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Chapter 2: Imaginary Cosmopolitanism
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- How Flat are Atoms
- The lumpy world of migration
Chapter 2: Imaginary Cosmopolitanism MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte helped launch the internet into the public spotlight with his 1995 book, "Being Digital", which celebrated a near-future world in which digital technologies transformed every aspects of our lives. For a book that touches on holographic video and virtual reality, it starts in a surprisingly mundane place with a story about the absurdity of bottled water. Attending a conference on American competitiveness, Negroponte noted the irony of being served Evian water, shipped in glass bottles from the French Alps. America’s future, he declared, was not in manipulating these heavy, hard to move atoms, but in weightless bits. There’s no Evian water for sale at the convenience store around the corner from the Media Lab, the interdisciplinary technology research center Negroponte founded in 1985. Instead, discerning drinkers can choose between domestic and imported bottled water, including Fiji Water, offered in its distinctive rectangular bottles. The name is not a marketing gimmick: the water is bottled in Yaqara, Fiji, 8100 miles from Cambridge. How the water got from Fiji to Cambridge is an illuminating case study of the logistics of our global economy. Canadian businessman David Gillmor used the fortune he'd made from a Nevada gold mine to purchase Wakaya, Fiji, an uninhabited 2200 acre island ringed with white-sand beaches. Originally intending to use the island as a family retreat, Gillmor realized its potential as an exclusive resort. Flown in on Gillmor's six-seat plane, guests paid thousands a night to stay in thatched roof villas, eating gourmet food prepared from "native venison, vegetables and herbs", sipping French champagne and Evian water. Gillmor tells reporters that he saw a guest guzzling Evian as he played golf and realized he needed a local alternative to bottled water from France. Gillmor's next steps suggest that his ambitions were a bit larger than providing ecofriendly bottled water to the occupants of his nine villas. In 2003, he leased 50 acres on Vitu Levu, Fiji's largest island, obtained a 99 year lease to the aquifer below and invested $48 million in building a state of the art bottling plant. He hired Doug Carlson, an Aspen, Colorado hotel executive, to build Fiji water into a global luxury brand. Carlson introduced the water to an American market through gourmet restaurants, persuading chefs to serve the bottle in a silver sleeve and sell the water at $10 a bottle. Celebrity chef Nobu Matsuhisa told reporters that he used the water to prepare rice in his high end sushi restaurants. Early adopters included movie stars and musicians, whose patronage helped turn the bottles into a popular fashion accessory, and into an "aspirational brand" affordable by a mainstream audience. In 2004, Gillmor sold the company to American entrepreneurs Stewart and Lynda Resnick, who had made their fortune selling collectible knicknacks marketed by The Franklin Mint. The Resnicks promptly rebranded Fiji as a green company, buying carbon offsets to counterbalance the environmental costs of shipping bottle blanks to China, empty bottles to Fiji and filled bottles to the US and beyond. Concerns about the carbon footprint of the product have had little impact on sales - by 2008, Fiji water had outpaced Evian as the top-selling "premium bottled water" brand in the United States. Danish shipping giant Maersk routes shipping containers from Suva, Fiji to Cambridge, MA via Auckland, New Zealand and Philadelphia's Packer Avenue Container Port. Maersk's online shipping calculator tells us that the voyage takes thirty three days and that transporting a 40-foot container costs $5540.30, including trucking the box from Philadelphia to Cambridge. These containers can hold over 30,000 kilograms, which means the shipping cost for a liter of Fiji water from Suva to Massachusetts would be about 18 cents. Atoms may be heavy and hard to move, but transporting them halfway across a planet is shockingly inexpensive. Fiji has had a rough history in the years since Gillmor bought his private island, though it's probably not his fault. Tensions between Fijians of Melanesian descent and Indo-Fijians led to two coups in 1987, and in the new millennium, Commodore Frank Bainamara, commander of Fiji's military forces, has taken over the government twice, in 2000 and again in 2006. In 2009, Fiji's supreme court ruled Bainamara's 2006 coup illegal and demanded he step down. His political allies responded by abolishing the constitution, sacking the judiciary and replacing the fired judges with rented judges from Sri Lanka. Concerned over negative publicity, Bainamara ordered foreign diplomats and journalists out of the country and instructed remaining reporters to practice "the journalism of hope", reporting only positive stories, lest their publications be shut down. The government of Fiji hasn't needed to threaten US journalists to ensure hopeful reporting. Commodore Bainamara's recent address to the UN General Assembly, where he apologized that his country wouldn't be able to hold elections until 2014 at the earliest, received no coverage in New York newspapers. Fiji Water's efforts to go green, on the other hand, merited two features in the New York Times. Fiji water is apparently more mobile than Fijian news. And it's safe to say that more people have sipped the nation's well-traveled water than have sampled the music of Rosila, one of Fiji's leading pop bands, or watched "The Land Has Eyes", Fiji's first locally produced feature film.xxxix Could it be that atoms are more mobile than bits? When New York Times pundit Thomas Friedman announced that the world was flat, he blurred three separate phenomena - the globalization of atoms, bits and people - into a single trend. In Friedman's flat world, communications technologies allow companies to build global supply chains, outsource work and collaborate across international borders. As a result, a US business might manufacture in China, offer customer service in India and rely on the best minds of Japan and the Netherlands to produce new products. As a result, American workers should think of themselves as competing with the best and the brightest from every corner of the globe. The world may look very flat from Friedman's vantage point: the KGA golf club in downtown Bangalore, where he traded shots and quips with executives from Indian IT giant Infosys. Infosys's CEO Nandan Nilekani offered a comment about level playing fields which led to Friedman's title. The world looks less flat in the slums of the same city, where Friedman's "triple convergence" and "ten flatteners" have had little economic impact for poor and less educated Indians. And in Chhattisgarh, two states away, where acute poverty is more widespread than in Africa's 26 poorest nations, Friedman's projected flattening looks awfully far off.xl Friedman's flattened framing has found flocks of followers. His publisher has released three editions of "The World Is Flat", and two of his follow-up, "Flat, Hot and Crowded", which expanded Friedman's thinking about globalization to include global warming and population expansion. And other authors have embraced Friedman's key metaphor: a quick spin through Amazon reveals "Competing in a Flat World", "How to Manage in a Flat World", "Philanthropy in a Flat World" and event "Glocalization: How Followers of Jesus Engage a Flat World". (It's unclear whether embracing a flat world has led to increased book sales for these authors or whether they share any royalties with Friedman.) Not everyone thinks Friedman's vision of an interconnected, competitive future is an especially accurate one. It's certainly not a new one. The economist John Maynard Keynes offered a Friedmanesque view of a communications enabled globalization in 1919: "The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth - he could at the same time and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprise of any quarter of the world - he could secure forthwith, if he wished, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality." What's particularly striking about Keynes's vision is that he wasn't looking to the future, but to the past - the quote is a description of life in London before the first World War closed an era of rapid globalization. (Keynes, "The Economic Consequences of the Peace", 1919) Two massive wars and a worldwide economic collapse not only disrupted flows of atoms, people and bits across national borders. It also spawned strong skeptics of the idea that political interconnection, through organizations like the United Nations, would protect sovereign economic interests. In her "maiden speech" to Congress in 1943, playwright, journalist and representative from Connecticut Clare Booth Luce urged her compatriots not to cede control over international air travel to the British (a timely concern, as Britain's de Havilland brought the UK into the age of commercial jet flight in 1952, six years before Boeing's 707.) In the course of her speech, she lambasted Vice President Henry Wallace's view of an internationalized, interconnected post-WWII world as "globaloney".xli Her neologism has been adopted by some of Friedman's fiercest critics, including business strategy professor Pankaj Ghemawat. Ghemawat's book "World 3.0" opens by criticizing "The World Is Flat" for relying on anecdote, not data, for making the his case. Both those who celebrate globalization and those who fear it are in danger of overreacting to stories of globalization that overstate impacts far beyond what data shows is actually happening. Ghemawat offers a flood of statistics designed to combat globaloney. Foreign direct investment represents only 9% of investment worldwide. Venture capitalists invest 80% of their capital in their home markets and less than 20% of stock market shares are owned by foreign investors. Exports represent about 20% of global production as determined by GDP, and Ghemawat argues that this figure overcounts the real impact of trade, pointing out that the components that compose your mobile phone are counted as international trade once when they're sold as components and again when they're sold as a finished product. Even apparently interchangeable commodities like rice are surprisingly immobile - only 7% of rice is sold across international borders. The "semi-globalization" Ghemawat describes should be good news both for those excited about and those incensed by globalization. For those who believe that increased globalization will lead to prosperity and growth, there's still further to go. For those concerned that globalization is destroying environments, livelihoods and cultures, we have the opportunity to ensure that globalization doesn't mean deregulation and environmental and cultural destruction. (Ghemawat envisions a world that's interconnected but tightly regulated, capturing the upsides of interconnecting economies while minimizing the downside of environmental destruction and financial contagion.) The mistake is assuming that globalization has already happened and that we have little control over the outcomes, in accepting Friedman's flat world as a fait accompli, not a process that's underway, but incomplete and changeable. Believe the stories about globalization and you may lose the chance to alter the process. Friedman's misunderstanding comes from looking at infrastructures of connectivity and conflating what could be with what will be. The infrastructures Friedman celebrates - the internet, container shipping, air travel, mobile telephony - have the potential to shrink distance and integrate economies and cultures. But they're held in check by social, legal, economic and cultural forces that ensure that the blurring of international borders is slow, gradual and uneven. Understanding the current balance between forces that connect us and those that disconnect us allows us to consider our blind spots and determine whether we're getting what we want and need from the wider world. How Flat are Atoms? The Monday after Christmas 2004, Sara Bongiorni, a business reporter for the Baton Rouge Advocate, decided that her family would spend the following year boycotting China. The trigger for her decision was the discovery that 25 of the family's gifts under the Christmas tree came from China, and 14 from the rest of the world. Her book documenting their experiences, "A Year Without 'Made in China'", is a chronicle of the small crises a China boycott creates for Bongiorni and her family: shoes for her toddler cost $70 made in Texas rather than $10 made in China; buying an inflatable pool for her kids became impossible without violating the boycott. Had Bongiorni's ruleset required her family to foreswear products with components made in China, the task likely would have been impossible. Manufacturing supply chains span the globe, and apparently simple products include inputs from many nations. Leonardo Bonnanni, a researcher at MIT's Media Lab, has developed a platform called Sourcemap that helps map the global origins of everyday objects. A pair of denim jeans "made in Indonesia", includes cotton grown in the US, processed in China, woven in Thailand, cut in Singapore and sewn together in Indonesia, using thread from Malaysia, rivets from Taiwan and a zipper from Hong Kong.xlii Unpacking the origins of these simple objects reveals the power and pervasiveness of global sourcing, low-cost shipping and "just in time" inventory systems. Six months into her experiment, Bongiorni visits Walmart (which she'd been boycotting prior to her 2005 boycott of China) to test a claim made by Walmart's VP of corporate communications Mona Williams. Williams, in a letter to newsweek, asserted that Walmart purchases vastly more from US suppliers than from Chinese suppliers ($137.5 billion versus $18 billion in 2005.) Bongiorni, wandering the aisles of Walmart, finds the numbers hard to believe. After all, Walmart sources as much as 70% of its non-food inventory in US stores from over 5000 Chinese suppliers, which makes the American retailer China's eight largest trading partner, ahead of Russia, Australia and Canada. Bongiorni spends an after noon in Walmart, checking 106 items for their country of origin, reveals 49% made in China, 22% made in the US, and Honduras running a distant third. "The way I see it, unless Ms. Williams is including groceries, or building supplies used to construct Wal-Mart stores in her tally of American purchases, I just don't see how her numbers add up," she writes. Groceries are a good place to start unpacking Bongiorni's misperceptions of the global economy. Walmart is not just the largest retailer in the world - it's also the largest grocery store chain in the US. And despite eye-catching examples of globalization like water shipped from Fiji or lamb chops from New Zealand, less than 7% of the food consumed in the US comes from outside our borders.xliii Since 54% of Walmart's sales come from groceries in 2011, that's a lot of American-made foodstuffs that Bongiorni missed.xliv Her instinct that the materials used to construct Walmart stores are sourced locally is a sound one as well. While it's inexpensive to ship high value goods like electronics and, unbelievably enough, drinking water and still make a profit, building materials are another matter. Steel, timber and concrete used in the US are primarily sourced domestically - roughly 20-25% of the steel used in the US is imported, as is under a third of construction timber, imported primarily from Canada.xlv The relationship with suppliers of building materials, construction companies who build Walmart stores, refiners who supply gasoline and diesel to Walmart trucks, contractors who clean the stores are less visible than the "made in China" labels Bongiorni is haunted by. A recent calculation from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco suggests that “made in China” represents only 2.7% of American personal consumption expenditure. Their numbers are sound, but sometimes it doesn’t feel that way.xlvi As an exploration of the impacts of globalization on the US economy, Bongiorni's experiment leaves a lot to be desired - her attempt to debunk Walmart's supplier statistics by reading a hundred product labels is as rigorous as her research gets. As a portait of the visceral reactions we can sometimes have to the artifacts of globalization, it's far more helpful. Bongiorni is particularly incensed by items that she sees as specifically non-Chinese that are manufactured in that country: a ceramic statue of Jesus, patriotic decorations for the 4th of July. If China can make the magnetic ribbons Americans stick on their cars to show support for US troops, clearly they've dominated the entirety of the US consumer economy! The Chinese-made Ceramic Jesus and the bottle of Fiji water both invite us to imagine a level of globalization that's higher than actually exists. French economist Daniel Cohen observes that "French people 'see' a McDonald's on every corner, American films in all the theaters, Coca-Cola in all the cafeterias, but they are apparently blind to the thousands of French cafés that serve ham-and-butter sandwiches, the bottles of Evian and Badoit, the French films featuring Gérald Depardieu, or the regional press. In wealthy countries, globalization is largely imaginary."xlvii Trade is far less globalized than we'd expect in a Friedmanesque flat world. In 2000, economist Jeffrey Frankel calculated a theoretical level of globalization that we might compare our actual levels of global trade to. The US represents roughly 1/4 of the world's economy. In a truly borderless world, we'd expect Americans to buy and sell 75% of their goods abroad. In fact, America's international purchases and sales equal roughly 12% of GDP, suggesting a level of globalization that's roughly 1/6th what we might anticipate in a flat world where national origins of a product had become completely irrelevant. Geography still matters.xlviii So do government policies. Looking at the divergence of global trade from what we'd expect in a flat world to what we actually see in our decidedly lumpy reality reveals the power governments have in controlling the flow of atoms. One potential benefit of globalization is the ability for economies to specialize and take advantage of the specific strengths of their workforce. Wealthy countries tend to have well-educated and expensive workers - it makes sense for them to design and manufacture high-value, technically complex goods like computers, electronics and machine tools. Poor nations have undereducated and inexpensive workers, who we'd expect to be employed in agriculture and mining, producing raw materials at low cost for export to wealthier nations, who will refine and sell them to yet wealthier nations. Mali grows cotton, exports it to China, who weaves and sews it according to Italian designs for sales in the US. Markets work and everyone wins! Not quite. As it turns out, the US is the world's largest cotton exporter, responsible for roughly 40% of the world's cross-border cotton trade. We'd expect a wealthy nation with high labor costs to leave production of an agricultural commodity to developing nations, like Mali, Pakistan and Uzbekistan. America's dominance in this market is made possible by massive agricultural subsidies. In the 1930s and 40s, the US government began offering a guaranteed price for cotton to US farmers, both to ensure that the US military had ample supplies of cotton cloth for uniforms, and to help combat unemployment through the creation of new farm jobs. These subsidies average $3 billion a year over the past decade, and have ensured the 25,000 American farmers who grow cotton received roughly twice the market price for their goods. Because American farmers have such great financial incentives to grow cotton, they grow a lot of it - the US trails only China and India in total cotton production. And American farmers can sell cotton very cheaply, depressing global markets, because the price they are paid is set by the government, not by the market. Brazil, a major cotton producer, was so incensed by the US system that they sued the US through the World Trade Organization and won a settlement in which the US pays Brazil $147 million a year for the right to continue subsidizing domestic cotton production.xlix l The US is far from the only nation to "protect" domestic agriculture or manufacturing through subsidies that lower the cost of production, or tariffs that make imported goods more expensive. (Would love a figure here on total cost of subsidies and tariffs, but hard to find a single number.) And my argument here is not that the US should end cotton subsidies (we should), but that imagining a world that's flat, where atoms flow freely, governed only by market forces, makes it hard to see the reality: trade within countries is much larger than trade between countries, and that trade within regions is vastly larger than transoceanic or transcontinental trade. Cultural and political forces keep Americans eating Idaho potatoes and French people spreading local butter on their baguettes. Atoms move much more quickly and inexpensively across borders than in past decades, but they're not nearly as free as we might imagine. And if we assume that all atoms move as freely as those in bottles of Fiji water, we miss the chance to debate policy questions, like whether wealthy nations should still be subsidizing their farmers to compete against those in developing nations. The lumpy world of migration If a ceramic Chinese Jesus figurine can inspire an angry response from a US consumer, reactions to the migration of human beings is often more visceral and skeptical. Some European nations are reconsidering progressive immigration policies in the face of rising populations of Muslim immigrants. They fear these recent immigrants won't integrate into society as completely as previous immigrants have. In the US, a sustained recession has led some unemployed people to speculate that their joblessness is caused by illegal migration. (When the United Farm Workers, a group that represents many immigrant farmworkers in the US, launched the "take our jobs" campaign to encourage out of work Americans to seek employment as farm workers, only three unemployed workers in the entire nation ended up taking those difficult and dangerous jobs.li) Campaigns against the burqa in France and to enshrine English as the official language in US states may suggest that people are as uncomfortable with images that remind them of migration as they are with migrants themselves. Support for anti-immigrant politicians like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands or Arizona state governor Jan Brewer might suggest that countries are experiencing unprecedented levels of immigration. Actually, global migration is significantly lower than it was a hundred years ago, at the end of the last major wave of global migration. At the beginning of the 20th century, 14% of people worldwide lived in countries other than the land of their birth.lii Mass migrations from Italy, Ireland, Norway and Germany reshaped the US, Canada and Argentina, shifted 27 million Europeans overseas in the three decades before World War I. Prior to these voluntary migrations, indentured servitude sent Chinese and Indian workers to Africa and the Caribbean and Africans to North and South America. Immigration seems high to many of us because global mobility slowed almost to a stop after World War II and is only now returning to historic levels. A German farmer leaving for Minnesota in 1910 faced a long and dangerous voyage, an uncertain and risky future, and a near-complete severing of existing social ties. (He also faced strong resistance from his new neighbors - anti-immigrant rhetoric about the threat of "masses who share neither our language or culture" in Midwest newspapers from the 1900s is remarkably similar to anti-Mexican rhetoric in the US today.) Technological change offers a contemporary migrant a very different picture. Jet travel means a (legal) voyage is essentially riskless and instantaneous in comparison to overland and ocean journeys. A Nigerian immigrant to Houston can call home for a few cents a minute, or via Skype for virtually no cost. She can read Lagos newspapers online and download the latest Nollywood films. It's comparatively inexpensive to return home for a visit or to migrate in reverse. Some social theorists worry that it may be possible to migrate physically but not culturally, offering examples of Pakistani and Turkish communities in northern Europe where Turkish and Urdu remains the dominant language and residents encounter more satellite television than local media.liii These technological developments haven't radically increased the volume of international migration. The International Organization for Migration estimates 214 million migrants worldwide, or 3.1% of the world's population. That percentage is rising from a post WWII nadir, but slowly. Between 2000 and 2010, the migration rate increased from 2.9% to 3.1% of the global population.liv Far, far more people want to migrate than are able to, but they are constrained by immigration restrictions, not by technology. Development economist Lant Pritchett cites Zambia, where for decades a large number of people moved to the north of the country to work in booming copper mines, as an example of a state where migration is held in check. The falling prices of copper mean that mines are shuttered and millions of Zambians are unemployed - Pritchett calculates that the population of Zambia is now roughly three times what it would be if its citizens were free to seek work in other countries.lv The United States began restricting immigration in 1875 by barring prostitutes and convicts. Subsequent restrictions on lunatics, idiots, paupers, polygamists and the illiterate, as well as all Chinese (regardless of their mental, fiscal or marital status) slowed immigration prior to World War I.lvi In the wake of World War I, many developed nations joined the US in passing laws to sharply limit migration, fearing an influx of migrants from Southern Europe who had been displaced by conflict. It's not only wealthy nations who restrict immigration - in 1983, Nigeria's democratically elected government forced more than 3 million Ghanaian migrants out of the country within a month, in the hopes of lowering unemployment. Legal restrictions on migration are so commonplace that we often forget that they're not inevitable, the consequence of natural law. The rise of outsourcing, which Friedman celebrates in The World is Flat, can be thought of as one response to a world where jobs are mobile but people are not. Many of the Indian employees who answer customer service phone calls from Bangalore would be interested in living and working in Europe or the US. They're able to work at a distance because the forces that constrain their movements don't apply to the bits travelling between computers and across phone lines. Were migration restrictions relaxed or eliminated, it's likely that millions of people would move to places where they thought economic and political conditions were better, enabled by globalizing technologies like air travel and inexpensive telecommunications. But this possible movement is held in check by laws that seek to protect cultures, economies and social welfare systems from too much flattening. The result is a world in which migration patterns are deeply uneven. In some nations that are highly dependent on "guest workers", migrants who reside in the country for long times but don't have the rights of citizens, immigrants represent the majority of the population: 87% in Qatar, 70% in the United Arab Emirates, 69% in Kuwait. Other nations have little to no immigration, due to a lack of economic opportunity for migrants (Romania, 0.6%; Indonesia, 0.1%) or legal or cultural barriers to migration (Japan, 1.7%; South Africa, 3.7%). Levels of immigration in North America and western Europe are higher than the global average (which makes sense, as migrants generally leave poorer nations for wealthier ones. 9.39% of the population of the EU live in countries other than the country of their birth, as does 13.9% of the US and 21.3% of people living in Canada.lvii There's no clear threshold at which migration triggers societal tensions and debate - South Africa has seen anti-immigrant violence in a nation where more than 96% of the population is native born, while Canada promotes a multicultural identity as part of its strength as immigrants now represent more than 21% of the population. What may be more important than an absolute number or percentage of migrants is perceptions of how migration is changing a society. On July 22, 2011, Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik shot and killed nearly 70 teenagers at a summer camp hosted by the country's labor party on Utøya Island. Before embarking on his killing spree, Breivik released a 1500 page manifesto titled "2083: A European Declaration of Independence", mailing the document to 5700 people. The year 2083 is a reference to the 400th anniversary of the second (failed) Ottoman siege of Vienna, now seen as a turning point in the 300 year battle between the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires. Breivik's manifesto argues that Europe will be overrun by Muslims, aided by Marxist multiculturalists, if he and others don't mount a violent campaign to preserve Europe's Christian culture. Breivik's actions were horrific, and his views extreme, but it's possible to draw a line between far-right views on immigration expressed within the mainstream of European politics and his hateful words and deeds. The banning of the hijab in France and on the building of minarets in Switzerland reveal both a deep discomfort with the growth of Islam in Europe that verges on Islamophobia and a focus on combating publicly visible manifestations of the religion, rather than addressing the deeper dynamics of immigration. (In that sense, they're similar to laws in the US that make English an official language and prevent the use of other languages in the course of government business.) Imagining a transformation of Europe into a caliphate is a dangerous illusion that's easily punctured by data. Projections that Breivik alluded to in his manifesto, and which have featured regularly in European discussions of the "time bomb" of Muslim migration, project that Muslims will represent 20% of the population of the EU by 2050.lviii Those projections are extrapolations from existing migration and birth rates - the scenario in which one of five Europeans is Muslim is the "naive" scenario postulated by the author of the paper - more sophisticated models (which assume that birth rates for Muslim families in Europe will drop as those families become better educated, a well-documented demographic phenomenon) show an even smaller growth in Muslim population.lix It may also be worth noting that Islam has been one of the world's fastest growing religions over the past half century - the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life projects that 26.4% of the global population will be Muslim by 2030, suggesting that even if the European "time bomb" proves to be accurate, Europe would have a much lower proportion of Muslims than the world as a whole - indeed, Pew predicts that 8% of Europe will be Muslim by 2030, and that the US will have a larger Muslim population than any European nation other than Russia or France.lx Nor does the presence of millions of Muslims in Europe guarantee a cultural conflict between Christian and Muslim Europeans - despite Angela Merkel's declaration that multiculturalism in Germany had "utterly failed", it's awfully early to render that desperate verdict. Milton Gordon's groundbreaking study of immigration to America, "Assimilation in American Life", concluded that while a first generation of immigrants were quite different from the majority of the society they'd joined, their grandchildren were more similar to mainstream society than to their own second-generation immigrant parents. By 2050, it may be irrelevant that 20% of Germans are Muslim, as those Muslims will be German. Lots of global migration is occurring. Rates of migration are much higher than they were forty years ago, as we've moved beyond post-war isolation towards a rate of migration closer to what the world experienced in 1900. And migration undoubtedly raises challenges for governments and societies. But it's worth considering that the illusions we hold about the mobility of people can blind us to the actual demographic challenges nations face. One of the reasons European nations are loath to make sharp restrictions in immigration is that their populations are aging and they run the risk that their social welfare systems won't be able to support a population of elderly retirees unless an influx of young taxpayers staves off demographic collapse. Focusing on the illusion of a Muslim takeover of Europe, or even the illusion of a flat world where labor is highly mobile, makes it very difficult to see and address problems like maintaining a survivable worker:retiree ratio. In a flat world, displaced Zambian copper miners would be flocking to Japan to care for the elderly. In our semi-globalized world, they're held in place by immigration restrictions and cultural barriers. 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