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Its basically from political gadfly within the Republican caucus to potentially the number two person in the state of Arizona, says Arizona Republican Sen. T.J. Shope. Its a meteoric rise.

Never in a million years would Paul Boyer, a fellow GOP state legislator, have imagined that Finchem would crush a field of qualified candidates and win a nomination to statewide office.

Mark is known as the guy thats probably the dumbest well, theres a long list, but one of the dumbest legislators in the state House, he says. (Finchems retort: Boyer is an utter disgrace.)

But Finchems rise makes sense in light of the broader shift within the Arizona Republican Party. Trumps slate of political insurgents swept the GOP nomination for every state office in which he offered his blessing, from the U.S. Senate down to state Senate races.

After decades of civil war, the Arizona primaries mark a decisive swing in the state GOPs balance of power. The center-right, pro-business wing of the party led by the late Sen. John McCain and Gov. Doug Ducey has been defeated, at least for now. Finchem and other far-right outsiders the original tea party activists and the new Trumpist hard-liners have taken over.

We drove a stake through the heart of the McCain machine, Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake bragged, while making a stabbing motion, at a CPAC event following the primary. We threw together a rag-tag team of nonpolitical people to run the most exciting campaign in the country. And we won.

Lake, a former TV news anchor, fended off more than $20 million in spending against her to narrowly capture the nomination, despite her opponents backing from Ducey, former GOP Gov. Jan Brewer and former Vice President Mike Pence.

We drove a stake through the heart of the McCain machine, Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake bragged at a recent CPAC event.|LM Otero/AP Photo

Blake Masters, a 36-year-old acolyte of billionaire tech entrepreneur and Trump donor Peter Thiel, surged from behind in the U.S. Senate primary after earning Trumps nod. Abraham Hamadeh, a 31-year-old lawyer who has spent fewer days in a courtroom than many petty criminals, was rocketed out of obscurity to win the primary for state attorney general after snagging Trumps endorsement.

None have any political experience. But they have the main qualification that matters to the former president: They repeat the lie that the Arizona election was rigged against him. Every winning Republican candidate said they wouldnt have certified the 2020 election. That means that as Trump gears up for a possible third run for the presidency, Arizona is facing the prospect of a slate of statewide officials who could steal the election for him. (Indeed, another victim of a Trump-backed primary was Rusty Bowers, the soft-spoken leader of the Arizona House who rebuffed Trumps pressure campaign to overturn the states 2020 election results and testified to the January 6 committee.)

For his part, Finchem defeated three other candidates for the secretary of state nomination: Beau Lane, an advertising executive who had backing from the business community and Duceys full-throated endorsement; state Rep. Shawnna Bolick who had sponsored legislation to let lawmakers toss out the results of presidential elections they dont like and had tried to capture the Trump vote; and state Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita, who has been the architect of every major election integrity bill that has been signed into law for the past decade, but who refused to regurgitate the lie that Arizonas election was stolen from Trump. Finchem beat them all by wide margins.

Its not an overstatement to say Finchem remains a bit of a joke to his soon-to-be old colleagues.

Boyer, who served eight years in the Arizona Legislature alongside Finchem, cackled while recalling Finchems doomed 2020 run for speaker against Bowers. Finchem wrote a seven-page memo outlining his vision for the job, including his top priority: using viral content to take the messaging power back from the media. And he did prove that he knew how to go viral.

The use of mimes [SIC] is an emerging means of harnessing rhetoric and sarcasm with a purpose, Finchem declared with a repeated typo of the word meme, which became a local meme itself. The regular use of mimes to build brand identity and establish solid differentiation will serve us well.

Less than a third of the Republican caucus ultimately backed Finchem to become the speaker, but it cemented his status as the leader of the far right at the state Capitol.

Finchem has always been something of an underdog and outcast at the state Capitol. In his eight years as a lawmaker, he has only once been granted a committee chairmanship; typically, even junior Republican lawmakers get prime posts. He had just one bill signed into law this year fewer than many Democrats who sit in the minority and he hasnt fared much better in past years.

How can he go from that, to the Republican nominee for secretary of state? I mean, its simple. He won the Arizona Apprentice for secretary of state, Boyer says. Abe Hamadeh for AG? Kari Lake for governor? Its very simple. If you can fog up a mirror and win the Arizona Apprentice, youre good.

Abe Hamadeh for AG? Kari Lake for governor? Its very simple. If you can fog up a mirror and win the Arizona Apprentice, youre good.

Paul Boyer, Arizona state legislator

Boyer, meanwhile, chose not to run for reelection after receiving death threats for refusing to go along with his partys election lies. So just two years after his failed run for leadership, Finchem is on top. And those who laughed at his vision have been purged from Arizonas political landscape.

In many ways, Finchem is a man made for the times. Hes a longtime leader of the legislatures far-right Liberty Caucus, and is revered in conservative grassroots circles as one of the few good lawmakers.

He refused to do a phone interview for this article, but he did send a few text messages, saying if hes having a moment in the sun, its because like him, the people are no longer afraid to be bullied by the establishment.

I am but a humble servant who took the time to listen to his constituents and has been vilified for it, he wrote. Perhaps thats why they view me as their champion.

Originally from the Detroit area, Finchem moved to Arizona in 1999 and began a career as a realtor. (He had previously been a cop in Kalamazoo, Mich., where his final evaluation reads poor rating, would not rehire.) He later became vice president of business development for Clean Power Technologies LLC, an Idaho-based company that claimed on its now-defunct website that it can generate and deliver clean energy without wires, anywhere around the world.

Finchem was an early adopter of fringe politics in Arizona. He was touting state sovereignty issues long before phrases like plenary powers and the independent state legislature doctrine entered the mainstream political lexicon. Armed not with a law degree, but a masters in legal studies from the University of Arizonas freedom school, Finchem became the thought leader of the movement to decertify the 2020 election in Arizona.

After losing his head-to-head contest with Bowers for the speakership in late 2020, Finchem held an unauthorized, unofficial hearing with Rudy Giuliani and other members of Trumps legal team to air falsehoods about how the election was rigged. That hearing cemented his status as one of the key ringleaders of Arizonas Stop the Steal movement and helped earn him the Trump endorsement that rocketed him to national stardom on the right.

Just a few weeks later, Finchem was outside the U.S. Capitol at the Jan. 6 riot. Though he maintains he never entered the building, video footage shows he was much closer than he originally claimed. Ali Alexander, the organizer of the rally that helped fuel the deadly mayhem, declared there wouldnt have been a Stop the Steal movement in Arizona without Finchem.

CNN reported this week that Finchem previously shared posts on social media about stockpiling ammunition and touted his membership in the Oath Keepers anti-government extremist group, which is under scrutiny for its role in the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Finchem is still pushing baseless theories about how the election was rigged, texting a link to a conservative activist project that he claims shows the Chinese Communist Party now has operational control over many elections across the United States because they control the servers where all of the electronic data sits.

What boggles my mind is reporters and journalists are sitting on the story of the century but nobody has the balls to write about it, he wrote in a text.

The 2022 primaries underscored just how tight Trumps grip is over Arizona Republicans, and that his 2020 loss is still fresh on these voters minds as he considers another run for the presidency.

How could it not be? In Arizona, it feels like the 2020 election is still ongoing.

Republicans in this state, perhaps more than any other, have followed Trumps election conspiracies down the rabbit hole.

First there was the Cyber Ninjas audit authorized by the state Senate, which ultimately confirmed through a hand count of ballots that President Joe Biden won, but which offered up a host of other debunkable conspiracies about how maybe he didnt win. Then theres the still-ongoing investigation by the Arizona attorney general about alleged improprieties in the election, which uncovered a handful of record-keeping issues, but no proof of any widespread fraud, including from dead people voting.

Meanwhile, Arizona Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward not only continues to spout Trumps fantasies about the election; she broke with the chairs long-standing tradition of neutrality to throw her full weight behind the MAGA candidates in the primary, calling the Trump-opposed candidates RINOs and worse. The sycophantic pro-Trump student group Turning Point USA also is based in Arizona and deeply intertwined with the party infrastructure.

Trump himself has seen Arizona as key to keeping his political future alive. Hes traveled to the state twice since losing the 2020 election. In January of this year, he came to promote his candidates and spin election yarns. And during the first weeks of early voting, he returned with pillow salesman and conspiracy-slinger Mike Lindell, who warmed up the crowd by claiming, once again, that the election was rigged and that the state is poised to do away with defective vote tabulating machines.

But just as important, Arizonas mainstream conservatives have cowered to the lie that the election was stolen from Trump. While some, including Ducey, have attempted to tamp down on the rhetoric, none have forcefully confronted Trumps disinformation.

On the same day as Trumps latest rally for his candidates, Pence and Ducey stumped for their pick in the gubernatorial primary: Karrin Taylor Robson. Robson criticized Lake for saying the primary election was rigged against her before votes had even been cast, but Robson refused to say that the 2020 election was free and fair, saying she wasnt sure if she would have certified Arizonas 2020 election if she were governor.

We have the wrong guy in the White House, she said, while repeatedly refusing to clarify whether Biden was wrongfully elected or simply the wrong guy for the job.

Lane, Finchems business-backed opponent, would say the election wasnt stolen when asked. But he never made it a central point of his campaign in an overt way. Instead, he took to the airwaves with criticism of Finchem for having supported a National Popular Vote bill, saying if Finchem had his way, Hillary Clinton would have been president.

In a state where even the mainstream conservative candidate for the top election official doesnt forcefully articulate a message that the 2020 election was safe, secure and legitimate, it shouldnt be a shock that Republican voters backed a slate of candidates thats likely to be willing to throw out the results of the 2024 election.

Whether Finchem and his fellow Trumpists will find success in November is less clear.

In Arizonas purple political landscape, Democrats and even many Republicans here say GOP primary voters went too far that theyve undermined the partys chances of holding the states top offices in an otherwise great year for Republicans. Perhaps that could break the fever, as Barack Obama once predicted, before the party went even further to the right under Trump.

It may take a drubbing at the polls this year to get Republican voters off the Trump train, says Arizona Republican consultant Barrett Marson. Or maybe theyll just double down.

See the article here:
'Never in a Million Years': Arizona Republicans Grapple with the Rising Fringe - POLITICO

Three days after the FBI descended on former President Trumps Mar-a-Lago home, Attorney General Merrick Garland gave a press conference lasting less than four minutes about the raid. As he was speaking, he excoriated anyone who questions the motives and integrity of the FBI. His intent was clear: You are not allowed to criticize the FBI and its obvious double standards. Any criticism of the institution will be viewed as a threat to democracy. In true Orwellian fashion, the corporate media began parroting the same talking points.

The ruling elite is blinded by their groupthink mentality. The raid on a former president was the culmination of two decades of corruption within the big government apparatus where abuses of power have become increasingly brazen. The loss of trust in the agencies is not the result of conspiracy theories, social media, or millions of Americans simply becoming anti-government. It is a direct consequence of their actions.

The American people believed our institutions were operating in good faith and they took a laissez-faire approach for far too long, even as the evidence of an abusive bureaucracy was mounting. Consider the following:

In 2007, programs that were developed to target terrorists quickly morphed into domestic spying programs. The NSA began capturing and monitoring Americans electronic communications and metadata through the PRISM program. Both John Brennan and James Clapper denied the government was monitoring American citizens and openly lied to Congress. They were never charged with perjury, and not a single person who authorized this program was ever held accountable for this direct assault on the Fourth Amendment.

Journalists have also been routinely monitored by federal agencies making a mockery of the First Amendment. Ironically, many within the media now carry water for the institutions and serve as their private PR firms.

In 2012, then-Attorney General Eric Holder refused to provide information to Congress on the governments ill-thought-out Fast and Furious program. He was held in contempt of Congress, and there are indications that he may have committed perjury when he denied knowing about the program. Lucky for him, he never received the Steve Bannon treatment.

In 2013, the IRS admitted to targeting conservative groups. Lois Lerner deemed that these conservative and Tea Party groups were guilty of having the wrong political opinion. For her actions, Lois Lerner refused to answer questions, pleading the fifth, and was found in contempt of Congress by the House of Representatives, but the Justice Department declined to prosecute her on contempt charges. Instead, she was allowed to retire, collect her pension, and never be held accountable.

In 2014, it was revealed that John Brennans CIA was monitoring sitting members of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee. Neither Brennan nor anyone else involved in the program was ever held accountable.

In 2015, Hillary Clinton was subpoenaed to preserve her home-brewed email server. Following the subpoena, her email management company Platte River Network wiped the server clean, and employees sent an email with the subject line stating, Hillary cover-up operation work ticket archive cleanup.

In 2016, as the FBI was investigating the server, multiple people in the Hillary Clinton orbit were granted immunity. Cheryl Mills, who was a witness in the investigation, was allowed to claim attorney-client privilege. Compare that to the FBI raids on Trumps lawyers where long-standing norms of attorney-client privilege were thrown out the window.

Hillary Clintons top aide told the FBI that she wasnt aware of the private server, yet she had her own email account on it. We also know that then-FBI Director James Comey already had a draft letter prepared to exonerate Clinton even before she was interviewed. Then, shortly before the 2016 election, it was revealed that Clintons emails were found on a laptop shared by Abedin and her husband, disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner. Not a single person was ever held accountable for the lies, the deceit, and the illegal server.

As if spying on U.S. senators and turning a blind eye to Clintons malfeasance wasnt bad enough, in 2016, the FBI began its infamous Crossfire Hurricane operation where FBI agents would use a dossier paid for by Hillary Clintons campaign to investigate and surveil the Trump campaign, and later, the Trump presidency. They knew the dossier had little basis in fact but presented it to the FISA court anyway. FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith doctored another piece of evidence and presented it to the FISA court. Throughout the investigation, FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page would routinely send each other text messages expressing their disdain for Trump and his supporters.

The investigation didnt end when President Trump won the election. In 2017, FBI Director James Comey leaked sensitive information to the press in order to force then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to appoint a special counsel. Over the next few years, the country would be torn apart, and in the end, the special counsel never found any evidence of Russian collusion.

What about the U.S. Postal Services iCOP program, where postal inspectors were monitoring peoples social media accounts and forwarding posts to the Department of Homeland Security? Again, no accountability.

Federal courts have also admonished the FBI on several occasions for illegally accessing the NSAs repository for information on Americans.

Multiple intelligence and federal law enforcement agencies continue to monitor and collect the data of American citizens, including the FBI, the CIA, and ICE. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) has amassed millions of records on legal firearm owners even though a gun database is strictly prohibited by Congress.

What about how the Secret Service reportedly tried to cover up Hunter Bidens firearm incident or how the FBI was used to track down Ashley Bidens alleged diary? What about all the former senior-level intelligence heads stating that Hunters laptop was Russian disinformation in order to manipulate an election? Why havent we heard of any investigations into the current president given that he is directly implicated in the Biden family pay-to-play scheme?

Then you have the Department of Education, the National School Boards Association, and the Department of Justice colluding to target parents and label them as domestic terrorists.

Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, we witnessed repeated lies from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other public health institutions, ranging in topic from vaccines to masking to lockdowns. Even worse, Dr. Anthony Faucis emails show his ruthless efforts to target any scientists or medical professionals who disagreed with him in an attempt to destroy their credibility.

The evidence of rampant abuse within the bureaucracy is widespread and illustrates that we should not blindly and obediently trust these institutions. Many of our officials act as if we exist to serve them as opposed to them serving us. They justify their abuses with a sense of righteousness as long as they qualify their wrongdoing with the sentiment of preserving democracy. In their delusional minds, they believe they are guardians of democracy.

Thomas Jefferson once warned, The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold on us.

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Not Just FBI: How Institutions Across The Board Forfeited Our Trust - The Federalist

Who else finds the citys response to its illegal-migrant influx utterly surreal?

Over in The Bronx, hundreds of migrants lined up Sunday to sign up for health coverage and collect food, free phones and school supplies.

Friday at Department of Education headquarters, Chancellor David Banks detailed plans to get a thousand-plus migrant kids enrolled in public schools before classes start Sept. 8 amid advocate complaints that the DOE hasnt been moving fast enough.

Meanwhile, Department of Social Serviceschief Gary Jenkins is embroiled in accusations that he tried to cover up the scandal of some migrants having to stay overnight at an intake center rather than immediately being gotten to shelters. Oh, and the beleaguered hotel industry is jumping to offer new shelter space at a price, of course.

All this amid Mayor Eric Adams ongoing war of words with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, complaining about the relative handful of migrants Abbotts busing north to highlight how overwhelmed his towns are by the thousands arriving daily.

Yet Adams was silent for months about the migrants sent here by the Biden administration which is responsible for literally waving in the entire vast wave, and for distributing countless illegal border-crossers across the nation, including via secretive middle-of-the-night flights.

Its beyond bizarre that the citys entire power structure (most certainly including those all-too-powerful advocates) treats this insanity like it was some new form of weather, a challenge that erupted out of the blue through no ones fault except Abbotts, of course.

Set aside the refusal to even mention the presidents central role, and the fact that hes executing what somehow has become Democrats dogmatic open-borders policy (even if they refuse to put it that way, all joining in the just the weather denial).

Ignore, too, that this crisis should have some New York leaders finally questioning the citys shelter for all comers guarantees, and its extremist (since Mayor Bill de Blasio redefined it) sanctuary city policy.

Why does everyone insist on ignoring the migrants own agency here? These people chose to come chose to travel thousands of miles to illegally enter another country, usually crossing other countries where they could have stayed and then to come to New York City.

Heck, those who arrive send word back home (and to those already en route) about how to game the system, on top of advice from the federally funded advocate nonprofits urging them to make the trip.

Yes, many of them rush to find some way to be self-sufficient. And theyre all seeking a better life, and responding to the come on in signals so many Americans send.

But all of this is a result of human choices, not of mysterious forces requiring the rest of us to simply adjust. Routinely, universally pretending otherwise may be politically convenient, but it increasingly enrages everyone in the reality-based community.

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The insane topsy-turvy response to NYCs migrant crisis - New York Post

Liz Truss has been clear about her key selling point throughout her leadership campaign. At its launch she boasted: I can lead, I can make tough decisions and get things done.

And her whole campaign has amounted to variations upon that theme I do what I say I will do, Im somebody who gets things done in TV debates, hustings with members and personal appearances.

So Liz Truss not the slickest communicator but gets things done: thats the offer which Conservative members are buying into in droves. Of course, Boris Johnson was once the getting things done go-to guy. Or at least the Get Brexit Done candidate.

And that was the problem. Once Brexit got done and the obsessively focused Dominic Cummings left his side, Johnson proved fairly useless at the implementation side of things. He never lost his columnists facility for story-telling, but the dog-ate-my-homework excuses saw a chill descend towards him from many of his natural supporters.

On no issue was this ultimately fatal loss of faith felt so keenly as on the shocking surrender of control over the United Kingdoms borders.

Just a month into his premiership, Johnson spoke out about a then trickle of inflatable dinghies illegally unloading human cargo on the Kent coast after crossing the English Channel from France. We will send you back, declared the new prime minister directly to camera in August 2019.

In 2019 there were in total 1,843 illegal arrivals via this new method, almost all of whom went on to lodge asylum claims. The next year there were 8,466 such arrivals and almost nobody got sent back anywhere. Far from the Johnson administration implementing an effective deterrent regime as promised, successful arrivals began to put out TikTok videos about how easy this border-busting was proving to be, much to the impotent fury of Home Secretary Priti Patel.

In 2021 there were 28,526 arrivals by dinghy recorded. At the tail end of last week the number so far for 2022 surged past 20,000, almost twice the number who had arrived by the same point last year. It can now confidently be asserted that the government will do even worse this year than last, probably considerably so.

Everything Ms Patel has promised or tried on Mr Johnsons behalf has failed; paying France to stop the dinghies setting out has produced scant results, France has also refused to take back people picked up mid-Channel, there have been no pushbacks at sea, the Ministry of Defence being placed in charge of operations has only resulted in an improved water taxi service to whisk migrants to Dover and that experiment will shortly come to an end. Some 30,000 hotel rooms at a cost of 5 million a day have been requisitioned to accommodate the arrivals, the vast majority of whom are young men.

And the Rwanda removals agreement, that great hope of springtime, has come to nought as well, tied up in knots by human rights lawyers. With immigration in general surging contrary to 2019 Conservative manifesto promises and the government leaning on local authorities to divert scarce social housing away from British families and towards the huge numbers of Afghans and Ukrainians it has invited to come, nobody should believe liberal commentators who claim that the public are relaxed about all this.

In fact there is a feeling that the basic social contract between the government and the citizenry is breaking down given the ease with which foreign nationals can circumvent UK borders. Among2016 Leave voters and 2019 Conservative voters, immigration and asylum is rated as the second most important issue, behind the economic crisis.

The Tory leadership candidates understand that among party members its salience is just as high, which is why both Truss and Rishi Sunak have pledged to drive through the Rwanda policy. Truss has promised to seek similar agreements with other countries too.

So if Ms Trusss emerging political brand is to hold together rather than fall apart she will swiftly need to demonstrate progress on this front rather than just raging impotently, Johnson-style.

She says she does not rule out the UK withdrawing from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights, but first wishes to try a less drastic remedy passing a British Bill of Rights to bolster the jurisdiction of UK courts. Suella Braverman, the Attorney General, was clear in her own leadership campaign that this alone is unlikely to prove effective and so did advocate withdrawal from the ECHR.

Putting Braverman in charge of the governments response on this issue either as Home Secretary or Justice Secretary would send a useful signal to the Conservative-leaning voters for whom it is a major priority.

But Ms Truss will also need to prepare for the Bill of Rights approach to fail, not least because our own judiciary is quite capable of expanding de facto rights to asylum seekers and thwarting removals but also because it wont stop the ECHR interfering.

She must do enough between now and the next election to reassure Tory-leaning voters that she will do whatever it takes to stop the abuse of the asylum system. That may mean setting up a vast new asylum processing centre on the British overseas territory of Ascension Island, whether or not the Americans who share our military bases there object. It may mean routine detention of every asylum-seeker while claims are processed.

It will certainly mean preparing a radical set of policies for the next manifesto, including walking away from the ECHR and disavowing a swathe of other unsustainable international agreements.

Such an approach will cause an uproar among the liberal establishment and left-of-centre opposition parties. That could prove politically useful should Ms Truss hold her nerve, forcing an issue Labour is deeply uncomfortable talking about to the top of the broadcast media agenda. But her prime challenge will be to convince people that, unlike the teller of tall stories who preceded her, she really means it.

Read more here:
The Channel migrant crisis will make or break Liz Truss - The Spectator

A great upheaval is coming. Climate-driven movement of people is adding to a massive migration already under way to the worlds cities. The number of migrants has doubled globally over the past decade, and the issue of what to do about rapidly increasing populations of displaced people will only become greater and more urgent. To survive climate breakdown will require a planned and deliberate migration of a kind humanity has never before undertaken.

The world already sees twice as many days where temperatures exceed 50C than 30 years ago this level of heat is deadly for humans, and also hugely problematic for buildings, roads and power stations. It makes an area unliveable. This explosive planetary drama demands a dynamic human response. We need to help people to move from danger and poverty to safety and comfort to build a more resilient global society for everyones benefit.

Large populations will need to migrate, and not simply to the nearest city, but also across continents. Those living in regions with more tolerable conditions, especially nations in northern latitudes, will need to accommodate millions of migrants while themselves adapting to the demands of the climate crisis. We will need to create entirely new cities near the planets cooler poles, in land that is rapidly becoming ice-free. Parts of Siberia, for example, are already experiencing temperatures of 30C for months at a time.

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Arctic areas are burning, with mega-blazes devouring Siberia, Greenland and Alaska. Even in January, peat fires were burning in the Siberian cryosphere, despite temperatures below 50C. These zombie fires smoulder year round in the peat below ground, in and around the Arctic Circle, only to burst into huge blazes that rage across the boreal forests of Siberia, Alaska and Canada.

In 2019, colossal fires destroyed more than 4m hectares of Siberian taiga forest, blazing for more than three months, and producing a cloud of soot and ash as large as the countries that make up the entire European Union. Models predict that fires in the boreal forests and Arctic tundra will increase by up to four times by 2100.

Wherever you live now, migration will affect you and the lives of your children. It is predictable that Bangladesh, a country where one-third of the population lives along a sinking, low-lying coast, is becoming uninhabitable. (More than 13 million Bangladeshis nearly 10% of the population are expected to have left the country by 2050.) But in the coming decades wealthy nations will be severely affected, too.

This upheaval occurs not only at a time of unprecedented climate change but also of human demographic change. Global population will continue to rise in the coming decades, peaking at perhaps 10 billion in the 2060s. Most of this increase will be in the tropical regions that are worst hit by climate catastrophe, causing people there to flee northwards. The global north faces the opposite problem a top-heavy demographic crisis, in which a large elderly population is supported by a too-small workforce. North America and Europe have 300 million people above the traditional retirement age (65+), and by 2050, the economic old-age dependency ratio there is projected to be at 43 elderly persons per 100 working persons aged 2064. Cities from Munich to Buffalo will begin competing with each other to attract migrants.

The coming migration will involve the worlds poorest fleeing deadly heatwaves and failed crops. It will also include the educated, the middle class, people who can no longer live where they planned because its impossible to get a mortgage or property insurance; because employment has moved elsewhere. The climate crisis has already uprooted millions in the US in 2018, 1.2 million were displaced by extreme conditions, fire, storms and flooding; by 2020, the annual toll had risen to 1.7 million people. The US now averages a $1bn disaster every 18 days.

More than half of the western US is facing extreme drought conditions, and farmers in Oregons Klamath Basin talk about illegally using force to open dam gates for irrigation. At the other extreme, fatal floods have stranded thousands of people from Death Valley to Kentucky. By 2050, half a million existing US homes will be on land that floods at least once a year, according to data from Climate Central, a partnership of scientists and journalists. Louisianas Isle de Jean Charles has already been allocated $48m of federal tax dollars to move the entire community due to coastal erosion and rising sea levels; in Britain, the Welsh villagers of Fairbourne have been told their homes should be abandoned to the encroaching sea as the entire village is to be decommissioned in 2045. Larger coastal cities are at risk, too. Consider that the Welsh capital, Cardiff, is projected to be two-thirds underwater by 2050.

The UN International Organization for Migration estimates that there could be as many as 1.5 billion environmental migrants in the next 30 years. After 2050, that figure is expected to soar as the world heats further and the global population rises to its predicted peak in the mid 2060s.

The question for humanity becomes: what does a sustainable world look like? We will need to develop an entirely new way of feeding, fuelling and maintaining our lifestyles, while also reducing atmospheric carbon levels. We will need to live in denser concentrations in fewer cities, while reducing the associated risks of crowded populations, including power outages, sanitation problems, overheating, pollution and infectious disease.

At least as challenging, though, will be the task of overcoming the idea that we belong to a particular land and that it belongs to us. We will need to assimilate into globally diverse societies, living in new, polar cities. We will need to be ready to move again when necessary. With every degree of temperature increase, roughly 1 billion people will be pushed outside the zone in which humans have lived for thousands of years. We are running out of time to manage the coming upheaval before it becomes overwhelming and deadly.

Migration is not the problem; it is the solution.

How we manage this global crisis, and how humanely we treat each other as we migrate, will be key to whether this century of upheaval proceeds smoothly or with violent conflict and unnecessary deaths. Managed right, this upheaval could lead to a new global commonwealth of humanity. Migration is our way out of this crisis.

Migration, whether from disaster to safety, or for a new land of opportunity, is deeply interwoven with cooperation it is only through our extensive collaborations that we are able to migrate, and its our migrations that forged todays global society. Migration made us. It is our national identities and borders that are the anomaly.

The idea of keeping foreign people out using borders is relatively recent. States used to be far more concerned about stopping people from leaving than preventing their arrival. They needed their labour and taxes.

Some may think that its flags, anthems and an army to guard your territory thats needed to develop a sense of nationhood. But in fact, the credit should go to a successful bureaucracy. Greater government intervention in peoples lives and the creation of a broad systemic bureaucracy were needed to run a complex industrial society and these also forged national identity in its citizens. For instance, Prussia began paying unemployment benefit in the 1880s, which was issued initially in a workers home village, where people and their circumstances were known. But it was also paid to people where they migrated for work, which meant a new layer of bureaucracy to establish who was Prussian and therefore entitled to benefits. This resulted in citizenship papers and controlled borders. As governments exerted greater control, people got more state benefits from their taxes, and more rights, such as voting, which engendered a feeling of ownership over the state. It became their nation.

Nation states are an artificial social structure predicated on the mythology that the world is made of distinct, homogenous groups that occupy separate portions of the globe, and claim most peoples primary allegiance. The reality is far messier. Most people speak the languages of multiple groups, and ethnic and cultural pluralism is the norm. The idea that a persons identity and wellbeing is primarily tied to that of one invented national group is far-fetched, even if this is presupposed by many governments. The political scientist Benedict Anderson famously described nation states as imagined communities.

It is hardly surprising that the nation-state model so often fails there have been about 200 civil wars since 1960. However, there are plenty of examples of nation states that work well despite being made up of different groups, such as Singapore, Malaysia and Tanzania, or nations created from global migrants like Australia, Canada and the US. To some degree, all nation states have been formed from a mixture of groups. When nation states falter or fail, the problem is not diversity itself, but not enough official inclusiveness equity in the eyes of the state, regardless of which other groups a person belongs to. An insecure government allied to a specific group, which it favours over others, breeds discontent and pitches one group against others this results in people falling back on trusted alliances based on kinship, rather.

A democracy with a mandate of official inclusiveness from its people is generally more stable but it needs underpinning by a complex bureaucracy. Nations have navigated this in various ways, for example, devolving power to local communities, giving them voice and agency over their own affairs within the nation state (as is the case in Canada, or Switzerlands cantons). By embracing multiple groups, languages and cultures as equally legitimate, a country like Tanzania can function as a national mosaic of at least 100 different ethnic groups and languages. In Singapore, which has consciously pursued an integrated multi-ethnic population, at least one-fifth of marriages are interracial. Unjust hierarchies between groups make this harder, particularly when imposed on a majority by a minority.

In April 2021, Governor Kristi Noem tweeted: South Dakota wont be taking any illegal immigrants that the Biden administration wants to relocate. My message to illegal immigrants call me when youre an American.

Consider that South Dakota only exists because thousands of undocumented immigrants from Europe used the Homestead Act from 1860 to 1920 to steal land from Native Americans without compensation or reparations. This kind of exclusive attitude from a leader weakens the sense of shared citizenship among all, creating divisions between residents who are deemed to belong and those who are not.

Official inclusion by the national bureaucracy is a starting point for building national identity in all citizens, particularly with a large influx of migrants, but the legacy of decades or centuries of injustice persists socially, economically and politically.

The frontline in Europes war against migrants is the Mediterranean Sea, patrolled by Italian warships tasked with intercepting small EU-bound vessels and forcing them instead to ports in Libya on the north African coast. One such warship, the Caprera, was singled out for praise by Italys anti-migrant interior minister for defending our security, after it intercepted more than 80 migrant boats, carrying more than 7,000 people. Honour! he tweeted, posting a photo of himself with the crew in 2018.

However, during an inspection of the Caprera that same year, police discovered more than 700,000 contraband cigarettes and large numbers of other smuggled goods imported by the crew from Libya to be sold for profit in Italy. On further investigation, the smuggling enterprise turned out to involve several other military ships. I felt like Dante descending into the inferno, said Lt Col Gabriele Gargano, the police officer who led the investigation.

The case highlights a central absurdity around todays attitude to migration. Immigration controls are regarded as essential but for people, not stuff. Huge effort goes into enabling the cross-border migration of goods, services and money. Every year more than 11bn tonnes of stuff is shipped around the world the equivalent of 1.5 tonnes per person a year whereas humans, who are key to all this economic activity, are unable to move freely. Industrialised nations with big demographic challenges and important labour shortages are blocked from employing migrants who are desperate for jobs.

Currently, there is no global body or organisation overseeing the movement of people worldwide. Governments belong to the International Organization for Migration, but this is an independent, related organisation of the UN, rather than an actual UN agency: it is not subject to the direct oversight of the general assembly and cannot set common policy that would enable countries to capitalise on the opportunities immigrants offer. Migrants are usually managed by each individual nations foreign ministry, rather than the labour ministry, so decisions are made without the information or coordinated policies to match people with job markets. We need a new mechanism to manage global labour mobility far more effectively and efficiently it is our biggest economic resource, after all.

The conversation about migration has become stuck on what ought to be allowed, rather than planning for what will occur. Nations need to move on from the idea of controlling to managing migration. At the very least, we need new mechanisms for lawful economic labour migration and mobility, and far better protection for those fleeing danger.

Within days of Russias invasion of Ukraine in February, EU leaders enacted an open-border policy for refugees fleeing the conflict, giving them the right to live and work across the bloc for three years, and helping with housing, education, transport and other needs. The policy undoubtedly saved lives but additionally, by not requiring millions of people to go through protracted asylum processes, the refugees were able to disperse to places where they could better help themselves and be helped by local communities. Across the EU, people came together in their communities, on social media, and through institutions to organise ways of hosting refugees.

They offered rooms in their homes, collected donations of clothes and toys, set up language camps and mental health support all of which was legal because of the open-border policy. This reduced the burden for central government, host towns and refugees alike.

Migration requires funds, contacts and courage. It usually involves a degree of hardship, at least initially, as people are wrenched from their families, familiar surroundings and language. Some countries make it almost impossible to move for work, and in others, parents are forced to leave behind children who they may never see grow up. An entire generation of Chinese children has reached adulthood seeing their parents only for a week or so once a year, during spring festival.

In China, hundreds of millions of people are caught in limbo between the village and cities, unable to fully transition due to archaic land laws and the lack of social housing, childcare, schools or other public facilities in the cities. The villages are sustained through remittances from absent workers, who cannot sell their farms for fear of losing their land, which is their only social security. Left-behind, isolated children then become primary caregivers for their ageing relatives. Migrant workers cannot afford to buy homes in the city and so return to the village on retirement, restarting the cycle.

In other cases, migrants pay huge fees to people traffickers for urban or foreign work, only to find themselves in indentured positions that are little better than slavery, working out their contracts until they can get their passports back and return home. What little money they do earn will be sent home. These include Asian construction workers and domestic workers in the Middle East and Europe, who have little protection and may end up in forced labour in the sex industry or in inhumane conditions in food processing or garment factories. Most migrants are trying to improve their lives, as we all do, by moving. Some are migrating to save their lives.

Ive visited people in refugee camps in different countries across four continents, where millions of people live in limbo, sometimes for generations. Around the world, whether the refugee camps were filled with Sudanese, Tibetans, Palestinians, Syrians, Salvadorans or Iraqis, the issue was the same: people want dignity. And that means being able to provide for their families being allowed to work, to move around, and to make a life for themselves in safety. Currently, too many nations make this wish though it is very simple and mutually beneficial impossible for those most in need of it. As our environment changes, millions more risk ending up in these nowhere places. Globally, this system of sealed borders and hostile migration policy is dysfunctional. It doesnt work for anyones benefit.

We are witnessing the highest levels of human displacement on record, and it will only increase. In 2020, refugees around the world exceeded 100 million, tripling since 2010, and half were children. This means one in every 78 people on earth has been forced to flee. Registered refugees represent only a fraction of those forced to leave their homes due to war or disaster.

In addition to these, 350 million people are undocumented worldwide, an astonishing 22 million in the US alone, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimates. These include informal workers and those who move along ancient routes crossing national borders these are the people who increasingly find themselves without legal recognition, living on the margins, unable to benefit from social support systems.

As long as 4.2 billion people live in poverty and the income gap between the global north and south continues to grow, people will have to move and those living in climate-impacted regions will be disproportionately affected. Nations have an obligation to offer asylum to refugees, but under the legal definition of the refugee, written in the 1951 Refugee Convention, this does not include those who have to leave their home because of climate crisis.

Things are beginning to shift, though. In a landmark judgment, in 2020, the UN Human Rights Committee ruled that climate refugees cannot be sent home, meaning that a state would be in breach of its human rights obligations if it returns someone to a country where due to the climate crisis their life is in danger. However, the rulings of the committee are not internationally binding.

Today, the 50 million climate-displaced people already outnumber those fleeing political persecution. The distinction between refugees and economic migrants is rarely a straightforward one, and further complicated by the climate crisis. While the dramatic devastation of a hurricane erasing whole villages can make refugees of people overnight, more often the impacts of climate breakdown on peoples lives are gradual another poor harvest or another season of unbearable heat, which becomes the catalyst/crisis that pushes people to seek better locations.

This should give the world time to adapt to the mass migrations to come that ultimate climate adaptation. But instead, as environments grow ever more deadly, the worlds wealthiest countries spend more on militarising their borders creating a climate wall than they do on the climate emergency. The growth in offshore detention and processing centres for asylum seekers not only adds to the death toll, but is among the most repugnant features of the rich worlds failure to ease the impact of the climate crisis on the poorest regions. We must be alert to climate nationalists who want to reinforce the unequal allocation of our planets safer lands.

The planetary scale crisis demands a global climate migration pact, but in the meantime, regional free movement agreements of the kind EU member states enjoy would help. Such agreements have helped residents of disaster-hit Caribbean islands find refuge in safer ones.

Climate change is in most cases survivable; it is our border policies that will kill people. Human movement on a scale never before seen will dominate this century. It could be a catastrophe or, managed well, it could be our salvation.

This article was amended on 19 August 2022 to remove the suggestion that there were arboreal forests in Greenland.

This is an edited extract from Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval by Gaia Vince, published by Allen Lane on 25 August. To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com

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The century of climate migration: why we need to plan for the great upheaval - The Guardian