Today’s border crossings
are unprecedented in scale
and implication.


By JASON DePARLE

PERHAPS NO FORCE in modern life is as omnipresent yet overlooked as global migration, that vehicle of creative destruction that is reordering ever more of the world.

Overlooked? A skeptic may well question the statement, given how often the topic makes news . After all, Arizona’s campaign against illegal immigrants set off debates from Melbourne to Madrid.

But migration also shapes the landscape beneath the seemingly unrelated events of the headlines. It is a storybehind- the-story, a complicating tide.

Even people who study migration for a living struggle to fully grasp its effects. “Politically, socially, economically, culturally - migration bubbles up everywhere,” James F. Hollifield, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said. “We often don’t recognize it.”

What prompted Google to close an office in China, rather than accept government censorship? Many factors, no doubt. But among those cited by Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, was the repression his family suffered during his childhood in the Soviet Union before they immigrated to the United States.

Immigration quickened the bitter split in the American labor movement. In 2005, a half dozen unions left the venerable American Federation of Labor to form a rival federation, Change to Win. The dissidents counted more low-wage immigrants in their membership.

The split, in turn, has had repercussions beyond the labor movement. Janice Fine, a political scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, noted that the Change to Win unions played a critical (some have argued decisive) role in the early stages of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

“If they were inside the larger bureaucracy, it would have been harder for them to make an early endorsement and move money his way,” Professor Fine said.

Theorists sometimes call the movement of people the third wave of globalization, after the movement of goods (trade) and the movement of money (finance) that began in the previous century.

While global trade and finance are disruptive they are disruptive in less visible ways. A shirt made in Mexico can cost an American worker his job. A worker from Mexico might move next door, send his children to public school and need to be spoken to in Spanish.

One reason migration seems so potent is that it arose unexpectedly. As recently as the 1970s, immigration seemed of such little importance that the United States Census Bureau decided to stop asking people where their parents were born.

Now, a quarter of the residents of the United States under 18 are immigrants or immigrants’ children.

The United Nations estimates that there are 214 million migrants across the globe, an increase of about 37 percent in two decades. Their ranks grew by 41 percent in Europe and 80 percent in North America. “There’s more mobility at this moment than at any time in world history,” said Gary P. Freeman, a political scientist at the University of Texas.

The most famous source countries in Europe - Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain - are suddenly migrant destinations, with Ireland electing a Nigerian-born man as its first black mayor in 2007.

As contentious as the issue is in America, the Americans’ capacity to absorb immigrants remains the envy of many Europeans (including those not inclined to envy Americans). Still, today’s challenges differ from those of the (mythologized) past. At least four differences set this age apart and amplify migration’s effects.

First is migration’s global reach. The movements of the 19th century were mostly trans-Atlantic. Now, Nepalis staff Korean factories and Mongolians do scut work in Prague. Persian Gulf economies would collapse without armies of guest workers.

Within the United States, immigrants are spread across dozens of “new gateways” unaccustomed to them, from Orlando to Salt Lake City.

A second factor that increases migration’s impact is its feminization: nearly half of the world’s migrants are now women, and many have left children behind. Their emergence as breadwinners is altering family dynamics across the developing world. And sex trafficking is now a global concern.

Technology introduces a third break from the past: the huddled masses reached Ellis Island without cellphones or Webcams.

Now a nanny in Manhattan can talk to her child in Zacatecas or vote in Mexican elections and watch Mexican television shows. This “transnationalism” is a comfort but also a concern for those who think it impedes integration.

In the age of global jihad, it may also be a security threat. The Pakistani immigrant who pleaded guilty last month to the attempted bombing of Times Square said that jihadi lectures reached him from Yemen, via the Internet.

At least one other trait amplifies the impact of modern migration: the expectation that governments will control it.

In America for most of the 19th century, there was no legal barrier to entry. The issue was contentious, but the government attracted little blame.

Now Western governments are expected to keep trade and tourism flowing and respect ethnic rights while sealing borders . Their failures weaken the broader faith in federal competence.

“It basically tells people that government cannot do its job,” said Demetri Papademetriou, a co-founder of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington research group. “It creates the anti-government rhetoric we see, and the anger people are feeling.”


Africans who were rescued at sea near Tarifa, Spain, are among about 214 million migrants who struggle worldwide. Below, migrants on a construction site in Dubai. / ANDY RAGEL/ASSOCIATED PRESS; BELOW LEFT, TYLER HICKS/THE NEW YORK TIMES



An asylum seeker emerges from a tanker truck near the port of Calais, in northern France . / PASCAL ROSSIGNOL/REUTERS