Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [44]
THE ARRIVAL CITY IN THE POST-MIGRATION NATION
The presence of a Central American peasant, like Mario Martinez, in Los Angeles, or a family of Bangladeshi villagers, like the Tafaders, in the East End of London, strikes many people as an aberration, an artifact of the past or a political mistake. In this age of border controls, high-technology information economies, and selective immigration policies, we often think there should be no reason to have large masses of the developing world’s rural poor forming enclaves in the cities of the West. In many western European countries, in Canada, the United States, and Australia, governments respond to the arrival city not by making it function better but by trying to pretend that village-origin migration won’t happen or can be permanently stopped or filtered out.
This is a perilous mistake. The great wave of rural–urban migration that will transform the developing world in this century will also be the main source of major, century-long migration flows from the world’s South and East to the cities of the West. The flow may be slowed or stopped in certain countries for limited periods, but the larger arrival is economically and politically inevitable. It is already happening. Today there are more rural migrants in the cities of North America, Europe, and Australia than there have been at any time since the early twentieth century. Every year, more than five million people move from the largely rural developing world into the urbanized West.
The arrival city is a major phenomenon in the West, and its citizens are the same people who occupy the arrival cities of the developing world. About 150 million foreign-born people live in the wealthy quarter of the world, accounting for about 8 percent of Europe’s population, 13 percent of North America’s, and 19 percent of Australia’s. They tend to be rural-born. The largest group of immigrants in Europe and the United States come from villages or regional cities in rural areas of the developing world and have migrated more or less directly to large cities. While it is not possible to quantify the rural-urban breakdown of immigrants (officials from the Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs tell me they would desperately like to have such statistics, but they are prohibitively difficult to collect), we anecdotally know that the rural-born make up the largest group of new arrivals in western Europe and the United States and of foreign-born citizens in Canada and Australia. Most migrants to the United States are Latin Americans, who overwhelmingly migrate from villages. They account for 18 million people, or 6 percent of the population; with their offspring, they number 40 million, or 14 percent of the population. In the European Union, there are legally 4.5 million people from North Africa, three million from the rest of Africa, five million from the Middle East and Turkey, 2.5 million from South America, and 1.7 million from the Indian subcontinent; most of these groups tend strongly to come from rural places.
Internal European Union migration also has a large village-to-city component. The largest group of migrants from Poland, Romania, and the Baltic states in western European cities are those who come from rural areas. Europe is also home to between five and 10 million migrants who live and work without proper authorization, most of whom come from rural areas in adjoining regions of Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. There are exceptions to the rural–urban pattern on both the sending and the receiving side: Places like Colombia and Egypt have