Félix Marquardt - The New Nomads: How the Migration Revolution is Making the World a Better Place

Highly Engaging a must-read Marquardt forces you to consider one of the central issues of all time in an entirely new way.Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The New Nomads

How the Migration Revolution is Making the World a Better Place

Felix Marquardt

Highly compelling Felix Marquardt [has] an uncanny ability to bring very different people together from all over human society and the world. The New Nomads is a profound, timely statement on the power of migration as an exponentially generative process.

Celso Amorim, former Brazilian Foreign Minister

The New Nomads belongs not to the privileged but to the hungry: hungry for wisdom, hungry for adventure, hungry for life. Marquardt places travel, even migration, back in its ancient setting of mythic education: you leave the village to find the part of you that the village could not provide His writing is filled with wit and challenge. It is a rare gift to be both raconteur and truth teller and Felix Marquardt is both.

Martin Shaw, author of Courting the Wild Twin and Smoke Hole

Holding aloft the migrant as perhaps the most electrifying figure of our time, The New Nomads deeply moves me. Felix Marquardts profound exploration is no less than a political theology of migration.

Bayo Akomolafe, author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences and I, Corona Virus

Here is a book that breaks through conventional wisdom to show that localism and globalism can and need to work together.

Saskia Sassen, Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology, Columbia University; author of Expulsions

A hymn of praise to the human spirit ever questing in search of the better and the just and the beautiful and the new. Let it never die. And it never will while the humanity of nomads like Felix Marquardt survives COVID-19 and flourishes again thereafter.

Lord Adonis, former Secretary of State for Transport and former Minister of State for Education

An intelligent and insightful analysis of one of the great issues of our age, laced with some powerful real-life examples and culminating in a number of thought-provoking recommendations for change.

Paul Polman, former CEO, Unilever

The New Nomads is like Confessions of an Economic Hitman for the Anthropocene.

Tyson Yunkaporta, author of Sand Talk

Felix Marquardt set out to write a celebration of hyper-mobility, but something far more interesting happened along the way. He has given us a depiction of the complex patterns of migration in the early twenty-first century that is also a critique of the Davos elite.

Dougald Hine, co-author of Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto

Felix Marquardt eloquently documents his journey grappling with issues of power, identity and mobility, while wrestling with the paradoxes of modernity within and around him and all of us.

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti, author of Hospicing Modernity

Felix Marquardt brings a rich experience of life, intelligence and empathy into this exploration of youth and migration. The stories are compelling, revealing humanity behind faces masked by stereotypes.

Frank Wilczek, Nobel Prize Laureate in Physics; author of Fundamentals

Masterful! The New Nomads is a deeply poetic exploration of migration and its role in the human journey. The stories form a compelling tapestry: the path forward isnt left or right, neither about pinning all our hopes on technology nor forsaking it, but embracing what makes us all human.

Sigurlna Ingvarsdttir, Senior Producer of Star Wars Battlefront and EA Sports FIFA

We are regularly encouraged to put ourselves into other peoples shoes Felix invites us to do precisely this: to change shoes and keep walking, eyes wide open. And change shoes again, many times, as we wander The New Nomads is truly a remarkable journey one you shouldnt miss!

Bertrand Badr, CEO, Blue Like an Orange; former Managing Director, World Bank

The New Nomads provides a welcome and brilliantly written antidote to the nativism that continues to fester in our more privileged societies As we follow Marquardt on this fascinating journey, we learn that, in his words, all migrations are a search for home.

Stan Cox, author of The Green New Deal and Beyond and The Path to a Livable Future

First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2021

Copyright Felix Marquardt, 2021

The right of Felix Marquardt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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The author and publishers have made all reasonable efforts to contact copyright-holders for permission, and apologise for any omissions or errors in the form of credits given. Corrections may be made to future printings.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4711-7737-8

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4711-7738-5

eBook ISBN: 978-1-4711-7739-2

To Oscar, Haruki and Saga. Dont ever forget you are a team.

To Aurore, my compass.

To the migrants from outside who have to cross borders and leave their countries behind at the price of immense tragedies, we must from now on add the migrants from inside who, while remaining in place, are experiencing the drama of seeing themselves left behind by their own countries.

Bruno Latour, O atterrir?

In the spring of 1864, just as the American Civil War was seeing the launch of a last, desperate, but ultimately successful attempt by the North to preserve the integrity of the Union, a German immigrant named Henry Sieben travelled on foot and by wagon from Illinois to the deepest depths of Montana. From freighting, he switched to cattle and sheep-speculation, and later settled down to build the foundations of two ranches. By the time his two daughters inherited them, Montana had become the 41st state of the Union.

Three subsequent generations have maintained the two farmsteads and expanded them through acquisitions or leases. After a long history as a sheep ranch, the Sieben Live Stock Company is now a cattle ranch. It is managed by Henry Siebens great-great-grandson Cooper Hibbard, a thoughtful, charismatic and earnest man in his mid-thirties who learned the trade on ranches in Colorado and Mexico, estancias in the Argentinian Pampas and cattle stations in Australias Queensland, and his wife Ashley Wertheimer, the daughter of a Jew from Queens and a North Carolinian of German, English and Irish ancestry.

On 20 December 2016, just over 150 years since its foundation by Henry Sieben, another immigrant to the United States made his way to the depths of Montana. Abdramane Abdi Diabate grew up in Kati, an old colonial garrison outpost in the south of Mali. He had flown in from San Francisco and landed in Bozeman, in the south of Montana, where he was greeted by his college friend Isaac Stafstrom, an American-born Wisconsian of Swedish and Chinese descent. Together, the two journeyed northwards to the Sieben ranch, where Isaac worked on and off as a ranch-hand for Cooper. Isaac had told Cooper about his friend whom he had invited to Montana for Christmas break, and asked if they could lend a hand for a couple of weeks. Cooper and Ashley invited the two to come.