World facing biggest ever migration crisis, says new report

Ekklesia (UK): Some 1 billion people will be forced from their homes by 2050 as climate change deepens an already huge global migration crisis, predicts an authoritative new report by Christian Aid - which shows that scapegoating immigrants is the wrong approach.

...Human Tide: The Real Migration Crisis shows that the migration issue is not the one that British tabloid newspapers regularly whip up hysteria about – bogus allegations that the UK and other rich countries are being ‘flooded’ – but the conditions of poverty, ecological destruction and war which make life insecure for millions of people in the South.

Future climate migrants will swell the ranks of the 155 million people already displaced by conflict, disaster and large-scale development projects, says Christian Aid. The vast majority will be from the world’s poorest countries.

Urgent action by the world community is needed if the worst effects of this crisis are to be averted, the new report claims. “We believe that forced migration is now the most urgent threat facing poor people in the developing world,” says John Davison, the report’s lead author.

Dennis McNamara (Special Adviser to the UN Emergency Relief Co-ordinator) and Jens-Hagen Eschenbaecher (acting head of the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre in Geneva) launched their survey and analysis crisis at a specially constructed displacement camp set up for the occasion on London’s South Bank on Monday 14 May 2007....

Henry Edward Doyle's 1868 engraving of "Emigrants leaving Ireland"