Book Talk: War, Work, and Want, by Randall Hansen

War, Work & Want asks why global migration, which should have fallen after 1970, tripled over the next fifty years. Hansen argues that the OPEC oil crisis unleashed economic and geopolitical changes that led to over 100 million unexpected migrants. The quadrupling of oil prices permanently halved economic growth in the West, leading to a five-decade stagnation in wages. The middle classes responding by rebuilding their inflation-shattered standards of living on the back of cheap migration labor, leading to millions of low-skilled migrations – documented and undocumented. In the oil-rich Middle East and Russia, a sudden rush of oil money destabilized Iran, led to the fall of the Shah, and resulted in multiple military conflicts: the Iran-Iraq War, two Gulf Wars, and, in a more complicated way, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The result was tens of millions of refugees. The overall result was over 100 million unexpected – and unwanted – migrants.

 

 

Randall Hansen is the Canada Research Chair in Global Migration in the Department of Political Science and Director of the Munk School’s Global Migration Lab.  He works on immigration and citizenship, demography and population policy and the effects of war on civilians. His published works include War, Work and Want: How the OPEC Oil Crisis Caused Mass Migration and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany and Japan (London: Faber, 2020); Disobeying Hitler: German Resistance after Operation Valkyrie (New York: Oxford University Press; 2014), Sterilized by the State: Eugenics, Race and the Population Scare in 20th Century North America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), Fire and Fury: the Allied Bombing of Germany (Penguin, 2009), and Citizenship and Immigration in Post-War Britain (Oxford University Press, 2000). He has also co-edited Immigration and Public Opinion in Liberal Democracies (with David Leal and Gary P. Freeman) (New York: Routledge, 2012), Migration States and International Cooperation (with Jeannette Money and Jobst Koehler, Routledge, 2011), Towards a European Nationality (w. P. Weil, Palgrave, 2001), Dual Nationality, Social Rights, and Federal Citizenship in the U.S. and Europe (w. P. Weil, Berghahn, 2002), and Immigration and asylum from 1900 to the present.

He was Director of the Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (CERES) from 2011-2022 and Interim Director of the Munk School from 2017-2020.