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...