OPEN BORDERS, 2050

Amouk Majok, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Mobility, approaches the podium at the end of her open-borders tour. The trip has taken her from Geneva to Lesvos, Melilla, Johannesburg and El Paso. Now, jetlagged and exhausted, she gauges the crowd at Nauru’s Museum of the Migrant. They are mostly international journalists, a handful of mid-level foreign policy dignitaries, and a group of Australian school children accompanying their Prime Minister, Yao Chung. The man sitting on the podium to Amouk’s right is the human rights activist Ibrahim al-Attar, who, as a boy, spent a year in the Nauru detention centre. He is there to acknowledge Prime Minister Chung’s official apology for intercepting boats carrying refugees and for placing migrants in offshore camps.

Amouk had spent the last half-decade spearheading the reorganization and rebranding of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the organization she served from 2020 until its official dissolution in 2048. The refugee camps – including Bidibidi in Uganda, to which her parents and sister had fled while she was an undergraduate at Oxford – have largely disappeared.