Overpopulation, climate change, immigration policy, gang violence, terrorism, political persecution and strained social systems. That’s a fairly scary and encompassing list of the challenges facing countries in the 21st century, and all of them are wrapped up in how we deal with the great migration from village to city, within and between countries.

Doug Saunders, the European bureau chief for the Globe and Mail, tackles the dilemmas and solutions to immigration and migration in his latest book, Arrival City: The Final Migration and our Next World. He argues that how we deal with arrival cities — the enclaves of newly arrived villagers, usually on the outskirts of cities — will have profound implications for modern states.

“Another way of looking at this book is this was me trying to find a structure I could use to bring attention to an interesting bunch of scholarship going on in a bunch of different disciplines that don’t really always talk to each other, but that are doing some kind of mind-blowing work on human settlements and migration and urbanization and so on,” says Saunders, sitting in a busy Calgary coffee shop, looking the part of a frazzled university prof.

The book examines conditions in slums, projects and immigrant neighbourhoods around the world. The epiphany stemmed from frequent visits to Turkey as part of Saunders’s career.

“What I recognized in Turkey that I hadn’t completely recognized before, was that the economic structure of these neighbourhoods, and the form of social relations in them, was exactly the same as the immigrant neighbourhoods I’d lived in, in Toronto and Los Angeles,” says Saunders, who grew up in Toronto and worked for the Globe in L.A. for several years.

“It made me realize that there’s this fulcrum point in transitional urban neighbourhoods that we don’t understand properly, that tends to turn these migrations either into successful stories of economic integration or to be stopped and become something threatening to the urban society and possibly even to the state itself.”

The argument presented in the book is that these arrival cities are important socio-economic elevators — allowing villagers a connection to the commerce and resources of the city and, therefore, a path to middle-class comfort. Paradoxically, the more persistent the poverty in a particular neighbourhood, the more successful it likely is.

The reason for the stagnant income rate, says Saunders, is that the area is functioning as it should, siphoning successful arrivals out of the neighbourhood into middle class enclaves and accepting new, poor arrivals from the village.

“They’re constantly getting a refreshed group of dirt-floor peasant farmers moving in,” he says. “This is true in some of the Asian arrival city neighbourhoods, but it’s also true in south Los Angeles; that mistake was often made.”

Confusion over the true nature of an arrival city can lead to the wrong programs being implemented. This can further decimate the potential of a neighbourhood. What is needed is small business support, accessible public transportation to funnel workers into the core and a “properly attuned education system.”

“Often these people don’t need classic social work and they don’t need welfare payments, because they’re actually on a socially mobile path to employment,” says Saunders.

One element that is often overlooked is the design of an area. The ghettos on the outskirts of Paris are modernist concrete abominations with no space for small businesses to flourish — an important component of self-directed upward mobility.

The consequences of ignoring these areas, storing new arrivals in featureless towers, or bulldozing makeshift communities to the ground, can be dire. There are the obvious consequences of preventing people from improving their own economic and social conditions, but it can also lead to ethnic conflict, gang violence, dire poverty and even the rise of fundamentalism — as witnessed in Amsterdam and Paris.

In Amsterdam, urban planners took a drastic approach, razing the concrete jungle that spawned Mohammed Bouyeri, who killed Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. In its place, the city left a high-density neighbourhood with relaxed zoning regulations that imitate the warehouse districts of the ’30s.

In Canada, the policy situation is problematic, with three levels of government responsible for different programs and regulations. Additionally, the Canadian approach to immigration is a failed experiment of trying to lure skilled workers.

“So what’s going to happen is there will be large numbers of immigrants to Canada over the next 20 years and a good proportion of them will not be high-skilled, university educated people, because the economy doesn’t want that and because the political reality is that 80 per cent of immigrants are going to be family reunification,” says Saunders.

“Paradoxically, if you want high-skilled people, if you want X-ray technicians and so on, when you’re competing with other countries to get them, you’re not going to start saying ‘No, you can only bring in two relatives,’ because that’s exactly what you’re competing with and it’s also just inhumane. It just won’t work.”