2026-02-12
56 分钟I'm Dan Kurtz-Valen, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview.
We're not talking about every migrant should go to Europe or the US.
That actually isn't the answer.
And that's not good for development as a whole.
But there are these pockets where migration is needed and countries are trying to figure out how do we attract the workforce we need.
And working with them to develop it would be a very good use of resources.
In 2024, there were more than 300 million migrants across the world,
double the number there had been in 1990.
Many of those have been displaced by conflict or climate change.
Many were simply looking for jobs and a better life.
But the national and multilateral systems designed to manage these flows have proved grossly inadequate,
helping set off political convulsions not just in the United States and Europe,
but in countries around the world, including in Latin America, Africa, and South Asia.
In democracies, migration has become perhaps today's most fraught and divisive political issue.
To Amy Pope, the director general of the International Organization for Migration,
these unprecedented levels and the crackdowns that have come in reaction make abundantly clear that the current global immigration system is failing.
It is, she wrote in Foreign Affairs last year,
incapable of contending with today's humanitarian needs,
demographic trends, or labor market demands.
Pope argues that a challenge at this scale demands a complete system overhaul.