interviews
Water and the American West
by Richard Frank
October 25, 2021
This interview with Richard Frank, professor of environmental practice at the UC Davis School of Law and Director of the California Environmental Law and Policy Center, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Can you tell me a little bit about the story of water and how it's tied to the West, and to California in particular?
Richard | A friend of mine who's a Court of Appeals Justice here in California wrote an opinion on a water law dispute and started it with the quote, "the history of California is written on its waters." And I think that the point is true of the entire American West.
Water policy and legal issues are inextricably tied to the development of the Western United States; water is the limiting factor in so many ways to settlement, to economic development, to prosperity, and to the environment and environmental preservation.
Can you talk about the difference between groundwater and surface water– and the policies that regulate each?
There are really two types of water when it comes to human consumption. There's surface water: that is the water that is transmitted by lakes, rivers, and streams. Then there is groundwater, and a substantial amount of water that Americans and the American West rely on is groundwater. That is water that is stored in groundwater aquifers, which are naturally occurring groundwater basins. Both groundwater and surface water are critical to the American West and its economy and its culture.
Traditionally a couple of things are important to note, first of all, water is finite. Second, water gets allocated in the Western United States generally at the state level. There's a limited federal role. Primarily, policy decisions about who gets how much water for what purpose are made state by state.
I think allocation is really interesting in that it's more state-level than federal. How was water and the allocation of water in California designed? Is it a public-private combination? What goes on in terms of the infrastructure of water?
Another very good question. The answer is it depends. Most of our water infrastructure is public in nature.
Again, in the American West, the regulation of water rights is generally done at the state level, but the federal government, historically, has a major water footprint in the American West because it has been federal dollars and federal design and management that really controlled much of the major water infrastructure in the American West — you know, Hoover Dam, and the complex system of dams and reservoirs on the Colorado River in California, with the Central Valley Project that was built and managed by the federal government with Shasta Dam on the upper Sacramento River as the centerpiece of that project. But we also have a California State Water Project, the key facility being the Oroville Dam and reservoir on the Southern River that is managed by state water managers. If we were starting over, that kind of parallel system would make no particular engineering or operational sense.
But, we are captive to our history.
And then you have these massive systems of aqueducts and canals that move water from one place to another throughout the American West. They are particularly responsible for moving water from surface water storage facilities to population centers. In the last 50 to 75 years, these population centers have really expanded dramatically, so you need massive infrastructure to deliver water from those storage facilities, the dams, and reservoirs, which generally are located in remote areas to the population centers. So it takes a lot of time and energy to transport the water, from where it is captured and stored to where it is needed for human use.
California has faced continuous drought – what measures is the state taking now to manage water?
Just to frame the issue a little bit — we have, as I mentioned, a growing population in the American Southwest at a time when the amount of available water is shrinking due to drought and due to the impacts of climate change. We have growing human demand for residential and commercial purposes and at the same time, we have a shrinking water supply. That is a huge looming crisis.
And it is beginning to play out in real-time. You see that playing out in real-time. For example, several different states and Mexico rely on Colorado River flows based on an allocation system that was created in the 1920s, which is overly optimistic about the amount of available water. From the 1920s until now, that water supply has decreased, and decreased, and decreased. Now you have interstate agreements, and in the case of Mexico, international agreements that allocate the finite Colorado river water supplies based on faulty, now obsolete, information. It is a real problem.
What measures do you take now, knowing this information?
If you look at the US Drought Monitor, it is obvious the problem is not limited to the Colorado River. We are in a mega-drought, so cutbacks are being imposed by federal and state water agencies to encourage agricultural, urban, and commercial water users to cut their water use and, and stretch finite supplies as much as possible through conservation efforts.
In California, we have the State Water Resources Control Board, the state water regulator in California, and they have issued curtailment orders. Meaning, they have told water rights holders, many of whom have had those water rights for over a hundred years, that, for the first time, the water that they feel they are entitled to, is not available. Local water districts are also issuing water conservation mandates; the San Francisco water department is doing that, in Los Angeles, the metropolitan water district, is urging urban users to curtail their efforts.
And then agriculture. Agricultural users — farmers and ranchers — have had to get water rights in many cases through the federal government, as the federal government is the operator of these water projects. They have contracts with water users, individual farmers, ranchers, or districts, and they are now issuing curtailment orders. They're saying, we know you contracted for X amount of water for this calendar year, but we are telling you because of the drought shortages we don't have that water to supply. Our reservoirs are low at Lake Shasta or at the Oroville Dam.
When you drive from San Francisco to LA on the five, you see a lot of signage from the agricultural farming community about water. There's apparently some frustration about this. What are the other options for them?
About 80% of all human consumed water goes to agriculture. That is by far the biggest component of water use, as opposed to 20% used for urban and commercial, and industrial purposes.
Over the years, ranchers and farmers, and agricultural water districts assumed that the water would always be there — as we all do.
And the farmers and ranchers have, in hindsight, exacerbated the problem by bringing more and more land into production. You see on those drives between San Francisco and Los Angeles, particularly in the San Joaquin Valley, all these orchards are being planted. Orchards are more lucrative crops than row crops — cotton, alfalfa, and rice. But, if you are growing a row crop, you can leave the land fallow in times of drought.
We don't have to plant. If the water stopped there, or if it's too expensive to get, it may make economic sense, but if you have an orchard or a vineyard it's a high value, those are high value crops, you don't have that operational flexibility and they need to be irrigated in wet years and in dry years. Now, you see these orchards, which were only planted a few years ago, are now being uprooted because the farmers realized that they don't have the water necessary to keep those vineyards and orchards alive. For ranchers, the same thing is true with their herds. They don’t have enough water for their livestock.
The water shortage has never been drier than it is right now. Farmers and ranchers are being deprived of water that they traditionally believed was theirs and they're very understandably, very unhappy about it. They see it as a threat to their livelihood and to the livelihood of the folks who work for them. Their anger and frustration are to be expected, but it's nobody's fault.
To say, as some farmers do, that it is mismanagement by state and federal government officials, I think is overly simplistic and misplaced in the face of a mega-drought. Everybody's going to have to sacrifice. Everybody's going to have to be more efficient in how they use water. All sectors are going to need to be more efficient with the water that does exist.
Looking at this percentage breakdown of water use – is it actually important for individual users to change their water habits?
Well, every little bit helps. When you're talking about homeowners, about 70% of urban water use is for outdoor irrigation. So we're talking parks and cemeteries and golf courses and folks' yards. You know, that used to be considered part of that American dream and the California dream — you would have a big lawn in front of your house and behind your house. Truth be told, that has never made much sense in an arid environment. That's where the water savings in urban areas is critical in the way it really involves aesthetics rather than critical human needs, like water for drinking and bathing and sanitation purposes. There is a growing movement away from big lawns, and away from the type of landscaping that you see in the Eastern US — there is no drought in the Eastern United States. As Hurricane Ida and other recent storms have shown, the problem is too much water, or rather than too little in most of the Eastern United States. So it really is a tale of two countries.
We just need to recognize that the American West is an arid region. It has always been an arid region, we can't make the desert bloom with water that doesn't exist. We need to be more efficient in how we allocate those water supplies. And it seems to me in an urban area, the best way to conserve and most effective way is to reduce urban landscaping, which is the major component of urban water use.
You also write about water markets and making them better – for those who don’t know, what is the water market?
Water markets, that is, the voluntary transfer of water between water users, is more robust in some other Western states. Again Arizona and New Mexico come to mind. California somewhat surprisingly is behind the curve. We are in the dark ages compared to other states. Water markets are kind of anecdotal. There is not much of a statewide system. It is done at the local level, through individual transactions without much oversight and without much transparency. And I have concerns about all of those things.
I believe conceptually watermarks are a way to stretch scarce, finite water resources to make water use more efficient. I can, for example, allow farmers or ranchers to sell water to urban uses or commercial usage or factories in times of drought.
Farmers sometimes can make more money by farming water, than they can by farming crops.
There are efficiencies to be gained here.
The problem in my view is really one of transparency. The water markets are not publicly regulated, and some of the people who are engaging in water transactions like it that way, frankly, they want to operate under the radar.
In my opinion, water markets need to be overseen by a public entity rather than private or nonprofit entities. We need oversight and transparency, so that folks like you and myself can follow the markets to see who's selling water to whom, for what purpose, and make sure that those water transfers serve the public interests and not just the private interests.
There have been a number of stories in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Salt Lake City Tribune about efforts in some parts to privatize water transfer. Hedge fund managers are buying and selling water, as a means of profiting. And it strikes me that when you're talking about an essential public resource — and in California, it is embedded in the law that public water is an inherently public resource, that water is owned by the public and it can be used for private purposes, but it is an inherently public resource — the idea of commoditizing water through the private, opaque markets is very troublesome to me. I think it represents a very dangerous trend and one that needs to be corrected and avoided.
Why is California so behind?
There's no good reason for it. It's largely inexplicable that since the state was created on September 9th, 1860, we've been fighting over water. In the 19th century, it was miners versus farmers ranchers. In the 20th century, with the growth of urban communities, the evolution of California into one of the most populous states with 40 million Californians, it has been a struggle between urban and agricultural uses of water.
In the second half of the 20th century, there was a recognition that some component of water had to be left in streams to protect ecosystems, landscape, and wildlife, including the threatened and endangered wildlife. That suggestion has made agricultural users in California angry. You will see those signs that allude to the idea that food and farming are more important than environmental values. I don't happen to believe that's true. I believe both are critically important to our society. But the advocates for the environment have a proverbial seat at the water table. So that's another demand for water allocation that exists.
Do you maintain optimism?
Yes. I think it's human nature to look on the bright side. I try to do that through research scholarships and teaching. There are models for how we can do this better in the United States. Israel and Saudi Arabia and Singapore are far more efficient with their water policies and efforts. Australia went through a severe megadrought. They came out of it a few years ago, but they used that opportunity to dramatically reform their water allocation systems. That's an additional model. I think most people would agree in hindsight that their previous system was antiquated, and not able to meet the challenges of climate change and the growing water shortage in some parts of the world.
Here in the United States, we can learn from those efforts. There are also some ways to expand the water supply. Desalination for one. Again, Singapore and Saudi Arabia have led the world in terms of removing the salt content from ocean water and increasing water supply that way. In Carlsbad, California, north of San Diego, we have the biggest desalination plant in the United States right now, and that is currently satisfying a significant component of the San Diego metropolitan areas’ water needs. It's more expensive than other water supplies, but the technology is getting more refined, so the cost of desalinated water is coming down at a time when other water supplies, due to shortages and the workings of the free market are going up.
At some point, they're going to meet or get closer. Unlike some of my environmental colleagues, I think desalination is an important part of the equation.
In a proposal that came up in the recall election, one of the candidates was talking about how we just need to build a canal from the Mississippi River to California to take care of all our problems. That ignores political problems associated with that effort, as well as the massive infrastructure costs that would be required to build and maintain a major aqueduct for 2000 miles from the Mississippi to California. That's just not going to happen. Some of those pie in the sky thoughts of how we expand the water supply, I think, are unrealistic.
interviews
The Mobility Mandala
by Daniel Naujoks
July 25, 2019
This interview with Daniel Naujoks was conducted and condensed by frank news.
Where are you from originally?
Daniel Naujoks: I'm from Berlin, Germany. When we talk about constructing a big wall, I tell people, "I grew up next to the wall." All my childhood I grew up next to a wall. I was lucky I was on the side of the wall that allowed me to cross it if I wanted to. But it was a wall that cost a lot of lives – and everyone celebrated once it came down.
Were you there when it came down?
DN: I was in Berlin at the time, yeah.
Wow. What does your work focus on now?
DN: I'm a migration researcher. Many people define themselves in terms of discipline, and I have a PhD in political economy, and a law degree, but I'm really a migration researcher. I do socio-economic migration research, looking at policies, at people, at identities, at the impacts of human mobility on people's lives and on communities – where they go to, where they come from. I focus a lot on global migration. Most people focus very much on immigration, which is a really important issue because that affects local communities where you live. What I do in addition to that, is look at the broader picture globally. Most migration isn’t happening in northern America, or in Europe. North America, especially the U.S., is a very important immigration country. But there's a lot of migration happening within Africa, within Asia, between Asia and other parts of the world. Less so within northern America, even though we can see an uptake in migration there.
Looking at immigration only disregards what happens where people come from, the entire process of why people migrate, what happens to the families and communities where people come from. What I do in my own work is try to look at that more holistically. My first book was on India, looking at Indian immigrants to the U.S., and their transnational livelihoods. Their social connections in both places were shaped by policies and in turn, shaped economic and social outcomes in both the U.S. and in India.
My recent research is more on the global scale. I'm half based in academia, here at Columbia, but I do a lot of work with the UN. I'm a senior advisor to the UN Development Program, but also to the World Bank, the OECD, and other development agencies. There, we look at the impact mostly on communities of origin. People think of remittances, they ask for investments or brain drain – but my focus is a little broader.
The Mobility Mandala is a framework I developed that I hope will help channel some ideas into broader discussions about how migration is affecting development in many different settings.
Let’s talk about the Mobility Mandala.
In 2015, the global community adopted the 17 sustainable development goals, the SDGs or global goals, which really define the world's development agenda. Everything the UN does, the World Bank does, national governments do, with regard to economic development and broader ideas about development, is linked to the SDGs. They are the most important goals, and they include poverty, hunger, education, health, gender equality and economic growth, climate change and environment, conflict and human rights. Basically, any aspect you can think of about development is covered by the SDGs.
They're divided into 169 targets, and measured by 233 indicators that are currently still evolving. I've been working for the last couple of years with the UN, mostly with the UN Development Program, on the link between sustainable development, broadly defined, from happiness to water management, to peace, to climate change, to poverty and the classic ideas about development, and how they're linked to displacement and migration. There are several goals and targets within these goals that mention migration specifically. For example, target 10.7 – it's very important, it asks countries to facilitate orderly, safe, and responsible migration, including through well managed migration policies. That's actually in the global development goals. It was a huge milestone for migration being part of these global development endeavors.
Within the goal on economic growth and good jobs, target 8.8 looks at safeguarding migrant's social rights and labor rights, especially for women. These are really important targets. Human trafficking is, for example, mentioned in three different goals. Last year a report came out that I authored for the UN Working Group on Migration in the Arab region that's chaired by the International Organization for Migration, and the UN Economic and Social Commission of Western Asia, the regional commission of the UN. The report focuses on the many specific mentions of migration in the SDGs.
However, my Mandala is broader. At the center of the mandala are outcomes for sustainable development. Everything related to education, better jobs, higher income, less poverty, less hunger, less climate change, less displacement, all these are in the center of the mandala.
Sometimes we look at outcomes for migrants. How are their outcomes changed by mobility? Or, we look at the outcomes for people in host or home communities who are affected by migration. My first of four mandala domains is that development itself affects mobility.
The first is that a lack of development drives out-migration. We call it the ‘root cause’ discussion. The lack of development, the lack of jobs, the existence of crime, of war, pushes people out. It's based on some intuitive assumption, but I would like to caution that a lot of the ideas put forth by some of the policy actors and donors trying to address the root causes of migration, are a little short-sighted and problematic. But, of course, addressing what really is bad for people, addressing unemployment, is a good thing, addressing gender-based violence, conflict, and disaster risk is a good thing. But the wish to address these major points as a subfield of the migration agenda is generally not feasible and it can lead to some problematic policies.
Secondly, the lack of development may also lead into less favorable mobility, and that's something people often don't understand. Poorer people are not the most likely to migrate. It's often the lower middle class or middle class, who can afford to go. Because migration is costly. First, in terms of actual money, financial resources, but then it also requires social networks, who you know, how your degree will allow you to work and so on. All this often means that the lower the development in certain communities, the lower chance they have to migrate. Or, they may not be able to migrate regularly, right?
They have to take more high-risk, more expensive routes, because they don't get a visa to go to the places they want to go to. So, often, less development may lead to less favorable mobility, meaning, mobility with substantially higher risks and often with less beneficial outcomes.
Third, in the worst cases, the lack of development can trap populations. We've seen that in some areas, think of conflict, think of environmental disasters. Really poor people should be moving, but they can't because they can't afford it. Instead of addressing the root cause to diminish migration and reduce migration, in some cases, we actually need to help people migrate. In the current political discourse everything is about getting rid of migration, especially of poor people. But in some cases, from a human right's perspective, from a global development perspective, we need to help people migrate who are trapped by low income, by low resources and other development failures.
My fourth area is that positive development may attract immigrants and returnees. Many think only about how the lack of development pushes people out. But if you have better development, people will come back. Look at India, for example.
The development of certain jobs in the IT sector, spurred the return migration.
Many countries want to have immigration, but they don't see themselves as attractive destinations and target countries. Some countries say, "Oh, if we can portray our development better, then more people will come." Even Germany. They go out, have fairs and tell students and highly skilled people how great they are in order to attract them. They're able to portray their own development as very positive in order to attract migrants. Again, it's important to understand that not everything is about reducing immigration, there are many countries, and rightly so, in my opinion, that are interested in increasing immigration. So, in a nutshell, these are the four aspects on the first mandala domain on how development affects mobility.
The next domain of the Mobility Mandala is a really critical domain when we want to understand all the links between migration and development, which is ‘mobility as development.’ We don't look only at what's happening to communities of origin, like, remittances, what happens to the families staying behind, what happens to jobs, et cetera, in the countries of destination, we have look at the migrant themselves.
People want to migrate because they see more income generating possibilities, they see better access to infrastructure, to education, to health services. And often, migration leads to better outcomes for migrants. And that's a development outcome that's often not captured because there's no clear constituency for these migrants. They are already out of the country of origin, and the country of origin is more interest in people staying back, but they're too marginal in the country of destination to be counted. From a human right's perspective, from a global development perspective, getting people who have a lower income to migrate abroad, who now have a higher income, and better access to health and education, is a huge development gain for the migrants themselves.
I think that's important when we want to understand the broader implications.
“Adaptation strategy” is a very helpful term.
DN: Exactly. It's often used in the environmental migration context, but adaptation can be for anything, right? If there's unemployment, one adaptation strategy is to migrate. And domestically, we've seen it. If in Detroit, there are no jobs anymore, why don't you move somewhere else? For domestic, internal migration, this adaptation for economic livelihood strategies is well recognized. Whereas, internationally we haven't caught up with that.
But then, of course, we have to understand that not every migration leads to better outcomes. And this leads to the third domain of the Mobility Mandala. The second domain highlights the positive potential of mobility as an adaptation strategy. If you go out of the war zone, if you can leave as a refugee, that's per se good, because you'll tend to go somewhere where it's safer than it was where you were before. But, that being said, often people who leave, are either going through spaces of specific vulnerabilities, or they're ending up in a refugee camp. The Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya has been very well documented for people having been 30, 40 years there with no good development opportunities.
For economic migrants, it’s the same. They may have better earning potential, but there may be isolation, there may be strong racism and discrimination. There may be other areas that create vulnerabilities for migrants. And the SDGs have a particular focus on what we call, leaving no one behind. That's one of the central maximes of the development goals.
Thus, the third domain of the Mobility Mandala focuses on mobility-specific vulnerabilities. It reminds us to think about how immigrants, refugees, internally displaced persons, returnees, emigrants and diaspora populations shouldn't be barred from achieving development outcomes. The idea is how to get from domain three, that focuses on those particularly vulnerable populations, to domain two where mobility leads to increased capabilities and positive development outcomes.
The fourth and last domain of the Mobility Mandala is about how mobile populations affect development outside themselves. They can either be impacting the country of origin, through the mere fact that they're leaving, through sending back remittances, diaspora investments, through “social remittances”, which are values and ideas. I put that into air quotes because to send ideas is not as easy as sending money. But, the idea of social remittances is that, through social interactions with people in migrants’ country of origin, they can help change norms that may be viewed as better. Corporate social responsibility norms, for example, can be transmitted. Certain gender norms can be transmitted from the diaspora back home, and that can, in some circumstances, be considered good development. Another example are ideas about entrepreneurship.
Immigrants and refugees can have an impact on the host society. And that, again, is often portrayed badly, because we know from certain conservative media and publications that there's the idea that immigrants are taking jobs and lowering our wages.
In most circumstances, inflows of people, and not just highly skilled people, have a positive impact on the native borns and on the labor market there. It's very, very few instances – for example, when Syrians came into Lebanon where they now representing about 20% of Lebanon's population and where this sizeable inflow happened in a short period of time and into an economy that wasn’t able to adjust easily – that labor markets had an issue with adjusting to this large inflow. But that cannot be seen in most of the world.
The U.S., for example, has a much, much, much, lower percentage of immigrants, Europe has a much lower percentage of immigrants. So, here, where there's a gradual inflow of immigrants, or refugees, regular or irregular, they generally have a positive impact on development, and on the wages of native borns.
Can you give a tangible example of immigration / migration benefitting the labor market? There is a popular and common argument against that.
I don't want to go too deep into the economics of labor immigration – but the idea that immigrants come in and lower the wages is based on a very simplistic idea of the economy. It's based on the idea of the decreasing marginal productivity of labor. You have a downward slope of the labor productivity, which means, the more people work, the lower the wages. The idea and the static model is, immigration means increasing population. Hence, the marginal productivity of labor goes down, hence, the wages go down. Or, if the wages can't go down because there's unions, et cetera, that means you will have an increase in the unemployment rate. There are several issue with this model. First, the slope of this line is not really what we see in reality.
We've seen in Turkey, for example, a large inflow. Turkey right now is the largest host country for Syrian refugees and of refugees in general. About four million, 3.5 to 4.5 million, depending on whether you take UNHCR or government estimates. When Syrians first came, they competed with Turkish workers in the informal economy – agriculture, construction, and other sectors that can absorb informal labor. And that, of course, means they're competing against local labor. It means local labor will either be pushed out, or the wages go down. But, a lot of Turks invested in more skills, because they could do other things. There was an upscaling in certain segments of the labor market. That's the thing about the labor markets, they are not static, they normally react. That's one reason.
Another reason is that, in addition to those people who benefit, who are direct substitutes, there are also those who are complements. One of the examples is, if I have a director of a lab coming in from abroad, an Indian scientist who's taking over a laboratory, this person with new ideas needs lab assistants – other people. She might be competing with other lab directors, but she may have a lot of additional people who she will employ. There's a lot of this too.
The entire economy is a little bit more complicated. Even if there are sometimes smaller impacts, what people forget is that the U.S. economy is a $20 trillion economy. It's a huge economy. Immigrants make up a small part of the economy. The idea that some people like to paint that they are destroying our economy – no.
What does this mean for different populations and policies?
DN: Often, we look at refugees only as needing protection. But, refugees are also employers and employees and people who are active on the labor market. They too have an impact. That's why I'm talking about this Mobility Mandala, the migration mandala. Sometimes, putting people into these legal categories of refugees, because they need the protection, which is correct, and from a human right's perspective, and legal perspective, we need to give them this protection, but, from a broader development perspective, they also need to be considered as participants in the labor market, and the broader development schemes.
Then, of course, the question is, what are the right policy responses? Because, a lot of these policy responses are not just to say, "Oh, migration has an impact." It depends on accompanying measures. If I know there's large inflows of migrants, and I see that my local labor force is, in part, competing with those people, maybe I come up with a new skill development program and help my local labor force to step up in the ladder. It's not just that I have to believe in the market forces by themselves.
Because, again, we're not in closed economies, we're open economies. We have trade, we have other ways to adjust the economy. If we expand production, we can actually compete more at the global market, it's not just the internal market which is static.
We hear about how generous Canada is, how generous Europe is, there is a certain amount of generosity if you want to call it that, but, the large number of refugees are still hosted in the global south. Migrants migrating from the south, which is a large term used for developing countries or countries of lower income. We call it South-South migration, is larger than the number of South-North migration. Many think, "Oh, all the migrants are coming from the Global South, from the poor countries to us." But, there's a lot of migration between rich countries, or so called rich countries, for example, within Europe.
And between countries in the Global South. The largest migration of Africans is within Africa. The focus of Europe in all this, the perceived wave of African migrants coming to Europe or all these narratives that are portrayed by certain elements in Europe, are largely unfounded. Yes, there's a slight increase in migration and migration aspirations from Africa and elsewhere, but it's by no means menacing or overwhelming. There's huge migration between people in Burkina Faso and Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana is a huge immigration country in Western Africa. Morocco recently approved a new immigration law because of a lot of Senegalese and others are coming to work in the country. Botswana is a large magnet for people in southern Africa, as is South Africa. The idea that only the U.S. and only Canada, and only Germany, are magnets for migration doesn't correspond with realities. That's important to understand.
Is media too reactionary to the influx of immigrants into northern countries?
DN: Putting things in perspective definitely would be the right way to go. That is not restricted to the coverage of migration. I mean, if there's a snowstorm in New York, in Berlin, we have it on the news. If there is a major terrorist attack in Pakistan, well, there's a high likelihood that it will not be. A snowstorm in New York – should that be news? Yes, for us locally living in New York, that's a big deal. But, do Berliners really need to know about the snowstorm in New York? Whereas, I think they definitely should know about the terrorist attack that's happening in Pakistan. Take the attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris. It's great to have empathy, but then, the following week there was a huge massacre in Lebanon and nobody identified with that. That's, of course, a problem with the general reporting structure about how we create empathy, how media report about things. And that is one reason why there's more reporting about migration issues in Europe than there is about migration issues in South Africa or in Botswana.
People have always moved somehow. The passport is a recent invention, the passport is like 100 years old. There were several attempts, after it was introduced, to say, "Oh, it is unnatural to have passports, let's abolish passports." Today, it's hard to believe, how can you travel, how can you have mobility without a passport? With an identity document that either grants, or in most cases, restricts your mobility opportunities.
But, throughout most of the history of humankind, even in the time of nation states, there was no passport. People could move in different ways.
Even if we manage some parts of it, the overall flux of people is not managed. It's not a hydraulic system where you just open and close the tap. Most of our policies are not geared towards that.
Looking at regular migration, a lot of people focus on the wall and on irregular border crossings. The majority of irregular migrants in most parts of the world come as tourists or with other valid visas. And we do want to allow people to come in with various kinds of visas. You don't want to fix people all the time, you want to have business travelers, you want to have tourists, you want to allow people to cross borders for medical reasons. The porosity of borders is natural. We can't live in today's so called globalized world, without porous borders. East Germany was a closed system, it didn't pay off. North Korea may be one of those other examples, where they have kind of non-porous borders or very low degree of porosity. Most other economies, most other countries need open borders.
Open borders don't mean everyone can come in and out, but there needs to be some degree of openness where people can come in. As long as you have that, there will be people who overstay their visas and there's nothing you can do about it without having a complete police state, which again, would trample on so many freedoms of people who are non-immigrants. The cost of that will be so high, it's just not worth it.
For the rule of law, it may not be the best to have people violating immigration rules. But in the end, there are people who are parking ticket offenders which we agree is not the best thing, but we don't put them all in jail or behead them because of it, it’d be a little overkill. The same thing is true with migration management.
This is one graph I made to show the diversity of global migration, to illustrate the point that migration is widely spread across the world. Each data point is one country with the share of immigrants per population and the share of emigrants per population. The ones close to the X and Y axis, cluster one, are those for which neither immigration nor emigration are really important. Only 22 countries have fewer than 3% of immigrants and 3% of emigrants, while the remaining 210 countries and territories have higher levels of immigration, emigration or both. Countries located close to the horizontal axis are predominantly immigration countries (cluster 2), and countries located close to the vertical axis are emigration-only countries (cluster 3). Importantly, in 82 countries, both immigration and emigration rates are above 5%. Thus, many countries today are simultaneously countries of origin and destination of migrants.
Human mobility is really connected to, not just immigration control, like the Department of Homeland Security or internal affairs ministries, but also to economic development, finance, environmental change, conflict security, agriculture, education, employment, all these public policy areas are closely related with migration.
It's important to understand the scope and the vulnerabilities and the needs in the employment field, in the education field, in the social development field, in all the other areas. That's both true in the country of origin and the country of destination.
Currently, I'm building a database, I'm coding all development plans in the world. I'm looking at development plans, both UN development plans, which are the UN plans for each of the developing countries where the UN works, or national development plans, in which each country specifies their vision for how to develop the country. The UN gave us a lot of these development plans and we analyze them. How often is migration, mobility, displacement, refugees mentioned in these plans? Our preliminary analysis of these plans shows that in Europe, 100% of these development plans, mention migration and mobility. You can see that, even people who work on economic and social development, increasingly understand the need to go beyond migration control, to understand more broadly how human mobility and sustainable development are linked. That's what I'm investigating.