Immigration! …you ain’t seen nothin’ yet – Viva!life 95

Featured in Viva!Life 95/Spring 2026

They’re all at it with their simplistic demands and claims. “Keep ‘em out!” “Let ‘em in.” “They’re rapists.” “They’re public servants.”

It has become a debate about the here and now with no one capable, it seems, of raising their eyes above the scary newspaper headlines to see what’s trundling down the road towards us.

OK, so we invaded Iraq and utterly destroyed its infrastructure, bombed Syria, occupied Afghanistan and let loose missiles on Libya – not a bad way of destabilising an entire region and causing its people to scurry for salvation elsewhere.

But that’s the past and it’s the future that should be causing us sleepless nights – millions, maybe billions, of dispossessed people trekking around a damaged world desperately seeking safety and somewhere to set down their load. We need to acknowledge that now and urgently start formulating policies to prevent it or at least to mitigate against it because our children are facing a world riven by conflict, cruelty, despair and a collapsing environment (even more so than now). And it is all of our own making.

The four horsemen of this new apocalypse are already advancing over the horizon and they are the same riders who galloped through the pages of the New Testament – Conquest, War, Famine and Death.

The first horseman represents the greed of individual governments and multinational corporations who care not a jot for the impoverished of this world. They have embarked upon a series of land and water acquisitions (land without water is useless) across Ethiopia, Ghana, Liberia, Madagascar, Mozambique, South Sudan, Ethiopia and Zambia.

It is straight out of the colonialist playbook and involves corrupt elites, authoritarianism, bribery, threats and false promises. The impact on poor rural communities has been disastrous, with many having been expelled from land where they had eked out a precarious subsistence for centuries, leaving them with nothing but despair and civil unrest. Moving somewhere else – anywhere else – is perhaps their only option for survival.

Land grabs that we know about totalled 227 million hectares in 2011, according to Oxfam – an area bigger than Germany and France combined. Driving this theft are investors from the United States, United Arab Emirates, India, UK, Egypt, China and Israel.

Major crops grown on this land are soya, maize and alfalfa, which are exported for animal feed, while other areas are used for highly dubious projects such as growing biofuel, supposed tree planting and carbon sequestration – all ways of trying to circumvent the desperate need to reduce carbon emissions. The true scale of the problem is even worse as many of the land grabs go unrecorded.

The second horseman is the water waster. Mountain snow across the world has for millennia been part of a vital cycle – falling in winter, melting in summer to provide the vital fresh water that flows along the world’s great arterial rivers. Mountains also shelter over 200,000 glaciers that store 70 per cent of the world’s fresh water and these water towers are now melting at an alarming rate.

Research from the World Meteorological Organisation has identified that the last three years have been the worst, with Norway, Sweden, Svalbard and the tropical Andes among the worst-affected areas, with Eastern Africa, the Andes, Alpine and Pyrenean glaciers also disappearing.

It gets worse! Ice reflects sunlight back from whence it came but with its melting, ice is replaced by dark soil that absorbs much more heat and spurs the process ever forward. According to Carbon Brief, this phenomenon is already causing loss of life, of livelihoods and of places that communities have called home for generations. They have little option but to join the ‘tide’ of migrants.

The lack of snow and melting glaciers threaten the essential water supply of two billion people and put global food production at risk, according to the UN. A process that has sustained ecosystems and human societies for centuries is now collapsing. The inevitable mass migration has barely started yet but make no mistake – it’s coming!

A couple of years ago I took a bus from Malaga to Almuñécar in southern Spain. During the two-hour journey we crossed over numerous rivers – or rather riverbeds as they were all almost completely dry. It was April when water should have been tumbling down towards the sea and the temperature was 26°C. Spain’s growing water shortages were glaringly obvious but it isn’t just Spain that’s in trouble – it affects all Mediterranean, Balkan and North African countries.

The third horseman brings the sun, with scorching heatwaves that are searing countries in Asia – Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Pakistan, the Philippines and Thailand. Several cities have recorded record temperatures of 50°C to 53°C. Like so many of the world’s environmental problems, those who played little part in causing them are picking up the tab for those who did.

Peasant farmers, daily wage labourers, waste pickers, cart vendors and others who have to work outdoors are the worst affected. They suffer from heat stroke, respiratory problems and death and, being poor, they have little access to health care and, of course, as always, it is women who are disproportionately affected.

Dr Friederike Otto of World Weather Attribution says: “Heatwaves are the deadliest type of extreme weather and there have been thousands and thousands of stories of poor people dying in heat that will never be told.” Already it’s estimated that half a million people are dying every year. Of course they’re going to migrate because the only other option is death but even then they may not be safe. Recently, dozens of Sudanese migrants died from scorching heat at an illegal border crossing while trying to escape into Egypt.

The fourth horseman uses the oceans as his weapon. Global sea levels are rising slowly but inexorably due to melting glaciers and ice sheets and the expansion of seawater as it warms. This will continue for decades even if serious action is taken immediately.

The result is coastal flooding, infrastructure damage, contamination of freshwater and following closely behind will be the displacement of millions of people and their inevitable migration to somewhere safer and drier. Many of the world’s largest cities are at risk as well as large areas of entire countries, such as Bangladesh and Vietnam. This isn’t shroud waving or guesswork, it’s what’s going to happen and it will eventually affect the entire planet.

Those who puff themselves up to attack migration with the red faces of outrage and aggression are the very ones who dismiss the causes and the solutions.

How on Earth do you even start to deal with such profound problems? Truth is, you’ve already done it with the simple decision to go vegan. No land grabs for fodder growing are required for you. You haven’t solved the problem of carbon emissions but with a 20 per cent reduction in your own footprint, it’s one hell of a start. Forests are no longer felled because of you, soil is not degraded, deserts are not spreading and carbon sinks are not destroyed on your behalf.

It’s more than ironic that those who puff themselves up to attack migration with the red faces of outrage and aggression are the very ones who dismiss the causes and the solutions. They still swear by greed, growth and gratuitous money-making – the very things that got us here and are the accelerants to this global conflagration.

I’m not religious but I’ll never spurn a good quotation: “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.”