Yet the mere fact that this is theoretically possible should be cause for concern. In coming generations the Islamic world and Africa could, in principle, send a constant flow of migrants ten times larger than what we are seeing now.

It is totally unrealistic to solve social problems through the migration of billions of people. Most social problems in southern countries must be resolved locally. There is no other viable alternative.

There will be those who will say, “Oh, it is our duty to receive as many as possible of these people and to share our prosperity with them, as we have so long been doing.” But suppose there are limits to our capacity to absorb. Suppose the effect of such a policy is to create, in the end, conditions within this country no better than those of the places the masses of immigrants have left: the same poverty, the same distress.

What we shall then have accomplished is not to have appreciably improved conditions in the Third World (for even the maximum numbers we could conceivably take would be only a drop from the bucket of the planet’s overpopulation) but to make this country itself a part of the Third World (as certain parts of it already are), thus depriving the planet of one of the few great regions that might have continued, as it now does, to be helpful to much of the remainder of the world by its relatively high standard of civilization, by its quality as example, by its ability to shed insight on the problems of the others and to help them find their answers to their own problems.