The world’s first international migrants left home as indentured labour to work on railways, ships, mines and plantations in distant lands, and stayed on. The world’s newest migrants are temporary workers who, typically, leave home to work elsewhere for limited periods as contract labourers, maybe, or professionals, and having made their piles, come back.
In between, the world has seen vast movements of people across national boundaries, and Asia, being the most populous region in the world, has formed the main stream of this traffic. Economic compulsions gradually took over from colonial interests, leaving Little Indias, Little Chinas, Little Japans, and Little Koreas all over the world, while political conflicts, like India’s partition and the Vietnam War, sent huge tsunamis of international refugees. A new tide could be waiting to sweep down from Afghanistan.
Today, according to Bangkok-based International Organisation for Migration, every 33rd person in the world is a migrant, or some 214 million in absolute terms. If current trends hold and nations’ gaps between the demand and supply of skilled and unskilled workers, because of demographic factors, keep widening, the number could swell to 405 million by 2050. Most of them would be Asians.
Migration is now an inalienable feature of our globalised world, and societies, governments and politicians must come to terms with it. But because of economic and racial tensions that migrants often tend to evoke in host countries, and the fact that the flow of migrants is also intra-regional, Asian governments face a challenge that’s all the more complicated and difficult.
While five Asian countries – India, China, Bangladesh, the Philippines and Pakistan – have emerged in a recent Pew Research Centre study among the top 10 sources of international migration, the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific reports that Asian countries themselves host over 53 million documented foreigners on their soil, mostly in West Asia and North and Central Asia but increasingly in South and Southeast Asia. According to recent Gallup surveys of 119 countries, one in four adults worldwide would like to go to another country for temporary work, and China’s rapid economic growth has made it an increasingly popular destination. Singapore, Japan and India are among other countries migrant workers would love to go to.
Now, a different, but potentially overwhelming, migration challenge faces Asia and the world and threatens to grow — that of people displaced by climatic disasters and environmental changes. A report published by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) last month said more than 42 million people were victims of direct natural calamities in this region alone in the last two years, some of whom became migrants within their own countries. The number would be much higher if people affected by slow environmental changes, such as desertification, rising sea levels, or coastal erosions, were to be added.
Although this type of migration is mainly intra-national, its implications are no less serious since the effect is immediate and directly concerns the lives and livelihoods of large numbers of people. The danger is clear and present, as Asia’s climatic hotspots occupy a vast swathe of territory, covering densely-populated coastal areas of China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Mekong and Irrawaddy deltas, even mega-cities like Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila. Left unattended, the problem could escalate into serious socio-economic upheavals.
Calling it a humanitarian threat, ADB urges governments to draw up comprehensive systems to manage disaster risks, introduce better insurance and rehabilitation schemes, and treat the issue of disaster migration as a call to ramp up their response to climate change, working with neighbours where needed.
The urgency of this advice would be apparent from the experience of two recent catastrophes whose consequences still linger. Last December, a powerful typhoon, Sendong, hit the Philippines in an area of northern Mindanao that had never been struck before, killing 2,000 people and leaving more than 211,000 homeless. Many are still stranded in temporary shelters and transitory relocation sites, while many others have migrated to cities in search of work, if there’s any.
Four years ago, cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar’s Irrawaddy delta, the deadliest ever in the country’s history, killing some 138,000 people and causing damages estimated at over $10 billion. The government is still struggling to cope with its aftermath, politics and inefficiency having severely affected relief work in the early days.
While direct calamities intensify, indirect dangers keep mounting. According to the Centre for Global Development (CGD) in Washington DC, rising sea levels could uproot up to 37.2 million people in India alone by 2050, making it the most vulnerable among Asian nations. Bangladesh (with 27 million potential victims), China (22.3 million), Indonesia (20.9 million), the Philippines (13.6 million), Vietnam (9.5 million) and Japan (9.2 million) are the others on CDG’s list of vulnerable countries that must plan, jointly and severally, to deter the creeping apocalypse.
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