17 October 2018 – Immigration is, by and large, a good thing. It’s not always a good thing, and it carries with it a host of potential problems, but in general immigration is better than its opposite: emigration. And, there are a number of reasons for that.

Immigration is movement toward some place. Emigration is flow away from a place.

Mathematically, population shifts are described by a non-homogeneous second-order differential equation. I expect that statement means absolutely nothing to about half the target audience for this blog, and a fair fraction of the others have (like me) forgotten most of what they ever knew (or wanted to know) about such equations. So, I’ll start with a short review of the relevant points of how the things behave.

It’ll help the rest of this blog make a lot more sense, so bear with me.

Basically, the relevant non-homogeneous second-order differential equation is something called the “diffusion equation.” Leaving the detailed math aside, what this equation says is that the rate of migration of just about anything from one place to another depends on the spatial distribution of population density, a mobility factor, and a driving force pushing the population in one direction or the other.

Things (such as people) “diffuse” from places with higher densities to those with lower densities.

That tendency is moderated by a “mobility” factor that expresses how easy it is to get from place to place. It’s hard to walk across a desert, so mobility of people through a desert is low. Similarly, if you build a wall across the migration path, that also reduces mobility. Throwing up all kinds of passport checks, visas and customs inspections also reduces mobility.

Giving people automobiles, buses and airplanes, on the other hand, pushes mobility up by a lot!

But, changing mobility only affects the rate of flow. It doesn’t do anything to change the direction of flow, or to actually stop it. That’s why building walls has never actually worked. It didn’t work for the First Emperor of China. It didn’t work for Hadrian. It hasn’t done much for the Israelis, either.

Direction of flow is controlled by a forcing term. Existence of that forcing term is what makes the equation “non-homogeneous” rather than “homogeneous.” The homogeneous version (without the forcing term) is called the “heat equation” because it models what dumb-old thermal energy does.

Things that can choose what to do (like people), and have feet to help them act on their choices, get to “vote with their feet.” That means they can go where they want, instead of always floating downstream like a dead leaf.

The forcing term largely accounts for the desirability of being in one place instead of another. For example, the United States has a reputation for being a nice place to live. Thus, people try to flock here in droves from places that are not so nice. Thus, there’s a forcing term that points people from other places to the U.S.

That’s the big reason you want to live in a country that has immigration issues, rather than one with emigration issues. The Middle East had a serious emigration problem in 2015. For a number of reasons, it had become a nasty place to live. Folks that lived there wanted out in a big way. So, they voted with their feet.

There was a huge forcing term that pushed a million people from the Middle East to elsewhere, specifically Europe. Europe was considered a much nicer place to be, so people were willing to go through Hell to get there. Thus: emigration from the Middle East, and immigration into Europe.

In another example Nazi occupation in the first half of the twentieth century made most places in Europe distasteful, especially for certain groups of people. So, the forcing term pushed a lot of people across the Atlantic toward America. In 1942 Michael Curtiz made a film about that. It was called Casablanca and is arguably one of the greatest films Humphrey Bogart starred in.

Similarly, for decades Mexico had some serious problems with poverty, organized crime and corruption. Those are things that make a place nasty to live in, so there was a big forcing function pushing people to cross the border into the much nicer United States.

In recent decades, regime change in Mexico cleaned up a lot of the country’s problems, so migration from Mexico to the United States dropped like a stone in the last years of the Obama administration. When Mexico became a nicer place to live, people stopped wanting to move away.

Duh!

There are two morals to this story:

1. If you want to cut down on immigration from some other country, help that other country become a nicer place to live. (Conversely, you could turn your own country into a third-world toilet so nobody wants to come in, but that’s not what we want.)
2. Putting up walls and other barriers to immigration doesn’t stop it. They only slow it down.

We’re All Immigrants

I’d should subtitle this section, “The Bigot’s Lament.”

There isn’t a bi-manual (two-handed) biped (two-legged) creature anywhere in North or South America who isn’t an immigrant or a descendant of immigrants.

There have been two major influxes of human population in the history (and pre-history) of the Americas. The first occurred near the end of the last Ice Age, and the second occurred during the European Age of Discovery.

Before about ten-thousand years ago, there were horses, wolves, saber-tooth tigers, camels(!), elephants, bison and all sorts of big and little critters running around the Americas, but not a single human being.

(The actual date is controversial, but you get the idea.)

Anatomically modern humans, (and there aren’t any others because everyone else went extinct tens of thousands of years ago) developed in East Africa about 200,000 years ago.

They were, by the way, almost certainly negroes. A fact every racist wants to ignore is that: everybody has black ancestors! You can’t hate black people without hating your own forefathers.

More important for this discussion, however, is that every human being in North and South America is descended from somebody who came here from somewhere else. So-called “Native Americans” came here in the Pleistocene Epoch, most likely from Siberia. Most everybody else showed up after Christopher Columbus accidentally fell over North America.

That started the second big migration of people into the Americas: European colonization.

Mostly these later immigrants were imported to fill America’s chronic labor shortage.

America’s labor shortage has persisted since the Spanish conquistadores pretty much wiped out the indigenous people, leaving the Spaniards with hardly anybody to do the manual labor on which their economy depended. Waves of forced and unforced migration have never caught up. We still have a chronic labor shortage.

Immigrants generally don’t come to take jobs from “real” Americans. They come here because there are by-and-large more available jobs than workers.

Currently, natural reductions in birth rates among better educated, better housed, and generally wealthier Americans have left the United States (similar to most developed countries) with the problem that the the working-age population is declining while the older, retired population expands. That means we haven’t got enough young squirts to support us old farts in retirement.

The only viable solution is to import more young squirts. That means welcoming working-age immigrants.

End of story.