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This essay is part of The Great Migrationkuromipg, a series by Lydia Polgreen exploring how people are moving around the world today.

We are living in an age of mass migration.

Millions of people from the poor world are trying to cross seas, forests, valleys and rivers, in search of safety, work and some kind of better future. About 281 million people now live outside the country in which they were born, a new peak of 3.6 percent of the global population according to the International Organization for Migration, and the number of people forced to leave their country because of conflict and disaster is at about 50 million — an all-time high. In the past decade alone, the number of refugees has tripled and the number of asylum seekers has more than quadrupled. Taken together, it is an extraordinary tide of human movement.

The surge of people trying to reach Europe, the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia has set off a broad panic, reshaping the political landscape. All across the rich world, citizens have concluded — with no small prompting by right-wing populists — that there is too much immigration. Migration has become the critical fault line of politics. Donald Trump owes his triumphant return to the White House in no small part to persuading Americans, whose country was built on migration, that migrants are now the prime source of its ills.

But these vituperative responses reveal a paradox at the heart of our era: The countries that malign migrants are, whether they recognize it or not, in quite serious need of new people. Country after country in the wealthy world is facing a top-heavy future, with millions of retirees and far too few workers to keep their economies and societies afloat. In the not-so-distant future, many countries will have too few people to sustain their current standard of living.

The right’s response to this problem is fantastical: expel the migrants and reproduce the natives. Any short-term economic pain, they contend, must be borne for the sake of safeguarding national identity in the face of the oncoming horde — a version of the racist “great replacement” theory that was once beyond the pale but has become commonplace. But we can see how this approach is playing out, in a laboratory favored by Trump and his ilk.

In Hungary, object of much right-wing admiration, the government of Viktor Orban’s twin obsessions are excluding migrants and raising the country’s anemic birthrate. But reality has proved to be stubborn. Hungary has made almost no progress on the latter, and on the former, the government has been courting guest workers in the face of a chronic labor crisis. That’s despite Orban having declared, in the teeth of the Syrian migrant crisis in 2016, that “Hungary does not need a single migrant for the economy to work or the population to sustain itself or for the country to have a future.”

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“It’s a punishing job in normal times,” Hollowaykuromipg, a scholar of African American history, told me when I spoke to him last week. “But the standards we’re being held to are impossible. I had to ask myself, ‘What is it I want to do, how can I do it, and is this the right position?’”