Zero Hedge — "Migration Is Part Of The Model": The Real Roots Of Central America's Migrant Crisis

...there's a good reason. And it's that the corrupt leaders of these countries don't want to upset the apple cart that allows the system of widespread corruption and graft to flourish.

Perhaps inadvertently, the region has developed a system that encourages the poorest members of the population to emigrate by offering inadequate social services and almost no opportunities for advancement. That system is reinforced by the role that the growing remittance payments sent by illegal migrant workers in the US send back to their families.

The payments represent a reliable flow of dollars that serves to underpin the financial systems of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. That sum is larger more than 30 times greater than the annual aid payments President Trump just scrapped....

The other piece of the model was that migrating workers provided low-cost labor for American business.  Trump upset that to some extent by his immigration policy, but poor domestic conditions are still resulting in desperate workers migrating North.

Zero Hedge
"Migration Is Part Of The Model": The Real Roots Of Central America's Migrant Crisis
Tyler Durden

France 24 — Out of Africa, and back: ancient skeleton reveals vast Eurasian migration

Up to a quarter of the western Eurasian population migrating into Africa: the suggestion may startle readers accustomed to migrants heading the other way, but scientists argue that is precisely what happened some 3,000 years ago.…

This means that modern-day migrants from East Africa crossing the Mediterranean to Europe could in fact encounter distant cousins whose ancestors went the opposite way thousands of years ago.

Oh, the irony.

France 24 — Culture
Out of Africa, and back: ancient skeleton reveals vast Eurasian migration

Avaneesh Pandey — Land Degradation Could Create 50 Million Climate Refugees Within A Decade

Desertification -- climate change-triggered degradation of land ecosystems -- might, in a decade, create 50 million refugees, the Economics of Land Degradation (ELD), a global initiative led by 30 different research groups, warned in a new study published Tuesday. The study, backed by the United Nations, also found that $6.3 trillion to $10.6 trillion worth of resources -- equivalent to up to 17 percent of the world’s GDP -- were lost annually due to land degradation.

“Our lands are no longer able to keep up with the pressures placed on its limited resources. Increasing misuse and demands for its goods are resulting in rapidly intensifying desertification and land degradation globally -- an issue of growing importance for all people and at all scales,” the report, titled “The Value of Land,” said.

Water.

International Business Times
Land Degradation, Desertification Might Create 50 Million Climate Refugees Within A Decade
Avaneesh Pandey

Frances Coppola — Europe's Shame

Shame, or just showing true (neoliberal) colors? Same in the USA, especially the broad reception for Trump's neo-fascist view of immigration.

Coppola Comment
Europe's Shame

Frances Coppola

Gurminder K. Bhambra and John Holmwood — Capitalist dispossession and new justifications of slavery

Discussions of migration are becoming increasingly dystopian. Based upon either exclusion or exploitation, new neoliberal arguments for open borders are not about freedom, but institutionalised domination.

Open borders where migrants agree to be come essentially slave labor. The new slavery. Such a deal.

....a new ‘economic’ argument has entered the debate. Recently put forward by Chicago University law professor Eric Posner and economist Glen Weyl, and pitched to the World Bank, this is a ‘pro-slavery’ argument for the free movement of unfree labour. An echo of their argument is heard in the suggestion by Italian interior minister, Algelino Alfano, that migrants should be made to work for free....

Wouldn't you know. University of Chicago stuff. You have to read it to believe it.

Maybe they should run it by Pope Francis and see what he thinks.

OpenDemocracy
Capitalist dispossession and new justifications of slavery
Gurminder K. Bhambra and John Holmwood

Branko Milanovic — Migration into Europe: A problem with no solution

And the vice of global warming hasn't really begun to tighten down yet. When that happens, mass migration from the tropics to the temperate zone and from arid areas to where the water still is.

Global Inequality
Migration into Europe: A problem with no solution
Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), and formerly lead economist in the World Bank's research department and senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Julian di Giovanni and Andrei Levchenko — A global view of cross-border migration

There is growing interest in understanding and quantifying the costs and benefits of migration. This column presents new research suggesting that migration benefits practically all origin and destination countries. OECD countries benefit because of greater domestic product variety and, in turn, most countries that are the source of migration countries benefit because the remittances sent by migrants more than offset the costs associated with smaller market size.

VOX.eu
A global view of cross-border migration
Julian di Giovanni, Economist in the Research Department at the International Monetary Fund, and Andrei Levchenko, Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan

Nothing about wage suppression in the host country and the global wage leveling that benefits the developing world at the expense of the workers of the developed world. How would this play politically in developed nations where workers dominate the electorate. I'm all for free flow of people and open borders, but there are political realities to face, too, as well as power relationship that will influence the way this would carried out to the benefit of capital. Initially, high skilled workers will flow toward the highest paying areas, reducing incomes of similar workers there, resulting in a "brain drain" in less developed areas and lower wages due to increased competition in more highly developed ones.

All models are assumption-dependent and this one is arguably unrealistic in what it assumes. Moreover, it works "in the long run." Short-run? Not so much.

Frances Coppola — The creeping desert

Economic "desertification" in the EZ periphery?


Coppola Comment
The creeping desert

Frances Coppola

Michael T. Klare — Entering a Resource-Shock World How Resource Scarcity and Climate Change Could Produce a Global Explosion

Brace yourself. You may not be able to tell yet, but according to global experts and the U.S. intelligence community, the earth is already shifting under you. Whether you know it or not, you’re on a new planet, a resource-shock world of a sort humanity has never before experienced.

Two nightmare scenarios -- a global scarcity of vital resources and the onset of extreme climate change -- are already beginning to converge and in the coming decades are likely to produce a tidal wave of unrest, rebellion, competition, and conflict. Just what this tsunami of disaster will look like may, as yet, be hard to discern, but experts warn of “water wars” over contested river systems, global food riots sparked by soaring prices for life’s basics, mass migrations of climate refugees (with resulting anti-migrant violence), and the breakdown of social order or the collapse of states. At first, such mayhem is likely to arise largely in Africa, Central Asia, and other areas of the underdeveloped South, but in timeall regions of the planet will be affected.
To appreciate the power of this encroaching catastrophe, it’s necessary to examine each of the forces that are combining to produce this future cataclysm.

Tom Dispatch
Entering a Resource-Shock World 
How Resource Scarcity and Climate Change Could Produce a Global Explosion
Michael T. Klare | Professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College and author of Resource Wars and The Race For What's Left.

The vise is tightening. When Klare says, "We aren't there yet," the reality of the magnitude of the situation has been largely concealed from a public that is in denial of this anyway and willing to be let off the hook as long as possible, even though that will exacerbate the consequences. Several military establishments, including that of the US, have said that this is the greatest threat to peace and security in the coming years.

The preppers may be crazy, but not completely so. Moreover, the "everybody for themselves" approach assures wider disaster than if coordination and cooperation are applied to these emerging challenges.

I wonder about coordination and cooperation though. Today I was driving behind a pickup with a bumper sticker reading, "I'll keep my guns, money and freedom, and you can keep the "change."  A lot of people seem to believe that if they don't change, the world won't either. The sad thing is that there were several young kids in the truck. It's their future that is not being priced in.

Migrations will be increasing trend in 2012

The Israeli Cabinet voted unanimously Sunday to finance a $160 million program to stanch the flow of illegal African migrants by stepping up construction of a border fence and expanding a detention center to hold thousands of new arrivals.

Some 50,000 Africans, mostly from Sudan and Eritrea, have illegally entered southern Israel since 2006 through the porous border with Egypt's Sinai desert, according to government estimates.

The influx has sparked a national debate. Some Israelis fear the mounting non-Jewish arrivals will compromise the state's Jewish character. Critics also claim the migrants are an economic and social burden. But others don't want their country, which grew out of the Nazi genocide of Jews, to turn away people escaping persecution or conflict.

Addressing the Cabinet, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the swelling stream of migrants is "a national scourge." Netanyahu, like other officials, said the overwhelming majority of infiltrators are not refugees escaping persecution, but instead have come to Israel seeking better economic opportunities.

Read the rest at The Huffington Post
Israel Immigration Program Gets $160 Million