Humankind is a species on the move. Ever since the East African savannah –unless it was, after all, the seashore- got too tight an environment for us, we have been trying to get to the other side of the hill, where the grass is reputed to be so much greener. Few of us, however, ever left Africa. We do not yet know about the Australian Aborigines, but the whole rest of us living outside our ancient homeland appear to be descended from something like 75,000 people who left Africa some 100,000 years ago –whether we are Chinese, Comanche, Russian or Spaniard. There are very few cultures that do not have some sort of a migration myth, such as the Jewish Exodus, whose origins are lost in time. The Basques are one of those exceptions –they seem not to have left their mountains since mammoths roamed the land.

The emergence of the modern nation state in late eighteenth-century Europe did nothing to stop people migrating. In fact, that epoch saw a new wave of mass migration –this time, to America. Fifty-something years after the French Revolution, millions of Irish, driven by the Great Hunger, crossed the Atlantic. The New World provided a place where Europeans could go to escape the demographic pressure of the old continent, along with the more political pressures and wars that shaped European life.

At the onset of the Industrial Revolution, Europe went through a period of explosive
population growth. The lands on the other side of the sea were needed badly.
Today, we see a new global mass migration. Europe, North America, Japan and Australia attract people from less wealthy regions of the world, while the Islamic world is going through a demographic expansion comparable to that of eighteenth-century Europe. Additionally, global warming threatens to destroy the scarce resources Africans, Asians, and South Americans live on –UN functionary Klaus Töpfer dubs the process a ‘prolonged environmental aggression of the North against the South.’
Unsustainably bad conditions back home combine with an equally unsustainably high
standard of living elsewhere to set in motion a mass movement in a Northern direction.
Consequently, Northerners feel threatened by people desperate enough to risk their
lives wandering, tramping the whole of the African continent and often enough crossing
the desert on foot. People who are captured are sent back into misery –the greater part of them tries again, often perishing in the attempt. It seems clear that erecting walls is not a solution –the question is, is there a solution?








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