Data visualization company Lucify used U.N. statistics to show the recent mass movement of people to the continent.
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.takepart.com
I was looking for a map that illustrates what is happening in Europe in relation to the number of refugees moving into Europe. If you follow the link above you will find an interactive map that shows you a visualization of the hundreds of thousands of people heading into different parts of Europe.
You can hover over a country and it will show you the paths that refugees are taking to get to that country.
The numbers are staggering and unprecedented in the modern era. These people have a singular focus to get to safety and find a peaceful place where they can start again.
Unfortunately the very nature of what they are doing means that the countries they are going to for asylum and a fresh start are changing irrevocably and just as many of the refugees feel entitled to a new life in the country of their choice, the countries aren’t equipped to deal with the sheer volume of migrants.
This threatens to break up countries and the EU itself. It naturally lends itself to the uprising of nationalist fronts, fighting to hold onto the culture and lifestyle they are seeing disappear.
Many are likening this to the Middle Ages when countries were more like fiefdoms and the borders changed constantly, just as they did in the Middle East. The problem is that we no longer have a feudal lifestyle and the nature of a democracy means that it isn’t possible for ‘rulers’ of countries to endow rights on some people and deny them to others. Elected leaders can be toppled with ease and already in some European countries prior to this crisis many leaders didn’t last their elected terms.
The complexity of this situation is such that the economies of Europe, many of which are already fragile, cannot sustain hundreds of thousands of people who don’t at this stage have a means to contribute to the economies of the countries they are choosing to live in. If those countries’ economies fail and wealthy economies, also at risk, can’t or won’t bail them out, we face ethnic conflict and nationalism in a scale we have never experienced before.
This is no war between an oppressor or imperialist conqueror, it is human beings with little means to look after themselves and a sense of hope and entitlement on one side, versus people who see the country, the culture and lifestyle they feel entitled to, disappearing over a very short time, against their will.
With no solutions being developed to resolve this problem at the massive scale it is occurring, some parts of Europe are looking very scary.
I wonder if the smart entrepreneurs of the world can find ways to quickly harness the skills, expertise and passions of the new migrants in such a way that they can contribute to their new countries before a violent backlash occurs.
At the moment it’s just a tide of people who will flow, like water to a point where they have nowhere left to go and could be left to stagnate or fight for their survival. Given what they have already been through and the feeling that they have absolutely nothing left to lose, have no doubt that they will do what they have to in order to survive.
Given an opportunity, these people could add to the rich culture of countries which must inevitably evolve. Given no opportunity they will fight to survive while the Europeans will equally fight for their homelands.
New migrants thus threatened will be ripe picking for extremists groups because they will feel they have nothing to lose.
It seems ironic that while all this is taking place there are modern cities like Ordos in China that can hold a million people and are pretty much empty.
Anyway, the point of this blog was to point you in the direction of the interactive map. Have a look here.
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