War, Work, and Want: How the OPEC Oil Crisis Caused Mass Migration and Revolution

"This book asks why, against all expectations, global migration tripled in the five decades after 1973. The book argues that economic and geopolitical changes unleashed by the OPEC oil crisis led to well over one hundred million migrants that few people expected or wanted. More people are on the move than at any time in human history: 281 million. This total figure has more than tripled since 1975 (90 million) and almost doubled since 1990 (153 million). Economically, immigration has transformed multiplesectors of the economy: agriculture, meatpacking, fishing, construction, retail, and caregiving. Politically, migration has cut a swathe through national, regional, and global politics: reshaping coalitions, reconfiguring party systems, and helping propel the far-right to power in Europe and-in the form of Donald Trump -the United States. The enormity of these changes is doubly impressive because largescale migration was unexpected and, in the global north, unwanted: slower post-1970s economic growth should have led to less immigration, and both European and American politicians attempted to end it"--
An expansive history of how an economic shock a half century ago created a world that is addicted to mass migration.The oil shock of 1973 changed everything. It brought the golden age of American and European economic growth to an end; it destabilized Middle Eastern politics; and it set in train processes that led to over one hundred million unexpected--and unwanted--immigrants. In War, Work, and Want, Randall Hansen asks why, against all expectations, global migration tripled after 1970. The answer, he argues, lies in how the OPEC Oil crisis transformed the global economy, Middle Eastern geopolitics and, as a consequence, international migration. The quadrupling of oil prices and attendant inflation destroyed economic growth in the West while flooding the Middle East with oil money. American and European consumers, their wealth drained, rebuilt their standard of living on the back of cheap labor--and cheap migrants. The Middle East enjoyed the benefits of a historic wealth transfer, but oil became a poisoned chalice leading to political instability, revolution, and war, all of which resulted in tens of millions of refugees. The economic, and migratory, consequences of the OPEC oil crisis transformed the contours of domestic politics around the world. They fueled the growth of nationalist-populist parties that built their brands on blaming immigrants forcollapsing standards of living, willfully ignoring the fact that mass immigration was the effect, not the cause, of that collapse. In showing how war (the main driver of refugee flows), work (labor migrants), and want (the desire for ever cheaper products made by migrants) led to the massive upsurge in global migration after 1973, this book will reshape our understanding of the past half-century of global history.