7 Billion Humans | Empty Pockets, The Youth Bulge in Developing World: Large Indian Family in Dharavi Slums | Mumbai (Bombay), India

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Large Indian Family in Dharavi Slums | Mumbai (Bombay), India

The world bank is trying to work out an arrangement where all of these squatters will get about twice the space they have now in new buildings, but it is complicated.

The basic concept of the National Geographic 7 Billion coverage – Urbanization, Immigration, Empty Pockets (the very fertile poor) and Empty Nests (the depopulation of aging, rich countries) is that these concepts are all interrelated.

As the empty pockets in Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere produce a huge population of young workers, the empty nests in Japan are building robots to take care of their elderly because they can’t import enough young workers or Filipinos.  The obvious solution is immigration. The empty pockets need good educations and salaries and the empty nests need workers to take care of them.  Like a rising tide—which you can watch from a lawn chair, willing it to stop, but it will rise anyway—immigration is an economic necessity that cannot be stopped. As the world’s population reaches 7 billion in 2011, 8 billion in 2025, and 9 billion in 2043, the repercussions for all of us will depend on how people move around our planet and the decisions they make as they go.