i'm an immigrant. Have been for most of my life. i've called 4 continents my home at one point or another, and haven't been a resident of my native country since i was a child.
Yet i think that immigration is going to become a big problem for many nations, and for the world in general, over the coming decades. The gap between rich and poor nations is as wide as ever. All the same; so long as people can make an acceptable life for themselves in their home... so long as they have a roof above their heads, food on the table, and some kind of future for their kids to look forward to... they'll tend to stay within their own community. Emigration is therefore restricted to the adventurous, the ambitious or the misfit.
However, as soon as the food gets short, or someone bombs your home, or the future offered your kids isn't too bright, then emigration becomes a palatable option for many more people and families. As more and more areas of 'the developing world' succumb to famine, or warfare, or the ravages of climate change (think of the recent flooding in Mozambique), then there are more and more people needing to find another place to live.
If you're forced to uproot yourself and your family, to flee starvation or war, then you'll head for the places with the best chance of providing for yourself and family. Places with decent medical care (you think the NHS is bad? i suspect it appears near-miraculous in comparison with the local health provision in Mozambique after the floods). Places that should have enough money to go round.
The trouble is, those wealthy places are already creaking under the weight of their bloated societies. The 'western lifestyle' is unsustainable. Each of us living in the wealthy industrial nations consumes far more than our "fair share" of global resources. We do this at the expense of those living elsewhere, of course; i'm not hiding that fact - more like illustrating it.
So an immigrant from Mozambique (i'm not "picking on" Mozambique by the way, quite the opposite; i just happened to see a documentary about life there after the floods, and figured if ever any people had a good reason to emigrate it was those folk) even at the lowest rung of the wealth ladder in the 'first world'; immediately becomes part of the global resource depletion problem (rather than one of its victims).
The Europe / US / Australasian way of life is killing the planet. i think most of us agree with that here. i am *NOT* proposing some kind of anti-immigration thing here... i don't think we natives of the wealthy areas have any more right to be squandering global resources than anyone who emigrates to join the party. Far from it. i'm just pointing out that every additional human being who becomes part of this way of life (at whatever level) is contributing to our most serious problem. Those deluded unimaginative fools who think they are dealing with the problem by restricting immigration, are in fact completely missing the entire point.
The solution? i have a theory. . . . . . but it's not solid enough to publish just yet.
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