How will climate migration reshape Canada?

Jordan We can all agree that the climate era is already radically changing our world. The question is, what is it changing it into? And how will it change Canada? And I’m not speaking here of the self evident stuff. The higher sea levels, the natural disasters, the heat waves, all the terrifying things we’ve covered. I’m asking, what kind of country will Canada become as the climate era slowly remakes the world? Climate migration is happening already, but the sheer scale of what’s coming as some places around the world are transformed into uninhabitable regions is staggering. Billions of people will need to move to survive. Where will they go? The answer depends on who is ready to take them in, who is ready for climate migrants to help reshape their nation. This is not a story about how Canada somehow comes out a winner on climate change. There are no winners here, but there are countries that can lead the way into the future of human migration, and they can show the rest of the world what our future could look like.

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Parag Khanna is an academic and an author. His new book is called Move: the Forces Uprooting Us . Hello, Parag.

Parag Hi there. Nice to speak with you.

Jordan It’s nice to talk to you as well. Why don’t you begin, because your book is so comprehensive, maybe give us the big picture of the future of migration around the world.

Parag Wow. Well, first of all, this is a book about the future of human geography, and migration is part of that. But everything from our species’ adaptation to climate change to our ethnography, mixed race marriages, all of that is human geography. So migration, I like to say, is sort of like meteorology. It’s like taking the temperature. How many people move from country A to country B this year or last year? That’s Meteorology.

Human geography is like climatology. It’s a deep science of understanding how we adapt and distribute ourselves around the world as a species. It’s a planetary kind of consideration. So that’s really what human geographies are. But of course, mass migrations, past, present and future are a really important and paramount lens for understanding human geography. And, of course, a lot of the book is precisely about that.

And the interesting part of the story is that whereas we think that we are now trapped and stuck and locked down forever as a result of this pandemic, the interesting and the ironic twist is that the pandemic struck at precisely the moment when we had been climbing higher and higher in terms of the number of people crossing borders and relocating and shifting every single year, every single century, you might say. So, I made this argument before the pandemic, and I don’t feel in any way shape or form compelled to change it that if you look at each century, the number of people who relocate away from their country of origin towards someplace new, the decimal point continuously shifts. It’s gone from millions to tens of millions to hundreds of millions in the 20th century. And in the 21st century, more than a billion people will surely have to relocate or will voluntarily relocate because of a wide range of things, from politics to climate change.

Jordan Maybe let’s discuss climate change for a minute, because that’s where a lot of northern countries like Canada are looking at trends and maybe wondering if they’re going to be dealing with a massive influx of climate migrants.

Parag Yes. So remember that Canada has become over time, not just recently, a mass migration society. A very diverse population. Some say that Canada is on the cusp of becoming “more Brown than white”. And that’s obviously not as a result of climate migrants. That’s a category of migrants that’s really just getting started. But it’s a very large number. So Canada has taken on. And I praise Canada endlessly in the book for its generosity and its strategic demographic policy, as a country that set out to increase its population by more than 1% every year to bring in 400,000 + people. And the fact that it’s doing so both on the basis of skilled migrants as well as political refugees and climate refugees, I think, is balanced and admirable.

But that doesn’t mean that Canada is going to be diluted or overrun. You’re the second largest country by territory on the planet Earth. You’re slightly smaller, but negligibly, let’s say, for the purposes of this conversation than Russia, but with only a third of Russia’s population. So Canada has a vast space. It’s not all livable, not all habitable. It’s not all going to be verdant and agricultural. But Canada has become an agricultural superpower, you’re investing in diversifying your economy. And in order to do that, to move from being a resource economy to a skills and services economy, you obviously need more immigrants anyway. So I think that Canada can easily absorb and become a population of 100 million people. And that’s, of course, what your Century initiative in your own country, which is a document and a strategy authored by Canadians. And it’s perfectly plausible that 100 million people can live sustainably in Canada, and perhaps a whole lot more.

Jordan What about climate migrants around the world? You mentioned in an excerpt of your book that I read in National Geographic that this is not going to be a phenomenon confined to North America or even to Europe, but that it’s going to be a massive influx simply from south to north. And I wonder about, well, you mentioned Russia. Let’s start there. Is Russia prepared for this? I know Canada has a history of multiculturalism and immigration, Russia, much less. So I’m trying to get a sense of how ready the world is for a migration on the scale that you’re writing about.

Parag And the answer is there isn’t one answer because Canada is really unique in terms of being a country that is having this open Democratic discourse in your elections. This does not feature in the sense of having been very polarizing or there being a significant backlash. Whereas Russia, not quite. Russia is a very inward looking nationalistic kind of society that’s not ready to simply absorb tens of millions of utterly alien culturally Peoples. So in many ways, Russia is the anti Canada, even if you have a similar climate.

But that said, unlike Canada, Russia sits and straddles all of the major zones of Eurasia, Eurasia being the largest landmass on the planet Earth, the largest continent with the majority of the human population. So Russia will inevitably, even as a place that’s far less migrant friendly, as a geography, as a territory, it better get ready to have a much larger population than it has today, because if climate change, even the moderate scenarios come to pass, a lot more people will be moving north into Central Asia and into Russia.

To some degree that’s already happening. So in the book I report from Siberia, and, yes, the winters are very cold. But the fact is that you can have a lot more people working in agriculture, industry, infrastructure and other areas of Russia. And Russians themselves have told me that they really wish they had more migrants because their population is declining very rapidly due to mortality, low fertility, alcoholism, emigration, you name it. So Russia will inevitably have more people and its own bureaucrats and officials and mayors and executives have told me that they actually wish they had more people. So that’s not what you’re going to hear Vladimir Putin saying in the Kremlin in Moscow. But it is the attitude of the people who actually run the country across the country’s vast geography, day in and day out. So I do hold out hope that Russia’s attitude towards itself and its role in the world is going to evolve and expand in potentially constructive directions, even if it does remain geopolitically a very antagonistic country.

Jordan When we look at the scale of the migration that’s coming, and you mentioned, we’re talking billions in the 21st century, what’s the potential for political and even military conflict? Because I agree here in Canada, we’ve done a fairly good job at embracing immigration and multiculturalism. But we’ve seen, even as refugees make their way to safe countries now from other countries, that there’s some pushback there. And there’s certainly some anti-immigration sentiment in Canada right now.

Parag There is, and you can have anti-immigration sentiment in America, which just had an administration dominated by it. You can have it in the case of Britain with Brexit and Ironically, perversely what you will find. And this is actually hopeful in the end is that despite all of that, you’ll have rising migration nonetheless. And the most recent US Census bears this out extraordinarily clearly. Under the Trump administration, under his watch, America became more diverse, more Latino, more mixed race, all at the same time. And we will look back ten years from now and say, ‘Trump who?’ when it comes to the demographics and the diversity of American society. And that’s a good thing.

Britain today, it is easier to migrate to Great Britain today than it was five years ago than it was before or immediately after Brexit, because they realized that they actually have massive labor shortages. In fact, they’re experiencing them right now as we speak, they need 100,000 just truck drivers, let alone all of the other sectors. So what happens is that even if you are a country with populist politics at the moment, it doesn’t mean that that’s actually your long term trajectory or long term policy. In fact, what you find is that in the grand scheme of things, supply and demand, supply and demand for labor is what ultimately dictates immigration policies and patterns a lot more than the political populism that tends to grab our attention and headlines. And that’s, of course, a very good thing.

Jordan So if this is inevitable, regardless of public sentiment, what should Northern countries be doing right now to prepare for it? It sounds transformational.

Parag Well, yes. But again, it’s hard to generalize about Northern countries in the same way that it’s hard to compare Canada and Russia and find a lot of political similarities. You wouldn’t, right. But it is important to have role models of countries that are ahead of the curve in attracting the hardworking, young, industrious taxpayers and entrepreneurs and construction workers and caregivers and teachers of the future that they lack. And there you can see a huge contrast within the so called west because Canada and Germany are quite different in the way they’re approaching this than, say, Britain or America.

And very often in our conversations, Britain and America are taken as representative of the west. But they’re absolutely not. I think Canada and Germany are much more. So in your two cases of Germany and Canada, you are increasing your labor force. You have significant inward migration. You have vocational training, you have strong assimilation policies. Your economies are growing on the back of growing numbers of migrants that are spread across the economy. That’s what you want to see happening. And quite frankly, when I look at the west as a whole, I don’t see Xenophobic anti-immigrant populism characterizing the entire west. I see what Canada and Germany are doing. I see Britain completely reversing force in its migration policy. So I see Pragmatism. Again, supply in demand ultimately wins.

Jordan So let’s talk about Canada specifically. You mentioned Canada has a tentative plan to be a country of 100 million people, and climate change will continue to reshape the world while, that happens. So how different will Canada look? And I don’t mean necessarily the color of people’s skins, I mean as a geographic country when we get to the end of this century?

Parag I think it’s a very well articulated question because Canadians themselves and it’s something I talk about in the book, based upon various studies or surveys, Canadians don’t really spend too much time thinking about your vast Northern expenses and their utility. Whereas in the coming decades, you would surely become much more familiar with them for their utility, access to the Arctic and shipping lanes and resources, potentially locations for human settlement and habitation. New geographies of agriculture, as I mentioned earlier, new infrastructure that we built to service those new economic territories and terrain. All of that is happening and going to happen and going to accelerate. And that is going to really create a new map, not a new geological map of Canada, but a new functional map of Canada, how you use it, and how familiar you are with your own country.

And I think that’s actually a really remarkable and interesting process that’s underway. I mean, as someone who’s trained in geography and really appreciates geography and thinks of geography not as something that’s just fixed and static, but rather, I kind of live by this motto. It’s a punchline from the book. Geography is what we make of it. And Canada making the most of its geography is literally one of the great human stories of this century.

Jordan I’m fascinated, obviously, by what happens to Northern countries like Canada. But I also just want to ask you, what does it look like then near the equator in 20 or 30 years? I mean, yes, tremendous amounts of migration. We’re not going to abandon that land. It’s not going to be completely uninhabitable, is it?

Parag No. Well, Equatorial regions are not necessarily as bad or as poorly kind of situated as other regions that are more extreme in their location. So I live on the equator right now, as we speak. I’m at one degree, 15 minutes north latitude in Singapore, and it’s a tropical jungle, so it will rain and it will continue to rain. And that’s a good thing in the sense that if you can divide the world in the future into two categories of geography in terms of suitability for human habitation, there are those that have water and those that don’t have water. So it’s not even so much whether you are at the equator, are you in a desert or desertified location or a place where the water tables have completely disappeared and there’s just no more groundwater, or a place where you have sufficient rainfall and reservoirs and irrigation and so forth.

So that said, in Singapore, obviously, you have to cope with rising sea levels. But rising sea levels are a risk North, south and Equatorial. So the places that are going to really suffer the most, and they already are, quite frankly, are particularly in South Asia, India and Pakistan. In Bangladesh the problem is too much water in India, there is a lot of drought. In Pakistan as well, in Iran, Middle Eastern countries, a number of African countries, North Africa, have already suffered extreme droughts. But of course, extreme droughts have come to the Western United States as well. It’s called a mega drought, what’s happening in the Western US.

So places that are afflicted by drought are probably the ones that we have to be the most concerned about in the future, because even with large scale water desalination projects, which are very expensive and behind schedule in many places, it takes a long time to implement them. And it doesn’t mean that people want to stay there. You don’t want to be dependent on a big industrial plant to provide your water, because there’s no rain and no agriculture. That’s hardly a stable, resilient situation for you as a person. It’s more likely that you’ll want to move. So the mass migrations of the present and the future are most certainly going to come from those geographies as well as others.

Jordan In terms of grappling with new demographics in some of these countries that will see a huge influx of migrants; a lot of cultural identity in Canada, at least currently is tied to the country for those born here, but also to the country of origin for many of the migrants. And is there a tipping point at which a new country becomes home, I guess, for a massive influx of new people?

Parag Well, that is itself evidence of how identity is not singular. Identity is manifold. It’s cumulative, as I like to say, it’s not singular because you have more and more people who still have ties and linkages and belief to their original homeland. And of course, the Internet and technology makes it possible for migration to be a physical one way street, but it’s not necessarily a cultural one way street. And I think that is a very positive trend that that is happening. Again. The term multiculturalism applies and is defended and debated more in Canada than any other country in the world. This notion of what multiculturalism means, and it’s not going to mean the same thing everywhere.

To take the example of Germany, again, they have a debate. And of course, it’s worth looking at a country that is more representative of the cultural and ethnic homogeneity of Western European societies. That, of course, have a very distinct and very kind of regrettable history of acting according to that. And the fact that today Germany has become a diverse immigrant society with a debate that they call “Der Neuen Deutschen”, the new Germans. And the question is not positing, how will you the migrants become like us, the natives. It’s saying, what are the common aspects of being here, of being a resident here that tie us together? And what do we all agree are the elements, the common elements of what it means to be a German in the year 2020, 2030 and beyond? And it’s something that’s being co defined.

And I think of Canadianness as something that’s always being co defined rather than a fixed, static thing. And I think that it’s obviously far more prominent in America for people to have a singular cultural ethnographic definition of what American means and to defend that. And I think that Canadians are less prone to that. And even those Canadians who may be prone to it probably accept the reality that you can’t reverse the demographic sort of diversity that represents the country today and would probably take more pragmatic approaches to the issue.

Jordan I want to ask you a question that I’ve seen asked in other places to other people and has come off as offensive. And let’s just state as the premise that climate change is an ongoing global catastrophe, however, is the premise of your argument that climate change is going to be good, for Canada at least?

Parag Well, it is true that even though climate change is a worldwide global phenomenon, that we’re not equally affected by it, therefore, we don’t have a common global approach. Witness our climate diplomacy today. So countries are relatively worse or better off from climate change. That’s just a fact. Again, some countries will have to be fully vacated and abandoned, whereas other places are what I call climate oases because they’re becoming more habitable and even comfortable to some degree. And that applies to Canada to some degree.

I don’t want to over generalize, because the climate is so fickle and finicky and indeterminate and chaotic that we are all also victims of climate change, even if there are opportunities, so that’s probably the better way of seeing it. Not that Canada is a winner, but are there opportunities, again, to diversify the economy, to brand oneself as a safe haven for people from around the world who can be contributors to our society and economy? Yes, Canada has that opportunity and is taking that opportunity.

But the dynamic kind of management of that challenge is going to be a constant and complex exercise. It’s not going to be easy because, again, how volatile climate change is. And remember, you’re also connected to the rest of the world. And so the disruptions in one place, even if they are cataclysmic ecologically, are still going to affect you because you may be importing things from there, and migrants may come from there. And so on.

Jordan The last thing I want to pose to you is I’m not sure about you, but this period of time, the last 5-10 years or so has felt extremely unstable politically in terms of climate in terms of obviously the past two years of a pandemic. And your book kind of indicates that this is a trend that at least for the short term future, is going to continue to accelerate. When you think about the big picture, how will this period look through the lens of history, assuming we’re around to write it?

Parag Well, I think we will be around. The question is how many people will be around because we’re actually reaching a demographic Plateau. So the first and one of the most significant things for which this era is going to be remembered is that kind of tipping point in the global population. Because 20 years ago, we thought the world population would continuously climb to 15 billion people, but nothing of the sort is going to happen. Instead, we’re reaching what I call in this book, peak humanity. The world population will probably peak at 9 billion people, which is far less than 15 billion people. Now, some might say that’s a good thing for the climate. But climate change also is accelerating irrespective of that demographic peak.

The second major facet of today’s life is, of course, climate change and the fact that it is so disruptive that it is pushing people left, right and center all over the place. And I had to conclude, I mean, the way I framed the book is that this is about how humanity responds to the complexity at the intersection of this demographic peak, climate change, geopolitical disruptions, technological changes like automation and so forth. All of that is happening at the same time and slamming us at the same time. How do we, as individual agents, respond? And how do we scatter ourselves around the planet in search of a new kind of stability? And I foresee that our migration patterns, leading towards a future human geography, are going to be so different from today that it’s upsetting thousands of years in a way of geographical stability. And so that’s obviously what I think this particular era is going to be most known for looking back.

Jordan Parag, thank you so much for this. Thank you for the book. And what a fascinating conversation I feel like I learned a lot.

Parag Likewise. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Jordan Parag Khanna, author of Move: the Forces Uprooting Us .

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Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow. Back to top of page