Migration & Diaspora

Humans have always moved. Before agriculture pinned us to fields, before cities walled us in, before borders existed as a concept, our ancestors walked out of East Africa and kept walking until they had colonized every continent except Antarctica. Movement is not the exception in human history. Staying put is.

What changed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is scale, speed, and the political machinery built to manage it. In 1960, roughly 75 million people lived outside their country of birth. By 2020, that figure had reached 281 million. The reasons are old: war, famine, persecution, the simple desire for a less precarious life. The infrastructure is new: commercial aviation, smuggling networks, refugee processing centers, biometric databases, and razor-wire fences topped with motion sensors.

The decades after 1945 produced some of the largest population transfers in recorded history, most of them driven by the redrawing of political maps.