Canary in the coal mine
by digby
Take the time to read this. It is an investigation of an emerging refugee crisis happening right before our eyes and one which could result in something very, very dangerous happening to the world order:
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| Passage to Europe: common migration routes from sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. |
The article is a discussion of how Europe is dealing with this and it’s quite interesting. I think we already know how the strains are manifesting themselves politically and it’s likely to become much more unstable over time.
This is being driven by economics, war and climate change (the latter of which is heavily influencing the former.) And it is likely to be a precursor of similar issues manifesting themselves elsewhere.
I don’t think people have quite grasped exactly how the climate crisis is going to play itself out. True, there will be massive environmental impacts. But it’s the way people react to them that’s going to affect us the most. There will be more wars and more migration.
It’s one of the reasons why our homegrown “immigration debate” is so dumb. We’ve been adequately dealing with migration from the south for centuries, as we “allowed” workers to come over and fill jobs that nobody else would do and then travel back or send money to families back home. It’s not a crisis. It’s normal. But at some point this may become a different issue and we should be prepared to think about how to handle it when it does. The kids at the border last summer are a little preview of what could happen.
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