Many years ago, I attended a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony at the Royal Festival Hall in London. In those days, I could only afford the cheap seats at the back of the auditorium, and on this occasion, I was in the very last row, far from the stage on which the orchestra sat. Just before the concert started, the man sitting next to me took a large book out of his bag, which I could see was the score of the symphony. I was impressed that he planned to follow the music, page by page, during the performance. Then he produced a small white baton and, as the audience quietened and the dramatic opening notes were played, he started to keep time with his right hand while turning the pages of the score with his left. Unseen by the musicians and unnoticed by almost all the audience, for the next thirty minutes he conducted the symphony all the way through to the end. Bravo!
I had not thought about this unusual musical experience for a long time, but it came to mind at the end of last year, listening to certain British politicians debating immigration, which has recently risen to levels which they describe as “out of control”. Various policy proposals are being introduced to try to limit the numbers of incoming migrants. This was the great prize that many British people thought they had secured when they voted to leave the EU a few years back, that we would now be free to control our borders and to reduce the number of people who can enter Britain to live and work. These voters have discovered in the subsequent period that meaningful control of our borders is elusive, and that the so-called Brexit dividend is really an invoice. Those politicians who have not understood this, and who continue to demand policies to reduce immigration, remind me of the man who conducted the orchestra from the back row: they wave their hands around with energy and passion but to no real effect, for the migrants like the musicians are moving to a different beat.
Migration is old news. The first humans date back around six million years. They originated in south-west Africa and, around two million years ago, some of them walked to Asia and some to Europe. They – that is, we – have been moving around ever since. There are two sorts of impulse that drive migration: first, something bad happens to the environment where you are currently settled forcing you to leave, for example, a natural disaster, the arrival of a new predator, a shortage of food, or fighting between tribes. In other cases, you learn or dream about a place that is better, with nicer weather, more abundant food supply, fewer hostile enemies, and you decide to move in search of this greener grass. The first impulse is a push, the second is a pull: often both are operative to some extent. We move because we think there is somewhere else that will suit us better than where we currently are.
Not all migration is voluntary. The British, in collusion with several other European states, financed and organised the forced removal of more than 12 million Africans to the Americas and the Caribbean. Later, after slavery had been abolished, the British organised the transport of more than 1 million indentured labourers from India to Africa and the Caribbean. In other examples, successive Russian governments punished political opponents by internal exile, sending hundreds of thousands of people to live and work in Siberia: in the nineteenth century Tsar Nicolas I sent Fyodor Dostoevsky to Omsk, although after nine years he was allowed home; in the twentieth century, Stalin sent Osip Mandelstam to Voronezh in the Urals, and later to Vladivostok, where he died of typhoid. Most victims were less famous and are no longer remembered. the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), which settled the current borders of Turkey at the expense of the Kurds and the Armenians, led to the “unmixing” of populations in the eastern Mediterranean, determined by the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations, which forced around 2 million people to abandon their ancestral homes and move to a foreign land.
During the nineteenth century migration between countries and continents – both voluntary and coerced – occurred on a vast scale. In The Transformation of the World the historian Jürgen Osterhammel provides examples of some of these movements. Immigration from Europe to the United States grew from around 14,000 per year in the 1820s, to 260,000 a year in the 1850s, to a peak of 1 million in 1911. In total around 55 million people moved westwards across the Atlantic between 1820 and 1920. Of these, around 5.5 million went to Argentina, where in the early twentieth century, more than half the population were either born abroad or were children of those born abroad. On the other side of the world, Chinese workers were leaving their homeland in large numbers, some to work in goldfields in California (from 1849), Australia (from 1851), and South Africa (from 1886), others travelled to Siam, Burma, and Vietnam to work as merchants, or miners, or in agriculture. Some credible estimates suggest that between 1846 and 1940, the numbers of Indians and Chinese who moved overseas, to countries around the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific, totalled close to 50 million, roughly the same size as European immigration to North America.
What is common to many of these examples is the centrality of work. Once, most people worked on the land or the sea, as farmers, hunters, or fishers. They moved only when produce from the local land or water proved insufficient to feed them, either because of crop failure or population growth. From the seventeenth century onwards, as agriculture industrialised and as manufacturing industry germinated, the demand for labour in some locations quickly outstripped the local supply. People moved – or were taken – to those places where workers were in high demand. Whether they dug for gold or other minerals, cut sugar cane, picked cotton, worked in factories, traded manufactured goods, or herded cattle and sheep, they all travelled for travail. It is only very recently that people have migrated to retire, that is, to give up work, and there are very few people in the world wealthy enough to be able to make this choice.
If the search for work has been the dominant cause of migration in the recent past, the escape from hostile weather has become the primary cause of migration today and for the near future. The UNHCR estimates that between 2008 and 2016, on average 21.5 million people were displaced each year due to extreme weather events, such as floods, extreme temperatures, or wildfires. Some of those people will have returned home, at least temporarily, but increasingly the displaced will face the choice of semi-permanent refugee camps or permanent migration. The IEP, an international think tank, has forecast that by 2050, 2.8 billion people will live in countries facing severe ecological threats, compared with 1.8 billion today. It also notes that there are already 4 billion people living in countries with food insecurity and 2 billion living in countries without regular access to safe drinking water. Whereas work was a pull, an enticement to move to somewhere with better opportunities, weather is a push, the necessity to abandon one’s home to survive. The pull might be strong, but the push is urgent. In the next twenty-five years, tens of millions of people will become involuntary migrants each year, and they will be heading to countries where there is food, clean water, and weather that is not deadly.
Which brings me back to the man conducting Beethoven from the back row of the Festival Hall. However much he enjoyed himself, he surely knew that the orchestra were not following his lead, for their eyes were concentrated on the white baton in the hand of the famous maestro, dressed in a black tailcoat, standing on the podium. By contrast, it seems that many of the politicians busy making speeches about taking back control, somehow think they have real power over the flow of global migration, as if labour demand and food and water shortages were irrelevant. They would do better to spend their time thinking about how to accommodate incoming migrants, for come they will. As substantial parts of Africa become uninhabitable, another exodus to Europe is the obvious solution, not least because the ageing societies of Europe are short of workers (i.e. taxpayers).
Henry of Huntingdon’s chronicle of British history (written in the twelfth century) tells a story about King Cnut (d. 1035), the truth of which is frequently questioned by modern historians, but which nonetheless has become a popular legend. Cnut is reported to have ordered his throne to be set upon the beach, from where he commanded the waves to cease. When they continued to roll up the sand, lapping at his feet, he drew his courtiers’ attention to the limitations of human power over the natural world. True or not, this is a story whose lesson has been lost on many of the current generation of British leaders. However powerful these politicians imagine themselves to be, they cannot stop the waves and they will not stop the boats.
small boats welcome !!