The North Goes South Or The South Comes North

February 29, 2016 by Graham E. Fuller •

The North Goes South Or The South Comes North
Graham E. Fuller (grahamefuller.com)
29 February 2016
It does not take much imagination to see where refugees are taking the world over the longer run.
This issue currently lies at the heart of some very ugly American politics. It is also tearing apart one of the noblest political experiments in human history, the EU. It is radicalizing broad regions  of the world and fueling global violence, from Myanmar to Tunisia and South Africa.
The basic conclusion is simple: either the North goes to the South, or the South comes to the North.
The meaning of South coming North is already clear: conditions in the South are driving refugees to  flee to the North. Most refugees bring along serious political, social, economic and cultural problems of their homelands which complicate their ready integration into the North. This is especially true in smaller, and hence more culturally fragile countries in Europe—“nation-states” that possess unique cultural and social balance that any major influx of foreigners will disrupt. There is only one unique Netherlands or Denmark, or Estonia, or Norway. They are not classical “immigrant nations” as are the vast spaces of the US, Canada, Australia, even Russia and Latin America. 
This larger long-term movement of populations is certain. Existing conditions in large numbers of countries in the “South” are becoming untenable—poverty, disease, misgovernance, conflict, environmental degradation, unemployment. Many of these blights are locally generated. But the West cannot deny its role in this as well. Western imperialism, remember, took over most of the known world for a good century or more; its sole purpose was to benefit the imperial metropole through resource extraction; the world order was designed to facilitate those gains. Its blessings to the colonized were mixed, to say the least. 
But the blame game is not important here—the current reality is that we face a global problem of massive proportions however we ascribe the causes. And affixing blame does not solve the problem either. What is certain is that the problem today has now arrived on the doorstep of the affluent North. http://grahamefuller.com/the-north-goes-south-or-the-south-comes-north/