Immigration: Becoming More of an Issue As Time Passes

When it comes to immigration, the United States has been lucky. That is mostly because most of the migrants to our country were not at odds with our civilization. I think of the problems with Pakistanis in Britain and Burmese Rohingya in Thailand, and I see the American prejudice against Mexicans and Central Americans as solvable over time. We were just plain lucky that the peoples of the North and South American continents are not substantially different from us, and that we are separated from Europe, Africa, and Asia by two large and formidable oceans.

Within historic times, there have been long periods of migration that contributed to the destruction of the Western Roman Empire. On my bookshelves is an eight-volume study by Thomas Hodgkin entitled The Barbarian Invasions of the Roman Empire. They tell a long tale of ravages wrought by the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Huns, Vandals, Lombards, and Franks. They are not the only reason for the fall of Rome, but they certainly contributed.

We may soon be seeing hordes of migrants that dwarf anything from the past. The reasons for this are two-fold:

• Because of the acceleration of climate change, many island, equatorial, and desert regions are becoming uninhabitable
• More and more countries are turning into failed states, the worst being Somalia, Sudan, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Syria, Haiti, Venezuela, Honduras, Mali, Libya, Albania, and DR Congo

In the years to come, the United States will be sen more and more as a sanctuary from the world’s climatic and political ills, even though we see ourselves as having climatic and political ills aplenty. It will be like the migrants of over a century ago who thought the streets of America were paved with gold. Even when they were not.

I don’t think that building a wall along our southern border will accomplish much: the Mexican cartels have discovered that fences could be climbed over or tunneled under. They are now in charge of the coyotes guiding most migrants over the border. In the end, controlling access to the border will probably be more profitable for them than smuggling drugs ever was.

Will the oceans still protect us when the pressure to migrate grows tenfold? I think not. Even now, many migrants crossing over from Mexico are from China and Africa.