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Aside from cold winters, NORC cities also count among the world’s happiest places to live. According to the London-based Economist Intelligence

Some Common Measures of Economic of Economic Globalization, Percefulness, and Civil Liberties, Relative to the World

(Source: 2009 Index of Economic Freedom, Heritage Foundation, and Wall Street Journal (179 countries); 2008 Economic Freedom of the World Index (141 countries); 2009 KOF Index of Globalization (208 countries); 2009 Global Peace Index (144 countries); 2008 Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index (167 countries); 2009 Freedom in the World Country Rankings (193 countries))

Unit, four of them rank among the world’s top ten most livable cities (with Vancouver in first place), citing low crime, little threat from political instability or terrorism, and excellence in education, health care, infrastructure, and culture.434 Remember Lagos, Dhaka, and Karachi, three megacities of 2025 presented in Chapter 2? They scored in the bottom ten.

Acceptance of Global Immigrants

But it takes more than just natural resources in the ground, ameliorating climate, stable governance, and pleasant cities for a civilization to expand. It also takes people.

Like the rest of the developed world, all eight NORC countries are graying and fertility rates dropping. The Russian Federation also faces a sharp population contraction (projected to fall -17% by 2050, see table on p. 173). However, the other seven are expected to grow anywhere from +1% to +31% by 2050. Much of this growth will come from international immigration.435 Thus, global flows of people are already changing the face of the Northern Rim and are critically important to how its future will unfold.

The specific rules and quotas of future immigration policies are impossible to divine here. However, an examination of current laws and trends reveals some surprisingly different attitudes toward foreigners among the NORC countries. National policies differ on the number, origin, and skill sets of foreign immigrants admitted. And culturally, some places are more welcoming than others.

The Russian Federation faces the bleakest prospect. Its demographics are in free fall, with sixteen people dying for every ten new babies being born.436 Its total population is now dropping by nearly eigtht hundred thousand people per year. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, some three million ethnic Russians moved from former satellites into the new Russian Federation, but by 2003 that wave of return had largely ended. In an effort to repatriate more, the Putin administration created a national program to recruit twenty million Russian expatriates to “return home” in 2006. However, it now appears impossible to attract more than two and a half million in total, even counting migrants from the Baltic States.437

Russia’s labor pool for construction, agriculture, and other seasonal work thus depends heavily on migrants from Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, and—increasingly—China in the Far East. Many are “irregular migrants” and would be called “undocumented workers” or “illegal aliens” in the United States. Perhaps ten million may be living inside Russia. Up to a million Tajiks—almost half of the entire workforce of Tajikistan—migrate to Russia in search of seasonal work each year.

Russian leaders have long realized they need to raise legal immigration into the country, but policies to do so are unpopular. Before the spring 2008 elections the Putin administration slashed the quota for foreign labor migrants from six million to two, and several years earlier abolished laws allowing multinational firms to easily hire skilled foreign workers. The reason for such moves is purely political, as Russia suffers from widespread xenophobia. Resentment of foreign migrants runs deep, especially in large cities where they tend to concentrate. In 2008 alone, at least 525 migrants suffered hate-crime attacks, with 97 of them killed.438

The United States is similar to the Russian Federation in that its economy