Here we go again. Migrants have become the populists’ favourite boogeyman – the convenient reason behind every perceived ailment plaguing the nation. Nothing seems to work quite as effectively as pointing fingers at people who look and sound different. It’s the oldest political trick in the book: punch down instead of up, and watch the crowd cheer.

But this tired scapegoating obscures an inconvenient truth: as Lydia Polgreen explores in her series The Great Migration (paywalled – archived view here), the countries busy maligning migrants are actually in desperate need of new people.

“Country after country in the wealthy world is facing a top-heavy future, with millions of retirees and far too few workers to keep their economies and societies afloat. In the not-so-distant future, many countries will have too few people to sustain their current standard of living.”

She paints a picture of a future where wealthy countries (which will include China, by the way) will have to really compete for migrants. But beyond the clear economic imperatives, migration serves as a catalyst for renewal, bringing new energy precisely when societies need it most:

“Whatever nightmare pressed people to leave home – war, famine, natural disaster – their arrival unleashes torrents of human dynamism. The movement of people, even or especially under duress, is inextricably tied with human progress.”

“Having the will to leave, to seek out something new and leave everything and everyone you know behind, is a profound act of self-creation. The panic about migration, it strikes me, is really a panic about the future – and about progress. Migrants are individuals making a profound, risky bet that by undertaking the rare and difficult decision to leave home, they can build something new. Behind opposition to migration is often the reverse: a belief that the only way to protect the future is to make it more like the mythic past, to build something old. But this approach, as we will see, has never been a formula for human flourishing.”

Borders, of course, are merely imaginary lines we’ve drawn on maps. The rest of the natural world hasn’t received this memo, thankfully. As Willow Defebaugh writes beautifully for Atmos, we need only look to our fellow creatures to understand that movement across vast distances is both natural and necessary:

“All across the Earth, in its seas and skies, over manmade borders, courageous crossings and voyages are underway: generations making sacrifices for the ones to follow, seeking new suns, carrying culture and songs, sustaining and shaping life along the way. From Los Angeles to Gaza, all beings should be free to roam or remain. For ferried in the refrain of every whalesong, in every breeze that monarchs float on, nature reminds us that migration is sacred.”

Migration inevitably brings with it some challenges – that’s simply the nature of change. But rather than treating human movement merely as a crisis to be solved, we should recognise it as a profound, necessary expression of hope, resilience and our capacity to imagine a better future. The alternative, as we’re learning, is a world growing smaller, angrier and greyer by the day. – Kai