Conversation

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).
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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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