The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future (27 page)

The New Cascadians

But the passage of NAFTA in 1994 marked the beginning of a stunning reorientation in Canada’s political and economic geography. It quickly began to integrate in a north-south direction with parts of the United States, rather than in the old east-west orientation across Canada. Very recent studies of this phenomenon are discovering it runs far deeper than simply increased cross-border trade and traffic; there is an actual melding of cross-border economies under way.
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This is not being steered by Ottawa and Washington but rather by a proliferation of cross-border networks of business groups, chambers of commerce, NGOs, mayors’ councils, and other forms of grassroots enterprise.

The end result of this north-south reorientation is the emergence of new cross-border “super-regions” with distinct economic footprints and cultural auras of their own. Names are even being floated for two of them. “Cascadia” refers to the melding economies of the Pacific Northwest and western Canada, centered on the Vancouver-Seattle-Portland corridor. “Atlantica” links upstate New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine with Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island.
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A key super-region is the Toronto-Hamilton-Detroit corridor integrating southern Ontario—the industrial heart of Canada—with Michigan’s automotive industry and manufacturing sectors in Indiana, Ohio, and other Midwestern states.

For each of these emerging super-regions, the two respective halves across the U.S.-Canada border are also knitting culturally. New surveys reveal that the social values of Atlantic Canada now resemble those of the U.S. East Coast, whereas those of Alberta and British Columbia now resemble those of the western United States.
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Apparently, proximal Canadians and Americans identify better with each other than with their own countrymen living farther away. In North America big doors are opening wide along this long border, with the widest hallways running north and south.

The Friendly Globalizers

The happily knitting border between Canada and the United States is not unique in the North. Unlike the Arctic Ocean seabed, territorial boundaries on land are long settled and calm among the eight NORC countries.
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Borders between Norway, Sweden, and Finland are among the friendliest in the world and their citizens (like Cascadians) identify more closely with each other than with the rest of Europe. The closest thing to a troubled border, if there is one, zigzags through more than seven hundred miles of forest to disentangle Finland from Russia.

Throughout history the Finns were subjugated, first by Sweden and then by Russia, before capitalizing on the disarray of the Bolshevik Revolution to win peaceful independence from Russia in 1917. Finland has been grappling with how to coexist with her giant and occasionally unruly eastern neighbor ever since. The countries fought twice during World War II, and Finland was forced to cede substantial territories to the Soviet Union. One of these, Finnish Karelia, contains the beautiful port city of Viipuri (now Vyborg) and remains a source of great bitterness to Finns today. From time to time Finnish politicians make noises about seeking its return. Less noticed was the loss of Petsamo (now Pechenga), a small corridor that once connected Finland to the Arctic Ocean. Its loss shuts Finland out of any UNCLOS claim there. It is reasonable to expect that Finnish regret over this region will rise in the coming decades.

But none of this renders the Fenno-Russia border militarized or tense. A regional cross-border economy in roundwood (unmilled lumber) is emerging between the two countries, not unlike the one between Canada and the United States.
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Many Russians now own vacation homes in Finland—to the delight of local merchants and consternation of old-timers—and Finnish tourists pour into Karelia. In fact, the only reason this border even warrants mention is because all the other borders around the Northern Rim are so placid. Compared with other neighboring countries around the world, the NORCs are an extraordinarily peaceful bunch.

They also rank among the most rapidly globalizing, business-friendly countries on Earth. Compiled on the following page are index performance scores for fifteen countries, representing the six largest national economies, the BRICs, and the NORCs.
⁴³¹
These respected indices ingest a wide range of econometric and other data to derive country performance rankings in things like openness to trade, tendency to make war, treatment of citizens, and so on. Rather than dissect the merits or agendas of each index, I simply provide rank-based scores from all of them.
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Each uses a different scoring system, so they are presented as percentiles for easy comparison. A score of 86, for example, means a country ranked higher than 86% of all of the countries in the world that are measured by that particular index. Also shown is a single composite score for each country, averaged across the five numeric indices.

A remarkable story leaps from these numbers. With the exception of Russia, the NORC countries are the most stable, trade-liberal, rapidly globalizing players on the planet. Who knew that Denmark and Canada are even more open to free trade than Japan, Germany, or the United States? Of particular relevance to energy production is that this openness also pervades the oil and gas industry, in contrast to the worldwide trend toward nationalization described in Chapter 3.
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Civil and political freedoms run remarkably high except in Russia. Six are among the most peaceful nations in the world. Viewed collectively, the NORCs appear particularly well-positioned to succeed in our rapidly integrating world.

Aside from cold winters, NORC cities also count among the world’s happiest places to live. According to the London-based Economist Intelligence

Some Common Measures of Economic of Economic Globalization, Percefulness, and Civil Liberties, Relative to the World

(
Source:
2009 Index of Economic Freedom, Heritage Foundation, and
Wall Street Journal
(179 countries); 2008 Economic Freedom of the World Index (141 countries); 2009 KOF Index of Globalization (208 countries); 2009 Global Peace Index (144 countries); 2008 Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index (167 countries); 2009 Freedom in the World Country Rankings (193 countries))

Unit, four of them rank among the world’s top ten most livable cities (with Vancouver in first place), citing low crime, little threat from political instability or terrorism, and excellence in education, health care, infrastructure, and culture.
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Remember Lagos, Dhaka, and Karachi, three megacities of 2025 presented in Chapter 2? They scored in the bottom ten.

Acceptance of Global Immigrants

But it takes more than just natural resources in the ground, ameliorating climate, stable governance, and pleasant cities for a civilization to expand. It also takes people.

Like the rest of the developed world, all eight NORC countries are graying and fertility rates dropping. The Russian Federation also faces a sharp population contraction (projected to fall -17% by 2050, see table on p. 173). However, the other seven are expected to grow anywhere from +1% to +31% by 2050. Much of this growth will come from international immigration.
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Thus, global flows of
people
are already changing the face of the Northern Rim and are critically important to how its future will unfold.

The specific rules and quotas of future immigration policies are impossible to divine here. However, an examination of current laws and trends reveals some surprisingly different attitudes toward foreigners among the NORC countries. National policies differ on the number, origin, and skill sets of foreign immigrants admitted. And culturally, some places are more welcoming than others.

The Russian Federation faces the bleakest prospect. Its demographics are in free fall, with sixteen people dying for every ten new babies being born.
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Its total population is now dropping by nearly eigtht hundred thousand people per year. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, some three million ethnic Russians moved from former satellites into the new Russian Federation, but by 2003 that wave of return had largely ended. In an effort to repatriate more, the Putin administration created a national program to recruit twenty million Russian expatriates to “return home” in 2006. However, it now appears impossible to attract more than two and a half million in total, even counting migrants from the Baltic States.
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Russia’s labor pool for construction, agriculture, and other seasonal work thus depends heavily on migrants from Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, and—increasingly—China in the Far East. Many are “irregular migrants” and would be called “undocumented workers” or “illegal aliens” in the United States. Perhaps ten million may be living inside Russia. Up to a million Tajiks—almost half of the entire workforce of Tajikistan—migrate to Russia in search of seasonal work each year.

Russian leaders have long realized they need to raise legal immigration into the country, but policies to do so are unpopular. Before the spring 2008 elections the Putin administration slashed the quota for foreign labor migrants from six million to two, and several years earlier abolished laws allowing multinational firms to easily hire skilled foreign workers. The reason for such moves is purely political, as Russia suffers from widespread xenophobia. Resentment of foreign migrants runs deep, especially in large cities where they tend to concentrate. In 2008 alone, at least 525 migrants suffered hate-crime attacks, with 97 of them killed.
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The United States is similar to the Russian Federation in that its economy also draws heavily from undocumented migrant labor. Throughout history it, too, has suffered from bouts of xenophobia, presently directed at Hispanics. However, by any global measure, the culture of the United States is immigrant-friendly. Its population, fueled greatly by foreign immigration, is growing smartly by over 2.6 million people per year. Each year approximately 1 million new immigrants are admitted as legal permanent residents (LPRs), another 1 million become citizens, and another 1 million are apprehended at the border trying to enter illegally.
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Nearly 4 million more are admitted as temporary residents. The number of undocumented migrants is difficult to know but is probably around 10-12 million people, roughly comparable to the Russian figure.

The first and foremost goal of stated U.S. immigration policy is family reunification. Applicants who already have relatives living in the United States enjoy highest priority for legal permanent residency, and over 65% of all LPRs are admitted for this reason. The other stated U.S. objectives, in decreasing priority, are admitting skilled workers, protecting refugees from political, racial, or religious persecution at home, and ensuring cultural diversity. Competition is fierce, especially in the last category with 6-10 million applicants per year vying for just 50,000 slots. Even family reunification applicants face processing backlogs of five to ten years. In a world of aging population and falling births, the United States is remarkably advantaged among developed OECD countries, still with no lack of willing settlers ready to move to the United States from all over the world.

Canada enjoys a similar situation, but with some important differences. Like the United States, its immigration policy objectives are to reunite families, to attract skilled workers, and to protect refugees. However, the priority of the first two is reversed. The first and foremost goal of Canada’s immigration policy is to admit people with economically valuable work skills.

Out of the quarter-million legal immigrants admitted to Canada in 2008, skilled workers outnumbered family members by nearly three to one.
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Since 1967 an intricate point system has been used to score an applicant’s value for the workforce, e.g., up to twenty-five points for education level, up to twenty-four points for language skill, up to ten points for suitable working age, and so on. Put simply, Canada has sharpened its immigration policy to attract educated, multilingual, skilled workers above all else.
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While less emotive than U.S. policy of prioritizing family reunification first, it clearly makes Canada’s workforce globally competitive despite its much smaller population.

Canadian policies have also suffered from ugliness, such as exclusion of non-Europeans until 1976. Since then, however, the country’s culture has become unusually welcoming of immigrants from all over the world. Nearly one in five Canadians today is foreign-born. Not long ago I watched thousands of Tamil protestors flood the streets of downtown Ottawa, badly snarling traffic on Parliament Hill. Entrapped drivers just calmly waited it out, some politely tooting their horns in support. A popular television show in Canada is
Little Mosque on the Prairie,
a situation comedy about Muslim immigrants trying to adjust to small-town life in Saskatchewan. My favorite example comes from the CBC television network, which recently introduced sports commentators Parminder Singh and Harnarayan Singh to broadcast
Hockey Night in Canada
(equivalent to
Monday Night Football
in the United States) in Punjabi, now poised to become the country’s fourth most-spoken language. A photograph of these two gentlemen preparing to call out a game of the Toronto Maple Leafs appears in the pictorial section of this book.

In the Nordic countries, public sentiment and national immigration policies tend to fall somewhere between the dysfunctional xenophobia of Russia and the fast-growing ethnic cauldrons of Canada and the United States. Viewed collectively they are morally sympathetic to the plight of refugees and appreciate the need for immigrant labor, but are also wary of diluting their ethnic makeup and (especially) languages and culture. Compared with North America, Russia, and larger countries of Europe, their populations are small and quite homogenous. Other than Sweden, none has a long history of absorbing foreigners. Xenophobia is present and most people, if asked, are more worried about preserving things as they are, rather than population decline or finding enough construction workers.

In principle all of the Nordic countries have adopted policies of allowing free inflows of workers from any country in the European Union, even though Norway and Iceland are not members of the EU.
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This is more welcoming than Russia, which demands worker permits even from its fellow members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). However, winning citizenship in a Nordic country is much harder, often with a language-test requirement. Immigrants from outside the EU are unwelcomed and restricted mainly to a small number of refugees.

To be sure, some subtle differences exist among the Nordic countries. The stereotype Swede is blond and blue-eyed, but in fact there are many dark-skinned immigrants in Sweden. About 12% of Sweden’s population is now foreign-born, similar to the proportion in the United States and Germany. Iceland has also become quite dependent on immigrant labor. Its foreign-born population rose as high as 10% just before its 2008 banking collapse. From there the numbers decline for Norway (7.3%), Denmark (6.8%), and Finland (2.5%).
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Finland, despite belonging to the EU and thus technically open to migrants from all EU countries, is the least welcoming Nordic country, in part due to the difficulty of the language but also owing to a lack of concerted recruitment programs. Not surprisingly, population growth in this country is projected to be among the lowest of the NORCs, pegged at just +2% by 2050 (see table on p. 173). Forced to choose, many Finns prefer less immigration over more, even at the cost of their country’s population and economic growth.