Sundar Vedantham: The Immigration Conundrum

What Do We Do Then?

Consider U.S. itself. It has states like California and New York that are fairly advanced with lot of high paying job opportunities, better social net services, good public transport and so forth. There are also states like Mississippi and West Virginia that are comparatively impoverished with not very many job opportunities, where existing jobs are from earlier era like coal mining and so are dwindling by the year. Those states don't have good social nets and so poor citizens are left to fend for themselves. Compared to other states, public transport systems are non-existent. So, you would think people from such poorer states will start migrating en masse to those richer states as there are no borders in between and there are no regulations restricting movement between states within the U.S.

Some countries do maintain different levels of artificial barriers making it difficult for people to move from one part to another even within their own country. For example, in China, you need to get some level of government approval to move from one state to another. If you didn’t, you will lose many of the concessions like food subsidy, access to loans, etc. There is no such restriction in the US as anyone can pack up and move any day they want. Of course once you settle in the new place, you need to get that state's driver's license, may need to get your mail redirected, etc. which are all minor paperwork. Still we don't see any state getting flooded with other states losing population year after year in big numbers. Why? Reasons are multi-dimensional. People usually have extended family in one place, they like the weather, food, culture they grew up with, may not like the progressive/regressive values of the other state, and may not like the expensive real-estate/taxes that may cancel out the extra money they could potentially make in the richer state. So, though there are no borders, migration of population tends to be self-limiting.

Even within India there are some states/cities that are richer with lot of job opportunities with expensive real estate and taxes. Tamilnadu and Gujarat are couple of examples. While there are other states that are considered backward with not many job opportunities, inexpensive real estate/taxes and so on. For decades the first letters of the names of four states namely Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Utter Pradesh used to be strung together to form the word BiMaRU that means sickness in Hindi, which is also supposed to reflect the overall status of those four states. They usually lagged behind other states in literacy rates, reduction in infant mortality, job opportunities, and used to be ruled by corrupt government officials. Perhaps some states are improving these days. But there is no question that huge differences exist between Indian states. I myself and my friends who routinely visit richer states of India every other year return with a bunch of surprises as to how some latest technology has pervasive presence or how good the toll roads look, and how expensive real estate has become. Friends who visit states that are still struggling tell me that they don’t see much change in their native states at all over the decades. They wonder aloud as to where are the effects of this Raising India nonsense everyone is talking about.

India doesn't limit migration within the country either and so there is some migration that is perceivable. For example, most construction workers and waiting staff in restaurants in states like Tamilnadu are from poorer Northeastern states of India like Mizoram, Tripura, that are comparatively very slow growing. Since these migrant workers’ skin color, facial features, language are all very different from the Tamilnadu natives, they are easy to identify. But since their language, food, culture is all fairly different, they don't seem to migrate en-masse with family to settle down in the richer state. Instead they work day and night, cook and eat their own food to save money and then head back to their native states within India to see family/friends every few months. It is possible that they don't return after a trip. Or bring a cousin or two with them. Still despite there not being any government imposed barriers, there is no evidence of mass migration changing the culture/language/food of Tamilnadu till now.

When I was discussing this topic with a Professor friend of mine who lives/works in India, he asked an interesting question. He thought he could understand the language/cultural differences that exists between different states of India limiting interstate migration. But since US has one language across the country and is culturally more homogeneous compared to India or the Continent of Europe, what prevents the US population from migrating to richer states as the family bonds are also comparatively weak? He wondered if it is more of an economic issue where we see larger levels of migration among well to do white population compared to poorer black or Hispanic population. I think my cumulative learning/understanding through observations over the past 30 years in US, leads me to conclude that the reasons are not that different as illustrated by the next three paragraphs below.

Recently our daughter participated in a cultural function that took place in an Allentown high school. So, as we were walking by the teacher offices in a corridor of this local school, I noticed the teachers' name and the college they graduated from posted on the doors. After reading a bunch of names/colleges, I was commenting to my wife as to how pretty much everyone seems to have graduated from colleges that are in Pennsylvania. She pointed out as to how there is a sense of belonging, family and cohesion that people find comforting when they live in the same place where they grew up. This is again anecdotally correlated by her nurses, clerks in her office or via colleagues in my office. I hear endless stories of grandparents baby-sitting grandchildren routinely when their children go to work. Our own babysitter, white woman of Polish descent, currently lives with her son & family as she & her husband have sold their house and is planning to buy a new one in the next few months. Son doesn't seem to mind putting up mom/step-dad into his house for months.

There are well educated (white) people that are engineers, doctors, lawyers in my street that are mostly born and brought up in Pennsylvania. When we meet in community events/parties, they often comment about how their multigenerational family members/relatives live nearby (my cousin works there, my Dad lives there, my uncle volunteers there, my niece is graduating from that college, my grandmother is in that retirement community). While there are certainly white people in my neighborhood who have moved in from other states, majority seems to be born in PA. I lived in Louisiana for about 12 years and in New Jersey for 3 years and saw the same phenomenon in action in those states as well. What I have come to realize over the decades is a subtle but a strong factor.

We (Indian diaspora) know how close knit our families are and so based on factors like U.S. divorce rates or the importance given to individualism in the American culture, Indians tend to think that US family ties are not that strong. Even if that can be proven true by some objective measure, average American families living the U.S. do not think of themselves that way. Though others may consider them as Sui Generis, they consider themselves very tight knit through family bonds just like any other families that may have immigrated to the U.S. or born and brought up here itself. They know their family and are not living in another culture for a long time to draw comparisons as they are not exposed to multiple cultures or travel all over the world. Thus, since they truly believe their family bonds are strong, they tend to stick around the same place where they grew up. These notions apply to U.S. descendant families of Black, White, Asian, Hispanic heritage equally well. In other words, despite how different populations perceive each other, effects of bonds & kinship within the population are modulated more by their own self-perception and so are equally effective across demographics!

I do recall Bill Clinton being interviewed during early Obama days when U.S. was going through a major recession. He pointed out as to how we can erase a considerable percentage of unemployment in the U.S. if we can fill all the available job openings by encouraging people to move. He said there are about 5 million job openings in U.S. that don't get filled since needed talent is not locally available and people hesitate to move or have real impediments preventing them from moving that as a society we should try to address. These notions apply to the transnational migration phenomenon as well.

Switching continents, consider Schengen countries mostly located in the continental Europe. In case you are not familiar with it, you can take a quick look at this site. These 22, once separate countries have formed a union that has been operating like a single country with no borders between them. People who are citizens of any of these 22 countries can freely move within this zone. Subsequently came the European Union. The https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/eu-countries/ site has a simple animated map that shows how the EU has grown over the last several decades. It currently consists of 28 member countries and few more in the process of getting in and a couple at the "future potential" status. While there is a large overlap between Schengen countries and EU countries, there are few countries that are in Schengen but not in EU (e.g. Norway, Switzerland) and there are countries that are in EU but not in Schengen (e.g. Ireland). Total population in the European Union is about 510 million now. People from any of those 28 countries are allowed to travel, stay, live and work anywhere within the EU. Though we do often hear about far right politicians giving xenophobic talks, I don’t see any of the member country emptying out with most citizens moving to a richer country within the union.

One may counter that view saying there are a lot of rules for countries to join EU, one of which is to bring down their inflation under 1.5% compared to the best performing states in the Union. This will ensure that the nation states are economically comparable in quality. This is true as it is part of the Convergence Criteria. But that is a rule for a country to newly join the EU. We know what happened to Greece. Their numbers related to the performance of their economy were all manipulated ones before they joined that subsequently exploded. Still we didn’t see a Grexit or everyone in Greece moving to France and Germany.

I was in Berlin recently to give a talk in a geek conference. When I took a city tour, saw the Berlin wall and Checkpoint Charlie. I was talking to Berliners that were old enough to remember the wall that separated East & West Germany for decades and people getting shot when they crossed the wall from East to West to go live in the West Germany. I distinctly remember the day the wall went down in Berlin leading to the unification of East & West Germanys. I was a new grad student in Baton Rouge, Louisiana watching it as it was happening on a small apartment television. Close to three decades have passed. The current Chancellor of United Germany Angela Merkel has been in that position since 2005. The fact that she was originally born in West Germany but moved to East Germany as an infant and grew up there is testament to the fact that combined societies that erase man made borders can still thrive. Germany is one of the best performing economies in the EU, fairly safe, and has a large global presence in political, technological and social leadership combined with good quality of life.

The Pew Research center site http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/05/18/5-facts-about-the-u-s-rank-in-worldwide-migration/ states that today all over the world about 244 million people live in a country other than the one where they were born. While it is a big number and this site points out as to how if all of them lived in one country, it will be the world's 5th largest country, it depends on how we look at it. It is equally valid to say compared to the world's total population of about 7.6 billion people, this is only about 3.2%. So, close to 97% of the people live within the same country where they were born!

While about 14% of the US population is foreign born, it is not really anywhere near the highest known numbers in the world. While Canada has 22% foreign born population, some of the gulf countries that actively recruit workers from other countries have some of the world's highest percentage of foreign born population. For example, Qatar and United Arab Emirates have 75% & 88% foreign born population respectively. It is easy to see none of these countries are struggling to maintain their quality of life despite having such a huge influx of immigrant population. If so, what factors make high levels of immigration a boon rather than a curse? Answer seems to point to two factors as discussed in this Planet Money podcast. It analyzes as to what happened to the US economy (particularly the Miami, Florida area) in the 1980s when 80,000 Cuban immigrants were allowed to come to the US.

By any measure that acute influx of a large number of immigrants didn't deteriorate the local economy. For such a successful assimilation two conditions need to be met as per David Card, who is a Professor of Economics in UC Berkeley focusing on labor economics.

1. The country that is receiving the immigrants should have a large pre-existing economy. This will ensure that the immigrant population is not posing an undue burden in attempting to assimilate.

2. The society should also have connections and processes in place to help new immigrants find work quickly so that they become productive members of the society rather than simply depending upon the welcoming society's largesse.

The common fear in countries/societies forced to take in immigrants is that there is only a set number of jobs or quantity of wealth, that when shared with the new immigrants will deprive pre-existing members of the society by an equal amount, thus bringing down the quality of life and opportunities for them. But when the two conditions stated above are met, the new immigrant population that lands without a lot of possessions spurs local economy as they purchase food, housing, clothes, transportation and other products & services required to run a normal life. This will create a larger pie that can enlarge the size of the economy helping everyone in the end. This effect will be more pronounced with fresh immigrants since they initially need lot more things (e.g. a vehicle, cooking utensils, clothes, a refrigerator) than what the previously existing population will need for routine upgrades. Thus absorbing a large number of refugees can actually benefit the accepting country economically when the assimilation is successful.

Raj Raghunathan is a professor of marketing at the UT Austin’s McCombs School of Business. You can find an interesting interview he has given here in which he argues that our brains trained by evolution, view everything in the world using the ‘scarcity model’, where some scarce resource (food, jobs, opportunities) need to be fought for. Even our economic models use the same approach. This may still be true in some cases where it is a zero sum game. We can think of a boxing match where there is only one medal to be had that two boxers fight for. But this is not universally true for every resource in modern societies. There are endless examples in today’s world where resources are in abundance and so working together, rather than competing, will actually help everyone enjoy access to lot more food, jobs and opportunities. This is a new realization that is just entering our collective conscious. It may take some time to reconcile such notions with our scarcity based model mindset and then to selectively switch ourselves to abundance model approach where appropriate. But it is exciting and provides a lot of hope.

There are about 800,000 people in the U.S. who were brought into the country without valid visa or other paperwork by their parents or relatives years back when they were small children. Most were brought in as early as when they were one or two years old. It is easy to see that it is not really their fault and these youngsters will know only U.S. as their country. Many don’t speak the languages of their country of origin and don’t have any family/friends or other connections there as they have been living in the U.S. practically for their whole lives.

Since almost all of them have lead clean lives, President Obama instituted a program called DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) that allowed them to stay in U.S. legally, study, work and be productive citizens. Plan is to let them apply for permanent residency/citizenship after they continue to live normal lives for a decade without any brushes with law. More than eighty percent of the American population supports this program as it makes complete sense.

President Trump cancelled this program few months back saying Obama exceeded his constitutional authority and should have gotten congressional approval. President Trump also says he fully supports the youngsters as they have done nothing wrong and wants congress to reinstate the program. Then why did he cancel it? He did that in order to use it as a negotiation chip to bargain with the congress and get money to build a wall across the U.S. Mexico border. No one including Congress thinks spending billions to build a wall is useful. As President Trump himself has said, determined immigrants can throw a rope ladder and climb over it. So, since congress doesn’t want to fund the wall, the DACA kids are stuck in limbo.

You would think since more than 80% of the Americans support this program, it should be easy for congress to pass this bill and force the President to sign it and move on. In fact a retiring Republican Senator named Jeff Flake, who is from the southern border state of Arizona juxtaposed to Mexico wants to get this bill passed before he leaves congress at the end of the year. But this hour long This American Life podcast episode explains why he is having such a hard time getting this simple bill passed. It goes to show how difficult these issues are. So, rather than saying DACA bill should be passed or other such micro measures should be implemented, let us think on much bigger terms to see how will we design a system that will work in practical terms, eliminate current idiosyncratic restrictions found all over the world and will be better than what we have today.

We have established that even when there are no borders, there are no mass migrations that totally empties out one area and overwhelms another as indicated by EU or U.S. or India scenarios we discussed earlier. But opening up the borders with all good intentions too quickly can certainly overwhelm the system, particularly when the country opening up its border doesn’t have a large economy and the needed infrastructure capable of absorbing all the incoming immigrants. Case in point is Ecuador. You might have heard that Julian Assange of WikiLeaks fame is stuck in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. When he originally entered that embassy years back, I thought Ecuador is granting him asylum just to stick it to the West. I was quite wrong. Ecuador actually has one of the most lenient border control in the world and treats it as a quality of an exalted nation promoted by its egalitarian President Rafael Correa. You can read this long The Atlantic article that explains the policy and its unintended consequences to get the full picture. So, it certainly doesn’t make sense to open up just one country unilaterally. But opening up in consort with other nations slowly and deliberately does make sense. Even Africa has been trying an EU like approach to slowly bring in nations into the AU (African Union) umbrella similar to EU. It hopes to erase borders and create a large coherent economy that makes logical sense. If achieved, it can bring in social changes and help improve the quality of life for its residents. It has about 55 member states and is hoping to support visa free travel within the zone launching air travel cooperation earlier this year. It certainly is not as advanced as EU currently is but is moving along slowly with similar intentions.

We can create new versions of the nation states that will let the population live/work where they want while still preserving structures needed to provide products and services to the habitants. We don’t need to fear that everyone in the planet will want to move to one corner of the world. In order to think differently, let us use the term Union instead of nation or country to see how we can go about designing a new system of geographical domains to support 21^st century societies.

- Structure the Unions around naturally existing boundaries on earth. Thus Australia can be one Union. North America can be another Union, while South America and Africa can become Unions by themselves. Though these are close to continents, I am using the term Union to emphasize all the countries within these landmass functioning more or less like one “nation” as nations exist today. Continent of Asia can be demarked into two or three Unions along the lines of natural boundaries where no one could potentially live (think of the Himalayan Mountain).

- Need to leverage technology to deliver the needed product and services to the citizens wherever they are, and also keep track of who is living where. This is not impossible. As an example of a massively scalable programs launched to identify and serve a huge population, you can look up India’s Aadhaar (translates to Evidence) or UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India) deployment. You will find a lot of pros/cons debate online. But those debates apart, we can’t deny that it is a program launched a decade back to provide IDs and verification support to every individual in India (about 1.2 Billion) at very low costs and is being successfully rolled out though the ruling parties/Government has changed in between. China is launching an even more ambitious program to provide social scores to all its citizen (similar to credit scores) to make them behave better. You can read about what a dystopia it may lead to as it is quite an invasive/intrusive program. But these programs actually being implemented today show that it is possible to use technology to reach the entire planet population to provide needed services.

- Structure the tax & spend systems to ensure income inequality is kept under a reasonable limit in each Union. This will ensure pure economic reasons do not overwhelm any part of the system. This may also help in the long run to merge multiple unions into an even larger union thus forming a single planet wide habitat eventually.

We do need to address all the concerns we discussed in the first part as to why they won’t deter such an open borders model. Let me try to do that here.

- First step is to discuss/debate these models to make everyone understand the virtues so that reflexive opposition to open borders are assuaged. There is ample evidence that well thought out integration of geographic zones work well. But counter examples based on anecdotal evidence are very powerful and will be emotionally appealing compared to dull policy discussions and tables/numbers. For example, safety is a reasonable and important concern citizens will have when they oppose opening up borders. Despite what right wing politicians all over the world may say, crime trend lines are on the decline not only in the U.S. but all around the world.

- Comprehensive discussions that not only show macro numbers/charts/proof like the ones listed in the bullet above but also provide micro level personalized evidence to help people and policy makers understand the issue well are important. For example, this famous picture of a Syrian boy in an ambulance did a lot to move people than what hundred hours of policy debates in UN might have achieved.

- On the other end of the spectrum, using the same idea of leveraging a personalized story, President Trump has been talking about how a young innocent white woman he refers to as “Beautiful Kate” was shot and killed by an illegal alien. It is a very powerful story that will easily rile up white citizens feeling that their young women are being attacked by dark skinned thugs entering U.S. illegally. You can read this Slate article to understand how twisted that narration is. It is clear that negative stories are better click bait compared to positive ones and so positive stories may not get shared virally. But presented truthfully, the devastation effected by blocked migration can be very effective in changing common people’s understanding as this Syrian boy in the ambulance story did.

- Arguments like letting outsiders to come in may bring in terrorists, rapists and criminals has no real evidence. Statistics show that immigrants all over the world tend to be more law abiding and less crime laden than the natives. This is certainly applicable to U.S. It is certainly appropriate for public to worry about terrorists like the ones that conducted the 9/11 attack in the U.S. or the November 2008 Mumbai attack in India (referred to as the 26/11 attack) getting inside the country when the borders tend to be open or even porous. But closer examination shows that those terrorists either got into the country legally passing all the checks or were able to easily bypass checks thus proving that border protection is not really preventing motivated terrorists but only excludes people who should be allowed to migrate.

- On the other hand, if we evaluate sheer numbers, heinous acts of terrorism and violence committed by citizens within their own country is orders of magnitude more compared to acts committed by foreigners. In U.S. acts of violence conducted by citizens can not technically be termed as terrorism and so get covered in the media as generic violence or hate crime.

- Creating a world where there is not a lot of motivation for terrorism will work better in the long run as demonstrated by this Denmark experiment rehabilitating young Islamic ISIS jihadists. This may also be cheaper in the long run compared to spending endless billions to strengthen borders and militaries that does not effectively deter motivated terrorists.

- The next most important concern of economic deterioration can be addressed via well managed social security programs such as BIG (Basic Income Guarantee). It is certainly hard for a WV coal miner to move to California, learn coding and start to work for Google. So, it is important to help the affected/threatened population first as discussed earlier in detail.

- Another big concern might be religious persecution of the majority by the minority within a country. This appears to be mostly in the minds of the majority as I see it on both sides of the planet. As we saw in the first section, Christian majority in U.S. feel they are threatened by non-Christians while the Hindu majority in India feel they are threatened by non-Hindus, though neither religion seems to be on the wane in these two countries. My suggestions to solve this problem is to push people of one religion to get to know people practicing the other religion personally. I haven’t seen a lot of cases where someone says I know this person really well personally and their religion/culture or country/language is really bad and threatening to me. It could be uncomfortable compared to being with our own kind talking within our own echo chambers. But promoting this reach out could be very effective in changing minds.

- Open borders will also encourage interaction as people traveling all over the world will certainly develop appreciation for the practices found in other parts of the world. Whoever I have hosted in our home in U.S. from other parts of the world have consistently appreciated U.S. for its orderly behavior, friendly people, cleaner public spaces, etc. My friends in U.S. who have traveled abroad have always appreciated the warmth of the people they encountered, food they enjoyed and so on around the planet.

- Having charismatic world leaders that can communicate well fighting for the open borders cause will help a lot. Listen to this TED Radiohour podcast episode that is discussing how movements get built, how do they grow organically, and what communication skills used by people like Martin Luther King who delivered the “I have a dream” speech are effective in galvanizing people into action. If you are not familiar with the U.S. civil rights movement of the 1960s, please do read up and particularly listen to the MLK speech available on the web. It is bound to give you goosebumps.

- Going back to economic concerns, immigrants in U.S. are often lot more entrepreneurial as they often start new businesses since they find it much easier to start and own a business in U.S. compared to their country of origin. Even if all the new businesses don’t turn out to be Google and Intel (two famous companies started by immigrants), there are thousands of smaller companies that generate local jobs and tax revenues.

- The unrelenting march forward by technology is doing all it can to erase borders virtually and optimize our transportation costs of goods & services. So, the alternative to open borders will be exporting all the jobs to parts of the world where it is cheaper to get it done and shipping the product and services to wherever they are needed. It will affect closed societies even more negatively rather than taking them back to some long past glory days.

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While countries like Norway, Sweden and Japan are indeed doing well, designing a world full of very small countries with extremely homogeneous population is not a sustainable long term model. To begin with, there are a lot of small countries with very homogeneous population that still don’t do well. I will cite Rwanda as an example, which is a very small country. But the 11 million size comparatively tiny population managed to divide itself (perhaps thanks to Belgian colonial days) into Hutu and Tutsi subgroups and fight/kill each other off ferociously in the mid-90’s, though it appears to be on the mend these days. Such examples demonstrate that simply creating small homogeneous societies is not the correct solution.

- On the other hand, Singapore is an extremely small city state that is very prosperous despite having a mix of Chinese, Malay and Indian descendants in the population in large percentages. I spent a week there late last year while attending a conference. Spoke to a lot of local people and toured around the city to develop a sense for myself. Though it is not without flaws, it did feel like a well-run system.

So, how well a small country does might have more to do with how it is managed and whether its people have a sense of belonging or not rather than its smallness and homogeneity of the population per se. In general it is easy to see there is strength in size and numbers. This is the reason EU is being created so that it can have the same clout comparable in size and power to the U.S. If all the countries in the world turned out to be small countries with miniscule population, developing any standard or implementing large projects will all become expensive and complicated if not impossible.

- It is also important to let immigrants settle down permanently wherever they want to rather than allowing them to stay temporarily for a period without letting them feel that they are part of the society. For example, Gulf countries like Dubai, Saudi Arabia allow a large number of immigrants to come and work. But once their working age is over, whether they are highly educated individuals or unskilled laborers, they are forced to return to their country of origin. This model prevents them from developing a sense of belonging to the society where they live. This is cited as one reason as to why Germany’s attempt to develop an equivalent of the Silicon Valley in the late 90’s failed. Though they aggressively recruited and welcomed IT workers from all over the world, particularly from countries like India, they were told that they had to go back after 6 years of so. So, the temporary immigrants, who did enjoy the stay and the money they made, ran out the clock and returned to their native countries without ever buying property in Germany or participating in civic organizations or learning the language well. Compared to that, since U.S. traditionally encourages people (though on a diminishing scale these days) to become citizens and be part of the society, immigrants in U.S. clearly have a sense of belonging and are much more involved in the local communities.

Many readers may feel apprehensive about these proposals as they all may sound too utopian. But I would challenge that opinion from multiple angles. We have discussed enough examples in this work where such solutions do work well. Now let us look even beyond those examples for additional reinforcements that augment our understanding.

I remember our company Intel Corporation’s founder/CEO Andy Grove facing an existential crisis for the company in the early 80’s. Intel was originally making most of its money by selling memory chips it invented. But at this time it was losing its lunch to Japanese competitors that were competing with Intel on price. While it was emotionally wrenching to let go of a business Intel invented, Grove famously asked his partners what would a new CEO taking over the company to turn it around would do. The answer was to ditch the memory business and find another area of business where the company can thrive. He apparently said, let me walk out of this room and walk back in as the new CEO and make that change. He did that and the company survived. Point of the story is that at times, though it is emotionally difficult to let go of some ideas and fears, when we recognize the current system is not working well, we need some bold initiative that will set the situation right.

If we need to design a brand new planet earth, will we design a system with this mess of restrictive borders and movement limitations? If not, we need to let go of old models that are not working and initiate a bold new model that will. I would also point to M.K.Gandhi’s non-violent struggle for India’s freedom to derive more inspiration. I am not sure if he would have succeeded and garnered the world’s respect if he had tried to raise an army to fight the British rulers. His trailblazing move into non-violent freedom struggle even looked silly against the British juggernaut when it started. It is so disappointing and unfortunate that the non-violent model is not being followed anywhere much now. But we know very well he succeeded and till date has the respect of the world.

Though the world is currently moving towards closing borders and limiting migratory movements, I hope these trends turn out to be temporary when we stand back and look at the big picture spanning several decades or a century or two. Books like Clash of Civilization, In Defense of Globalization, and The Rational Optimist might all be interesting reads related to peripheries of this topic. Factors like the raise of technology and demographic shifts are bound to interfere with production and consumption of goods & services profoundly. Thoughtful planners should be able perceive how allowing fluid migration of people all over the planet can significantly help and leverage those changes to make the lives better for everyone in the world. I hope we won’t let them stop at just perceiving but will also abet the changes while communicating the expected resulting changes well to the worldwide population. It will help develop the needed grass root support as long as it is complemented with support services needed for those who will be disadvantaged in the short run. True, it is easier said than done. But let us get the ball rolling. The Maricelas and Khairo Hassans of the world should not be forced to wait even a day longer. If they can’t even feed themselves, as Bharathiyaar would say, this world is not worth preserving. Another Tamil poet named Kaniyan Poongundranaar centuries back said:

யாதும் ஊரே, யாவரும் கேளிர்

It translates to “Every town is our town and all the people we see are our relatives”. Hopefully within our lifetime, that will become the norm & reality.

(The End)

References:

1. Black lung disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalworker%27s_pneumoconiosis

2. Bethlehem Steel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethlehem_Steel

3. Rust Belt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_Belt

4. https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/border-trilogy-part-1/

5. https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/border-trilogy-part-2-hold-line

6. https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/border-trilogy-part-3-what-remains

7. http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/world/2017/12/15/how-refugees-are-being-forced-back-to-a-war-zone-to-repay-their-debts/?utm_term=.8e222daa0ccd

8. Act 1: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/643/damned-if-you-do

9. Indian Frontier Railways: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8hs24tvR_8&t=2s

10. http://worldpopulationreview.com/european-union-countries/