There is nothing wrong with your mind if you inadvertently start humming this tune while watching your team of choice playing at a large sports spectacle such as the Euro Cup 2024. Its writing was inspired by a sports crowd in the UK. But note that the world-shaking performance of the song in Wembley Stadium in 1985, at the Live Aid concert which reportedly reached a global audience of 1.5 billion people, had nothing to do with sports. It was about facing a challenge for the human race and going on despite setbacks, thereby winning over adversity.
On the other hand, you also don’t need to consult your doctor about an onset of cognitive dissonance if you do not feel a chill in your sensory nerve endings when remembering Queen rock out We are the Champions or USA for Africa intone We are the World, twin anthems of the 16-hour multi-continental Live Aid benefit concert at which rock and pop brought together people and cultures. While these electrifying expressions of compassion changed humanitarian fundraising and influenced mindsets by the millions, they did not trigger a global transformation into a perfectly compassionate and inclusive world.
But you may be deeply mistaken if you believe that counterculture hymns of solidarity and universal humanity are old stuff only suited for septuagenarians jamming on stairways to heaven or that migrant/DP Freddie Mercury’s performance of We are the Champions was an inconsequential event in the prehistory of digital natives. It was in actuality a peak event in a long history of expressing the human quality of care for the stranger.
One facet to remember from such a musing about altruism is that the cultivation of unselfish passion is a versatile tonic of internal rejuvenation. It even acts as healing draught and mental health elixir when we are confronted – as one is on daily basis thrice and more often in Lebanon – with the poisoned flavors of 21st century life in a country under constant and vicious mental assault.
The first message of Executive’s foray into migration and displacement in our June 2024 special report is that migration has always been a part of human history, migrants have long brought value to their places of destination, and those who care for the displaced have long been favorably memorialized. The second message is that the story of migration and migrants, when analyzed in the aggregate, is a bit like the story of entrepreneurship. Many who embark on this journey of seeking opportunity irrespective of the resources at their command will experience entrepreneurial life as a nice but unremarkable episode, some will fail badly or even criminally, but a few will have stellar success and become change makers and catalysts of societal development that countless others are inspired by and will seek to emulate.
In truth, a truth that is today being passionately ignored in all political and nearly all popular migration debates, world literature is full of immortal stories of respect and care for the sojourner and refugee, as well as stories of migrant success and positive impact on their culture of refuge. Stories celebrating both groups, those who give refuge and those who need it, have over eons been woven into narratives of heroic migration that shape the history of civilizations.
Shifting to the geo-social picture
Refugee narratives with associations of inner nobility, prevailing against impossible odds, and non-kin altruistic compassion are encouraging and may propose solutions at a time when migration troubles are piling up globally.
But also, the counter-narratives are genuine and must not be overlooked: neither the individual or collective human trauma of war and disaster, nor the human drama of rejecting migrants and refugees out of the fear of losing one’s own safety and livelihood because those others have lost theirs.
Both the pro and the contra stories of human migration are anything but new. Emphasizing one and discounting the other because of personal views or prevailing group bias can be universally devastating for a people or a civilization.
In the nondescript steppes of the human mind, somewhere in between the hills of the heroic and the swamps of the traumatic, lies an emotionally desertified but safe realm where numbers and ratios play the lead role. In this space, the economics of migration can perhaps be the ramp that bridges the immense political and social distance between migrants and those who fear them.
If thus developed, migrant economics – or migrantonomics for the fleeting moment of this special report – reveals itself a trilemma. The first aspect of migrantonomics is political economy, which comprises both humanitarian and colonial traits. The second aspect consists of orthodox economics, with DNA strands of classical, neo-classical, Austrian, anarcho-libertarian, Keynesian, post-Keynesian, and other economic schools. The third aspect of migrantonomics is the elemental subsistence refugee economy of informal survival.
They behave as trilemma, each aspect contradictory to one another and irreconcilable, simply because the refugee’s interests of survival, the economic actor’s interest in profit, and the political actor’s interest in extension of her power, do not ever achieve stable balance.
When projecting this unbalanced socioeconomic mix forward into the digital globalized age of universal human obligations, however, a mission-impossible-type quadrupole looms. This higher-order challenge is a product of the wider cultural environment in which the migrantonomics trilemma is playing out today. Because there are more people, more technology, and more of practically everything that fuels human aspiration, in conjunction with more physical and labor mobility, plus an explosion of diversity of mindsets and approaches.
In this emergent context (which in the 2010s was described as “the 3M revolution” by Venezuelan author Moises Naim in a book about fundamentally changing power dynamics in our political and social systems), migration is an inescapable societal trend that is progressing on a gradual but inescapable scale that opens new dimensions of globalization and social obligations. Ergo, the migrantonomics trilemma looks set to evolve into a quadrupole that is shaped by interrelations of subsistence economy, orthodox economy, political economy, and a globally unfulfilled social economy promise.
To fulfill its promise of unifying migrants and those who fear them, migrantonomics in the digital age would eventually require portable, person-centric and equitable human balance sheets – of care received in early age, of education, human capital investments and certifications, of adult and advanced-age health care and livelihood, of intangible and tangible individual assets, inalienable rights, and commitments to public goods. Any aims of enacting global economic justice and sustainable equity, whether under SDG or any other programmatic frameworks, will make it imperative to create order in the primordial jungle of economic behaviors and societal values.
But the economical insight from Executive’s analysis of migration from, through, and into countries of the region (and elsewhere) is that economic data will not be the deciding factor on attitudes and policies when it comes to refugees and migrants.
By all historic and current observations on human behaviors, the imperative of global social justice is about as unlikely to be fulfilled in the digital future as will be a decisive reduction of harmful emissions in a world of growing populations and growing economic needs, wants, and expectations of the disenfranchised 70 to 80 percent.
The GDP numbers of immigration countries prove the economic benefits of migration. The historic numbers prove that migration is not something that can be decreed away. Rational humans make rational decisions. Well, sort of. So why are so many discussions about migration out of the realm of the rational?
The perilous and ultimately self-defeating dynamics of human power is one reason why an economic solution to the macro-prudential needs and geo-social challenges of migrantonomics is as improbable as an immediate enactment of cohesive global policies in a universally adopted UN migration compact. A contributing factor to the improbability of an economic solution to the global social justice challenge is selective victimology, the biased human tendency to side with victims at the expense of sustainable justice.
But perhaps the strongest and most notable reason why an economic solution to the existential force of migration is far from likely, is human reason.
Let’s examine rational decisions made by humans who do not involuntarily outsource most of their mental processes to machines. For one thing, we make decisions of bounded rationality. That means we look for the optimal achievable outcome on basis of the situation we are in, based on the information we have.
Next, we have filters in the mind. Filters such as the anchoring bias that overvalues the latest information we have stored in our internal hard disk, or brain; framing bias, which makes us perceptible to charmed products of social constructionism such as ethnic identity; and circular confirmation bias, which makes our mental search functions look for precisely the memory and information that we want to find.
Another filter is cognitive dissonance, in which we also excel. It provides us with the counterweight to affirmation biases: comfortable blind spots against inconvenient facts and experiences. Finally, and most interestingly for this skeptic of his own rational existence, is the thought that we do not program our desires based on our rational functions. No, we subject our ratio to the governance of our desires.
The rational numbers and trajectories on migration and displacement leave no doubt that the issues need to be addressed much better in terms of both remedial action – in response to predictable emergencies – and of root treatments that work and are not just decoys of romantic delusions. The problem has to be addressed in the interest of humanity, peace (whether as management/reduction of conflict, non-violence, or positive peace), and sustainable economy in real and digital terms.
Nothing short of an algorithmic substitution of the human pleasure centers and pathways of consciousness and conscience will change the polarity pattern of migratory and territorial behaviors that confound our species. Numbers and economic planning will not change the human contradiction, but they will make it less haphazard. Evidence-based migrantonomics can and need to be developed with aspects of global social rights, global portability of skills and recognized, certified intangible assets, equitable entitlements with limits, and capitalization on mobility entitlement and the mindset of the can-do spirit.
