Woke up this AM with a weirdly well-formed idea: “Internet of Migrants” based on routing pack(et)s of 2-10 people point-to-point in humane, conflict-free way that uses an IP-like protocol between cities rather than visa regimes between nations (which suffers border buffer bloat).
Conversation
Also woke up kinda convinced it’s game over for climate change. Energy transition and dematerialization are still crucial, but things are already enough out of containment limits that refugee flow management is the bottleneck problem.
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Migration is the general problem, and acute crisis refugee migrants are the corner case that will/should drive the redesign of antiquated visa regimes. And “refugees” are an artificial scarcity problem that presents as “huddled masses in border encampments”.
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If you look at actual flow numbers and match them to (interior, distributed) availability of potential humanitarian relief loci, problem is not as big as demagogues pretend. It is artificially inflated due to political theater and lousy centralized security-theater logistics.
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I strongly suspect a well-designed Internet of Migrants could handle 10-100x the current global refugee flow with 1/10th the conflict, much of which exists because the humanitarian burden is concentrated on national-border communities, not because resources are lacking.
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Moving the needy to the long-term resource sites, rather than emergency resources to needy, keeping pack(et)s intact (families mainly, but any small group that wants to stay together) with effective triaged routing solves a lot of the issues of burden concentration.
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Btw the center of gravity of the problem is developing world to developing world (eg Myanmar-> Bangladesh), where most refugee flows already happen, not developing to developed, which should happen more, but is unlikely to. So IoM should be designed for developing-to-developing.
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City-to-city migration protocol also seamlessly handles domestic migration and displacement, and chronic as well as acute stressors. Basically whole problem and solution needs to be moved down 2 levels of political aggregation to cities, which is where the provisioning happens.
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IoM governance would include a macro (nation level) refugee-credit type market similar to carbon credit, based on globally shared responsibility for creating refugees. And an individual-level market mechanism like a “migrantcoin” currency to bookkeep detailed resource flows.
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Nation-level policing of borders would still matter, but only at the level of dealing with security threats. Cities would issue migration “tickets” based on capacity, not nations. But nations would vet for *real* security threats at borders. That would be much smaller, like 5%.
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Note, much of this merely formalizes what already happens informally. Migrants don’t vaguely move from country to country, they move from city to city. Nobody *wants* to be stuck in a desert tent cities/de facto concentration camps run by military police for years.
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A 2x2: X= acute vs chronic displacement pressure Y = opportunity pull vs crisis push. You get 4 categories of migration flow. The opportunity-pull flows are what create a lot of wealth (gold rushes, tech booms, brain drains) via talent swarming. It’s the same logistics problem.
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You want the IoM to encourage constant flows and circulations, turning crisis-push flows into opportunity-pull flows. Use humanitarian relief actions to automatically bootstrap labor-market efficiency upgrades. Historically this has always happened anyway.
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Half of American science/technology leadership in the last century has been due to refugee-turned-swarm-talent flows. Like Hungarian mathematicians around WW2. We just need to scale up, globalize, and democratize the process.
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Solving for pack-integrity at city level rather than for national identity integrity at borders also is the right resolution for harmonious cultural integration. You get (eventually) integrates Syrian families rather than ghettoes ripe for resentment and radicalization.
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Keep families, friend groups and coffee-clubs of Hungarian mathematicians intact. Discourage tribes from forming or hardening their cultural boundaries via migration through hostile territories that view them as faceless, threatening invading masses. Personalize to humanize.
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The “caravan” is presented as an invading army of orcs from Mordor. Viewed at right resolution it’s just a few hundred families that want to stay together and could easily be distributed across ~100 cities, all of which would have kindness/capacity to handle 10 families apiece
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IoM, properly designed, could also probably handle domestic homelessness etc. too much better. Anyway hope that’s some good food for thought.
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