The Migrant’s Quest

One of the most intriguing aspects of Sigmund Freud’s life was his failure to see the Anschluss coming. How could he, such an intelligent, far-seeing man, remain past the point of personal danger until being plucked out of Vienna at the last moment by the Americans? At the time, the dangers of the Anschluss were obvious to many Austrian Jews, and, with hindsight, are obvious to us all. It is the phenomenon of the forest and trees and we all walk among the trees, occasionally trying to telescope ourselves above the forest to find the large historical patterns of human existence and so often failing.

Doug Saunders has written a book, Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World, that does manage to extricate itself from the trees of daily international journalism to identify a pattern of human migration that profoundly affects our present and our future. He refers to that pattern as the last great migration where, over a span of 100 years (1950 to 2050), as many as three billion people, one third of the human race, will migrate from a marginal rural existence to a potentially prosperous and environmentally efficient urban life. However, the genius of Arrival City lies in Saunders’s identification of the instrument that has enabled mass urbanization to occur successfully. That instrument, the crucial protein in the human chemistry of moving from village to city, is the slum. It is known by dozens of alternative names—bidonvilles, banlieux difficiles, favelas, shantytowns, barrios, bustees, kampongs—pick a language from any of the world’s populous nations and you will find a word for those transitional neighbourhoods that have sprung up like mushrooms, or cankers, on the edges of all of the world’s great and not-so-great cities.

Saunders has coined a different term, “arrival city,” and the essential insight of his book is that a slum is not necessarily a slum if by that term we mean a festering wound of human degradation where people remain entrapped in repeating cycles of poverty and criminality. The arrival city is different. It may include poverty, crime and squalor, but it is not static; it is dynamic. It contains employment, entrepreneurial vigour and a relentless ambition to succeed in the core city. It is an organ of change that supports and becomes the transition from rural village destitution to urban prosperity.

Saunders located and named this organ of change—this is the forest-and-trees part—by travelling to the edges of the great cities of the world while plying his journalist’s trade. Although he found cramped and impoverished suburbs, he noticed that many of them were active, busy places, filled with life and commerce. That caught his attention and led him to a very different conclusion. His claims for the historical importance of the arrival city are not modest: “The arrival city is a machine that transforms humans. It is also, if allowed to flourish, the instrument that will create a permanently sustainable world.”

Physically, an arrival city may appear to be similar to a slum: a cramped, crowded shantytown with raw sewage, littered garbage, haphazard electrical cables, narrow laneways and slapdash shelters made of every imaginable material. The difference lies in the dynamism, the backstreet buzz of small shops and vendors doing business.

The arrival city process begins in rural villages where more than half the human population resided until 2008. At that point, the great demographic divide was crossed toward a future where 75 percent of humans will reside in cities. The principal migration driver is the marginal existence of rural village life itself. For billions of peasants, it is the “largest single killer of humans,” the greatest source of malnutrition, infant mortality and reduced life spans. The arrival city provides the landing platform for integration into the city.

It is not a simple process, moving from rural destitution to urban prosperity. The migration is complex, like any evolutionary process, with a back-and-forth shuttle from village to the edges of the city, eking out a living in destitute circumstances, sending remittances back to the village for family members, returning to the village for seasonal work and, with modest success, providing support for fellow villagers to come. Sometimes the shuttle movement is intergenerational until one villager makes the leap and the city, not the village, becomes home. In many instances arrival cities are urban villages, populated by migrants from the same village, region or ethnicity. For the migrants, the arrival city is the entry point, providing information, support, protection and money.

Once established within the arrival city, the transition to the inner city begins, although it is not an easy route. There is much stop-and-go, and failure. There is shelter, but it may be a cement floor or an overcrowded room. There is food, but it barely sustains. There is employment, but the income is meagre and work is long, harsh and injurious. Still, money is made and, with great deprivation, saved. Savings lead to self-employment or education, which leads to more money saved, which leads to property ownership, often unregistered, which leads to equity, more savings and investment. Herein lies the dynamism that Saunders speaks about, this relentless movement forward, driven by rural destitution but also by raw ambition and the hope that it will eventually be possible for the migrant or his or her children to catch a firmer finger hold on the edges of the city and, with sufficient sacrifice and effort, slowly ascend the urban ladder to reliable employment, ownership, safety and even prosperity within the city.

Although many migrants fail, there is a relentless inevitability about the arrival city process. Saunders provides many examples of successful arrival cities such as Liu Gong Li (China), Tower Hamlets (United Kingdom), North Mumbai (India), Santa Marta ( Brazil), South Los Angeles (United States), Harem (Turkey) and Kamrangichar (Bangladesh). Each has its unique characteristics and history, but all exhibit a similar pattern of migration from specific regions and villages, chain migration between the village and arrival city, and a slow incremental movement toward working class urban prosperity.

Success is achieved in one of two ways. The individual migrant manages to save money, find better shelter, find better employment or create his or her own, purchase property and eventually move away from the arrival city into the more prosperous urban core. That person has made it. The arrival city constantly changes population. That is part of the dynamism. However, there is a second pattern. The arrival city itself changes, reflecting the increasing prosperity of its inhabitants. With employment and success, home ownership is regularized, city services such as sewage and electricity are installed, buildings are rebuilt and, most importantly, transport service to the city is provided. Residents do not move to the city, but with their economic and political success, the arrival city itself becomes a part of the city. A good example is Harem, in the 1970s a squatter town on the far edges of Istanbul and now a desirable neighbourhood within the city proper.

Saunders is careful to point out that not all slums are arrival cities. Some are simply slums, again the distinction being one of dynamism. In a sense, they are failed arrival cities and become cyclical traps, where poverty, unemployment, crime and destitution breed more of the same. Perhaps the most important contribution of the book is to note the government policies that have contributed to both the success and failure of arrival cities.

The primary error has been the failure of governments to recognize and appreciate arrival cities, their failure to see them as anything but a blight to be removed from the municipal carcass. Many governments have obstructed urban migration by refusing to provide municipal services, denying ownership rights, imposing external policing, restricting access to the city and forcibly clearing squatter communities that inevitably return. The consequences have been alienated ghettos of despair with high crime rates, low employment, rampant social problems and, sometimes, explosive political dissent. The notorious banlieux of Paris are the obvious example, but there are others such as the suburban communities of Tehran that played a powerful role in the Iranian Revolution, not out of religious extremism but because of resentment against political and economic exclusion.

Saunders cites positive planning policies that have facilitated the urban integration process, such as the recognition of ownership rights, accessible public transport, the licensing of businesses, allowing local government, and providing basic public utilities and education. Rather than obstructing the migration of people to the city, these policies have facilitated it. The result has been productive, innovative communities that generate wealth and employment. Sometimes the results have been stunning, such as Istanbul, which grew from one to twelve million people within a few decades. Many of the early arrival cities are now prized residential and business communities within the city.

Although the bulk of the great migration will occur within national borders, the same principles apply to migration across borders. Most immigrants arrive at urban destinations and initially find ethnic enclaves within the corpus of the city. In Canada, for the past 50 years, almost all immigrants have landed in cities, particularly Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal. The post-war Toronto communities of Italian, Portuguese, Greek and Chinese immigrants can be viewed as successful arrival cities. Saunders also cites Thorncliffe Park in Toronto as a good example of a gateway community, receiving waves of Greeks, Macedonians, Gujarati Indians, Ismaili East Africans, followed by Colombians, Chileans and now, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Afghans. Throughout, the community has remained relatively poor, but has fostered the successful transition of several immigrant movements into the city.

The success of Thorncliffe Park is partially attributable to sound civic investment in public transport and education. There are accessible entry-level jobs, cheap rents for start-up businesses and available information networks of other immigrants. It has been a recipe for success that is not being repeated in immigrant communities further away from Toronto centre. By now the lesson should have been learned. Arrival cities need access to the city. Without good public transport and access to jobs and business opportunities, aspirations can be blighted and dulled, leading to a downward spiral of frustration, poverty and the many social ills that thrive in communities left behind.

Saunders is correct. The key public policy approach is facilitation, recognizing that migration is a transition process that requires support. Effective facilitation—education, legal status, transport, equitable treatment, access to business and employment opportunities—results in a dynamic, integrated population. Obstruction or failed integration policies lead to ghettos, poverty, alienation and political explosions. It is important to remember that the young men in the suburban riots outside of Paris in 2005 were holding up their identity cards to the forest of media cameras. Legally they were French citizens, but they were not truly members of the wider French community. The inner city, Paris, was very far away.

When German chancellor Angela Merkel announced last year that multiculturalism was dead because immigrants had not become truly German, she simply did not get it. Most of the immigrants, particularly four million Turks, had been brought to Germany as guest workers. Although eventually granted permanent legal status, they had never moved beyond their own ethnic enclaves, which were failed arrival cities lacking effective facilitation policies to truly integrate them into German society. Media pundits on both sides of the fence leaped in to both criticize and praise Merkel, but arguments over the concept and success of multiculturalism miss the mark. The term obviously means different things to different people and countries. The real issue is the social integration of immigrants and how it can best be achieved. If Merkel’s point is that the social integration of immigrants in Germany is not possible, then the appropriate response is how do you know until you have really tried.

The immense challenges in integrating large and diverse immigrant populations should not be glossed over. There are no one-size-fits-all remedies and different ethnic communities may respond differently to similar policies. Smart, effective strategies require the integration of municipal, provincial and federal policies that are tailored to specific communities and are flexible in their design.

As well, the human cost of immigration should not be glossed over. Some social alienation is inevitable. For immigrants who leave their country, there is a loss of cultural and personal identity that is never completely recovered and their solace often lies with the success of their Canadian-born children. Cultural dislocation and the sacrifice of identity can leave an internal wound that is never fully healed.

Immigrants do not discover this loss until they enter their new country. Debi Goodwin’s recent book, Citizens of Nowhere: From Refugee Camp to Canadian Campus, graphically describes the loneliness and alienation of eleven Somali students from the Dadaab refugee camp in northern Kenya during their first year in Canada. They are intelligent, ambitious students who have endured many years of deprivation and hopelessness before having the astounding lottery-level luck of receiving a scholarship and permanent residence in Canada. Their experiences of ethnic difference, incapacity and social ignorance are overwhelming. They were respected students and teachers in the camp and now they struggle with the incomprehensibility of traffic lights, ATMs, thermostats, bus passes, half-clad women, inappropriate touching and the thousand other social constructs that most of us take for granted. For Canadian readers, the book provides many vivid and surprising examples of cultural dislocation. It is a reminder that the migrant’s arduous journey does not end with arrival.

But for Canada and all countries, the lessons of Doug Saunders’s book are profound. The increasing migration of people, within and across borders, is inevitable. It may be moderated and regulated but it cannot be stopped. For those governments who try to obstruct or ignore migration, the consequences are serious. Immigrants will initially find protective enclaves that can become either successful arrival cities or blighted ghettos that turn into breeding grounds of crime and social dissatisfaction. There are policy choices and consequences to those choices: either a prosperous civil society or a fractious, internally divided one. Arrival City contains an unstated article of faith that I share: that migrants arrive with ambition and hope, and the vast majority, if given the opportunity by their host society, will transcend difference and find their way into their new home.