Speaking with a friend about the migrant crisis in the United States, she made an interesting observation. Many of the most prosperous Western nations in the world today are facing the same problem. They’re flooded with migrants who are overwhelming the system, infuriating the citizenry, adding fiscal burdens, disrupting public order and leading to possible political instability.
Interesting question: Why after many multiple decades of only localized migrant issues, most having to do with border wars or other disruptions, have so many nations at once dealt with floods of people exploiting broken migration systems? In other words, how did a local problem become a global problem so quickly? How did all border systems break at once? And consider the problem before this one. We had a globalized response to the COVID crisis. In most nations of the world, the policy response was eerily similar.
There was masking, distancing, closures, travel restrictions and capacity limits, while big business was allowed to stay open. The same methods, which have no modern precedent, were attempted in all countries in the world except a few. The states that didn’t go along faced unrelenting attacks from world media.
The problem of migration plus pandemic planning are only two data points but they both suggest an ominous reality. The nation-states that have dominated the political landscape since the Renaissance, and even back in some cases to the ancient world, are giving way to a new form of .