There are currently an estimated 6.76 billion human beings living on the Earth. That is a greater number than is ever believed to have lived at the same time throughout human existence.

In 1830 the human population of our planet exceeded 1 billion for the first time. By 1930 it had doubled to 2 billion. It is now well over three times that figure and on current widely accepted projections it will reach 9 billion by the year 2030.

As UPI analysts and reporters have repeatedly documented in recent months, the governments of Russia, China, India and Venezuela in particular are dedicated to greatly expanding their military forces, not just to defend their own territories but also -- at the very least -- to project their power in the air, across the ocean and to other countries to protect vital resources or secure them for their own peoples.

Also, global warming is already setting off mass migrations involving tens of millions of people around the world.

The prosperous industrialized nations are already full of multiple millions of illegal immigrants understandably seeking a better life than the harsh, grinding poverty and increasingly unbearable changing weather conditions they are suffering in poor nations of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Asian subcontinent.

However, the global economic crisis is making jobs increasingly hard to find for the native populations of the major industrialized nations. Already some countries, such as Russia, are trying to actively send large or significant numbers of immigrant workers back to their nations of origin -- in the case of Russia, usually from the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. And already some major nations have started beefing up their border defenses.

In the United States, both Republicans and Democrats for decades opposed toughening border security with Mexico. Yet it was President George W. Bush, a Republican conservative president who came to office expecting to prioritize creating closer ties with Mexico, who was forced to start building a limited border fence along the Rio Grande.

Hispanic-Americans voted overwhelmingly for President Barack Obama in the U.S. presidential election last November. However, Obama appointed as his first secretary of homeland security the immensely capable and effective governor of Arizona, Janet Napolitano, who has been at the center of the illegal immigration issue, seeking simultaneously to improve border controls and border security while bringing large numbers of illegals within the legal framework of the United States.

Underlying the immigration controversies in the United States and the European Union is that harsh Malthusian reality that the world isn't getting any bigger but its population is. And that means wars.

As UPI analyst Andrei Chang has documented, China is developing a new maritime doctrine to project power around the world in order to protect its sources of energy and food imports in Africa and Latin America. China is fast replacing the United States and the European Union, as well as Russia, as the dominant influence in many of the nations of sub-Saharan Africa.

Part 3: Russia lays claim to the arctic

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