Countries should listen when people vote with their feet

At crunch time, people vote with their feet. Mass migration can tell us as much about our world as the most sophisticated geopolitical analysis. Continuous movements of populations, over centuries and millennia, have shaped history and will influence the future. This is as good an indication as any of where things are going, involving millions of individual and collective decisions.

There is a buildup of excitement as we approach the 16th BRICS Summit in the Russian city of Kazan during the last week of August. In times like these, when change is in the air, we are told that a new world order will emerge. Countries in BRICS — an association of states initiated by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — are on the rise, while the old-world order dominated by the US and the West is on the decline.

This is not hard to believe, and we are given overwhelming evidence by economists, political scientists and masses of analysts. We are warned that we will witness “gigantic geopolitical shifts” as imminently as the coming year. But if that is the case, why are people and money moving in the opposite direction to the change? Do we trust what people think, what they say or what they do? The three are not necessarily the same.

It is a bit like choosing a restaurant in Chinatown — I pick the busiest one that has the most people. I can never match the amount of information that has been processed by the dozens of people who end up filling the restaurant. Waiting a few minutes for a table beats having to browse through endless reviews and guides. If enough people voted with their feet and chose that very restaurant, this is good enough reason for me to pick it.

Even if you cannot compare countries to a restaurant or the choice of a meal, the decision to emigrate is more significant and involves more skin in the game. The choice to uproot oneself and family, and move to a strange land, may be far more indicative, and carries a strong message.

Before the 20th century travel was harder, more time consuming and expensive. But there were fewer borders and regulations. We now live in nation states that have far more barriers even if travel is easier, faster and cheaper. Migration has also become one of the most burning issues in the Western world.

The decision to emigrate is a complex one taken by millions. The process involves economic, political, psychological and emotional elements. It can be based on something as irrational as a spirit of adventure or a difficult choice involving both push and pull factors, but there are also many intangible elements.

In the jargon of international organizations like the World Bank, we are at a phase of “disorderly migration.” What this translates to is a massive movement of populations, tragedies of epic proportions, across seas and through jungles, with migrants exploited by people smugglers, starved, robbed, raped, drowned and arrested. In plain language it is people voting with their feet in search of a better life.

The world will be a different place for the next generation due to demographic change. If it were true that the West was in decline and the East and South were rising, the direction of emigration would be from the US and Europe to India, China, Iran and Brazil. When was the last time anyone you know emigrated to Russia, the land of opportunity?

Modern-day migration can be risky; barriers set up by nation states try to slow it down but in the end push people toward illegal journeys, through a surging industry of people smuggling. According to the International Organization for Migration data portal, 2023 was the deadliest year in migration routes worldwide, with 8,000 recorded fatalities, double the annual average of the previous 10 years. There are plenty of videos posted by migrants walking through jungles with horror stories of exploitation, abuse, illness and families being separated. Human trafficking is a form of modern-day slavery; the numbers are significant and they are also a measure of desperation by people who want to move to the West at any cost.

One interesting example close to home is the migration of Hezbollah supporters from south Lebanon. They listen to speeches by Hassan Nasrallah about the greatness of Iran and its allies, and how they are going to defeat the West and its Arab allies in the Gulf States at the same time as they emigrate en masse to these countries. Instead of emigrating to Russia and Iran, we see them moving to the US, Western Europe and the Gulf states. Again, what they do is probably different from what they think and what they say.

Even more significant is the movement of capital — millionaires and their money, commonly referred to as high-net-worth individuals. Observing the movement of HNWIs across the globe is important. According to the Henley Private Wealth Migration report, a significant proportion of HNWIs are entrepreneurs, especially the multi-millionaires or billionaires among them, and countries that attract HWNIs from other parts of the world may see powerful benefits like job creation and investment.

Mapping of such HNWI movement forecasts that the UAE will attract the most millionaires in 2024, while China and the UK are expected to lose the largest number.

What is more significant for our purpose is that the BRICS countries that are supposed to be on the rise are among the biggest losers of millionaires. HNWIs are escaping Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa mainly for Canada and the US, but also to countries in Europe such as Switzerland, Greece, Italy and Portugal, while in the Far East the attraction is Singapore.

The BRICS Summit is being held in Russia this year for a good reason. At the 2023 meeting in Johannesburg, Russian President Vladimir Putin had to dial in and appear via video conference in order to avoid embarrassing the South African hosts. The International Criminal Court had issued a warrant for his arrest and the South Africans would have been obliged to arrest him.

At the end of August, while reading and listening to news from the BRICS Summit and the claims of coming geopolitical shifts, we have to bear in mind that populations, both rich and poor, are moving in the opposite direction.

• Nadim Shehadi is an economist and political adviser. X: @Confusezeus