Two issues currently dominate global politics: anti-migrant politics across industrialised countries, and the rise of AI and robotics. For many people these are distinct issues; one of bigotry, and the other of techno-futurism. In reality, though, both issues are deeply linked by large demographic changes and how it is upending the post-World War II structure of the global geo-economics.We understand the modern world to be one of borders and passports, and take it for granted that this is how it has always been. In fact, passports were only introduced during World War I, and meant to facilitate travel rather than to restrict it. They only became a part of the international order after 1947, and as Joshua Collins writes, they serve a very specific purpose in the global economy. “Passports gave states enormous power to control those who entered their borders as well as power over their citizens. Perhaps more importantly, however, they also allowed wealthy nations to extract value and resources from poor ones by trapping workers via artificially constructed barriers, preventing them from taking the real value of their labor to global markets in fair competition.A worker trapped in Colombia, earning a minimum wage of $323/month USD, produces goods or services for companies in Europe or North America, who sell those goods or services in markets with far higher values at great profit.That worker is prevented from simply competing fairly in those same labor markets.”Intuitively, we know this is true. We use terms like “brain drain” to describe how the best-educated people from poorer countries are offered a narrow pathway to jobs and a life in richer countries. It is not that their effort, quality of work, or talent suddenly changes when they take their skills to rich countries, only that the amount they are paid increases enormously.In this way richer countries, the industrialised core of the global economy, have managed to keep most of the world trapped out of fair labour markets, while stealing trained human capital – doctors, engineers, academics, nurses – from poorer countries. For example, more than one third of the top 1,000 scorers in the IIT entrance exams have migrated out of India, primarily to the United States. Restrictive migration policies and the massive wage differentials they help maintain, also create a steady pipeline of those willing to work at – comparatively – lower wage jobs that locals do not want to do. These include drivers, store clerks, agricultural labour, cleaners, construction labour and a host of other jobs often derisively referred to as ‘low-skilled’ labour without which an economy simply cannot function. This arrangement has served the industrialised countries very well, by keeping high wage jobs at home, and either paying for lower-wage labour by offshoring industries, or importing specific labour needed for their requirements.Oil-rich countries in the Arab Gulf have also adopted a similar model, with a permanent class of ‘guest workers’ who earn far better (often tax-free) than their compatriots at home, but will almost never be a part of the polity in which they live.These practices, though, can only be sustained if the population of the host country is relatively stable, and this is increasingly not the case. Communities with greater wealth tend to have fewer children and live longer. The net (long-term) impact of this is that the worker (ages 25-64) to retiree (65+) ratios are falling across industrialised countries. A 2024 study of US demographics shows this starkly, with that ratio falling from just under three worker-age people to one retiree now, to 2.3 by 2035, and two by 2060. It estimates that to maintain the current worker-to-retiree ratio, immigration into the US has to increase by 3.5 times. It is important to note this was before the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies. Since then, US immigration growth has slowed significantly, recording the lowest numbers since the Covid-19 pandemic.The US is hardly alone in this. Across Europe, immigration is keeping the developed economies ticking. In industrialised countries where there is limited or no immigration the crisis is even starker. Japan has slowly opened up to immigration, but its population is still aging and declining fast. Russia is facing a massive demographic decline, and has been for years.Also read: Why Is India Silent as Trump’s Anti-Migrant Doctrine Targets Indians Abroad?South Korea has the worst population ratio of any country in the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, and is likely to push it into recession by the 2040s according to the Bank of Korea. Arguably the greatest long-term crisis is that of China’s, whose population may collapse from its current 1.3 billion to about 400 million over a period of 83 years without immigration. Simply put, across industrialised countries the tax base is shrinking rapidly and the retiree population is growing. All these countries desperately need to expand their tax base, and the previous trickle of immigration that they allowed is insufficient to address their needs.At the same time, xenophobia and anti-immigrant politics are on the rise, as are attacks on minorities and women. Arguably, these are two sides of the same coin. There is more than one way of expanding the tax base. Other than immigration, a country can also start including more of its workforce into paid labour. The biggest such pool across the world is that of women. In a country and economy like Australia’s, that unpaid labour amounts to about AUD 427 billion ($300 billion). Either by finding ways to pay for this labour, and tax the gains, or to move women into areas that are paid labour, requires a major restructuring of society and business. The same holds true of minority groups.One way to understand the prominence of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives over the last decade or so in developed economies is that they were structurally necessary for economies to accommodate large parts of the workforce that had been left out, and were now urgently needed. Or to put it in Marxist terms, the economic substructure demanded changes to the social superstructure. In both cases, though, whether mainstreaming immigration or incorporating heretofore repressed populations means the transfer of (disproportionate) political, economic, and social power away from dominant groups. Amanullah and Sehrun Khan may have immigrated to the UK in 1968, and working as a bus driver and a seamstress would likely have exposed them to financial and social precarity. Their son, though, is now Mayor of London, with a knighthood, and one of the most prominent British politicians. The way that dominant groups may have treated Sadiq Khan’s parents is unlikely to be the way they interact with him in 2026. Similarly, women, African-Americans, and queer communities that have found a place of economic and social strength simply cannot be treated the same way that they were earlier when they had limited social, economic, or political capital.Simply to maintain the status quo in an economy with a radically changing demography requires massive structural changes to social and political structures. And this is the rub, because while trade and commerce, by and large, work on the idea of expanding the pie, the power to exclude – whether through borders or internal repression – is by definition not shareable. By accepting, and changing socio-political systems to accept, either migrants or heretofore marginalised populations, those who have wielded power will have to give way, and that is a big ask.Photo: Leo Lau & Digit / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.There is, though, another way to maintain economic growth without sharing power, and that is to shrink the need of a workforce. This is where much of the demand for AI systems seems to be headed. It is important here to insert a caveat. “AI” is used to describe a whole range of practices, from machine learning to chatbots. It is not the purpose of this piece to say whether “AI” is good or bad, and in fact such a statement is meaningless because it covers such a wide range of technology created and used in such a wide variety of ways as to be impossible to lump together. That said, there is definitely a thrust for the use of “AI” in business practices, and almost all of it is perceived by the heads of businesses as leading to workforce reduction. One survey even suggests that 99% of C-suite executives said it would lead to workforce reductions. Even if the reality of it might be a bit more complex, business leaders are rapidly pushing for such technology with this specific reality in mind.Again, it is worth looking at China, which is seeing the fastest and largest population decline in the world. One of its strategies is using massive localised data collections in the hopes of training robots to replace workers in all sorts of jobs, including basic chores like cooking and doing the laundry. There has been much dismissal of the fact that such robots, even if mass produced, are likely to cost much more than employing human workers. This misses the point. A robot is not going to challenge the dominant socio-political system, no matter how expensive. After all it is a robot, a word literally derived from “slave”. Furthermore, human labour may be cheaper to employ now, but this will not always be the case. According to the UN World Population Prospects 2024, the global population will peak by around 2080 and start to decline. More importantly, in a quarter of the world, that peak has already arrived and population is declining as of today. Human labour, one of the most undervalued resources in the world, will continue to become more expensive as demand starts to outstrip supply, especially as much of the population, while still growing for the next few decades, will be of older people, with retirees soon outstripping children in their numbers.In real terms, such a substitution by robots or programmes for human labour may never be fully feasible. Humans pay tax, robots do not, and quite often the obscenely rich who will likely own such robots and technologies pay a tiny percentage of what they should, using tax havens and other structures to avoid taxation. Shrinking the workforce, even if it were actually possible, would still leave the state with a large and growing bill to pay for its retiree population without a tax base needed to pay that bill. What is striking in all of this is that the countries that provide the demographic capital (i.e. migrants) to keep industrialised countries running are nowhere in the picture on global migration policy while chasing the payoff of a supposed “AI revolution”. South Asia is a particularly large provider of migrant labour across the world, and its political leadership has never even mooted a joint approach to the issue. India, both because of its population size and its inability to create sufficient jobs for that population is probably the largest source of migrants working abroad of any country in the world and yet, while it was quick to hold an “AI Summit,” the government has assiduously avoided taking a public stance on immigration as a global phenomenon. These issues have taken time to come to a head. Passports and hard borders were the outcomes of the two World Wars. Anxiety over population decline in industrialised countries is just over a decade old (although racism against immigrants has a longer pedigree) as birthrates have fallen. Nonetheless, they have been clear to see for some time now. Added to that, the euphoria around “AI” as a globally transforming technology – despite no clear pathway to profitability – is driving the conversation away from the issue of labour and living wages. For countries that benefit from their migrant populations working abroad, largely through remittances, the time to understand the global terrain and to take a public stand, is now, not later, and yet all we hear is silence. Omair Ahmad has worked as a political analyst and journalist in India, the US and the UK.