Saturday, May 11, 2019

The Immigration Conundrum



(Image credit: Npr.org.)

A Tamil poet named Bharathiyaar that lived in the 20th century is famous for these two lines he wrote in addition to many more pieces found in his oeuvre:

தனியொரு மனிதனுக்கு உணவில்லையெனில்
ஜகத்தினை அழித்திடுவோம்.

That couplet translates to, “if an individual human being cannot find food and has to go hungry, let us destroy the world”. Though it may sound radical on the surface, it is easy to see that the sentiment expressed is to support & preserve individual rights without which the world is not worth living. I have been thinking as to how this notion applies to both sides of the immigration debate in progress all over the world. It is a pretty complex topic. Thanks to the U.S. President Trump, it is right at the forefront of public debate in US as well as in other parts of the world. Since people either support or oppose immigration and don't dig deeper to understand the complexities, debates often tend to be superficial focused on just one aspect of the big picture. But since I have been reading articles/books pertinent to this topic, listening to podcasts, watching documentaries and talking to people, felt I should put my thoughts on paper for my own understanding. I am trying to do it in three parts. In the first part I intend to explore the views and perspectives of nationalists that support impervious borders. In the second part I look at how well borders work and in the third and concluding part provide solutions that will dovetail the first two parts and thus hopefully will make logical sense to everyone. I would urge interested readers to explore all the links sprinkled throughout the write-up. The articles, podcasts and videos listed will certainly enrich the experience and comprehension. I have mentioned the links inline to make sure the context is easy to understand, while they are all listed at the end under references so that readers who prefer not to get distracted while reading the main article can chose to explore them all in sequence separately. If you agree/disagree with the details, send in your thoughts. It will help me tweak & polish my understanding and perhaps help me write something better in the future. 

Why Do Closed Borders Make Sense?

A while back I read an article that explained as to why it is not possible for us to treat people on the other side of the planet the same way as we treat our own countrymen/women. When we push the lens further in and look at a family level, it is easy to see that however good at heart one may be, it is not possible for anyone to treat their neighbors as one’s own family members living under the same roof. It may be possible to do it during short spans of time, say when a neighbor is going through some hardship and you are helping out. But permanently sharing all your wealth, space, time with the neighbor's family and children as you do with your spouse/children is not possible. Our societies themselves are not structured to support such behavior as indicated by the way we earn money, spend on our family's needs, how we file taxes, and so on. A similar but a bit more diluted argument can be extended to the whole nation as it is more cohesive compared to the entire world. It is not possible to express the same level of empathy to people in other countries as we do with our fellow citizens. Having a sense of cohesion is mandatory for lot of things to work. Hence we will always worry more about a single finger lost from our body than 1000 people killed on the other side of the planet. If that sense is diluted to make us equally egalitarian in our approach to everyone in the world, it doesn't seem to work at all and turns into apathy. It also eliminates the feeling of us belonging to a tight knit group making us feeling special. 

While reading up on why open borders won't work, I saw lot of arguments like this one: Switzerland is a small, beautiful, wealthy country that has less than 9 Million people. India has 1.2 Billion people and everyone in India would love to live in Switzerland. If there are no restrictions, all the Indians will move to Switzerland and then there will be no Switzerland! If we agree with these conclusions, then closed borders and strong national identities will start to make a lot of sense. National anthems, waving flags and talks of patriotism instill a lot of pride in people. They certainly serve emotional needs and form cohesive societies.

About one year back I was listening to a podcast that featured a coal miner from the state of West Virginia in the U.S. The person who spoke was a third generation coal miner since his father and grandfather also worked in the same mine decades past. It is not easy work. It is labor intensive while being fraught with physical dangers of the mine collapsing, catching fire, and emitting noxious gases. You can look up black lung which is a common lung disease miners fall victim to as they breathe in coal dust day in and day out while working in the mines. This particular miner also suffered from it and was forced to retire early due to ill health. Despite all these issues, he fondly recalled talking to another reporter few years earlier. At that time as he was giving a tour of the mine, the visiting reporter remarked how his miner job is similar to an astronaut’s since like an astronaut the miner is also exploring new spaces where no human being has ever set foot in the past! You can sense the respect he felt by that reporter’s observation so long back.



In the years past such jobs provided decent salary in the U.S. to lead a respectful middleclass life. These workers usually had high school level education and with the salary they earned were able to buy a car, own a house and put food on the table. They rightly considered themselves part of an honest and successful workforce that helped the country thrive. You can hear the pride in his voice and the meaning he derived from his work as he felt the coal they were mining was powering the whole nation. This profile will apply to a large number of blue collar workers that enjoyed good societal standing in the years past as they were putting in decades of work in steady jobs with excellent work ethics and raised good families. His son took up the same job as a fourth generation miner, only to be laid off since coal mines are on the decline as power plants have been switching to natural gas which is cheaper as well as cleaner, making it environmentally friendly while making the business more profitable. This is a rare combinatoric unicorn to come by. There was a famous line in the 2012 presidential debate where Barack Obama pushed back his rival Mitt Romney saying, "You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets because the nature of our military's changed.” This applies to coal mining jobs as well as several manufacturing jobs that have evaporated from the U.S. due to reasons like the arrival of natural gas or globalization that has made manufacturing goods anywhere in the world and transporting them where they are needed in large shipping container more economical than manufacturing them where they are needed. This is all well and good as it improves the quality of life on the whole for the whole planet. But what should the fourth generation miner that got laid off do now? Saying he should quickly learn to code and start working for cloud computing companies is highly impractical.



Just miles from where I live/work, there used to be a famous steel plant called Bethlehem Steel that was a proud symbol of American manufacturing prowess, as it delivered steel all over the country and world for more than 100 years. It also had a ship building business that served the world during WWII. In the late 90’s, not be able to compete with companies like Mittal Steel of India (currently a multinational conglomerate called ArcelorMittal), it started going down and went bankrupt in 2003. While people all over the world feel that American multinationals come in and destroy their national icons, the demise of Bethlehem Steel and similar destruction of U.S. manufacturing jobs by non-U.S. multinationals indicates that it cuts both ways. While Bethlehem Steel or coal mining jobs may not mean much for my kids born in the last two decades, it resonates well with people I personally know. Many of them feel that we have had too much of globalization and so it is time for some rebalancing as the decades past were much better in these rust belt regions with ample middle class jobs that are nowhere to be found now.

Zooming in and listening/interacting with individuals of this kind will crystalize the issues at an emotional level, which is very different from logical high level analysis of abstract numbers of jobs lost/created and so on. For this base with declining quality of life compared to their grandparents, politicians that tell them that their suffering is all caused by faceless people in other countries and providing solutions that promise the return of the glory days obviating the need for them to relearn anything or relocate to anywhere else appeal at the gut level.

This worry of outsiders taking over what we genuinely feel belongs to us is not new or limited to the U.S. alone. More than thirty years back, as a freshly minted Electronics & Instrumentation engineer, I joined a company called HAL (Hindustan Aeronautics Limited) in Bangalore, India. We were involved in designing the ALH (Advanced Light Helicopter) in that central government owned/run company. Since it is a large public sector institution, new employees were recruited via a nationwide entrance exam and interview, thus attracting engineers from all over the country. I got that job through that same selection process. But while I was working there, heard the state natives often complaining about us ‘outsiders’ who come in from other states and take up well paying Government jobs that should have been given to the people of Karnataka, the state where Bangalore is located. I am not playing victim since I wasn’t affected by such comments in any way. Neither was I a hero that addressed such concerns and resolved issues. I don’t know what I could have done to change anyone’s mind as I was a young engineer fresh out of college with not much knowledge about any such policy issue. Western readers may know that India is sort of like EU since each Indian state has its own language, food, culture, movies and so on. Though I grew up in the state adjacent to the state where Bangalore is located, I can't read one line of text written in the local state language of Bangalore called Kannada. It is not even equivalent to a German visiting France where one would at least recognize the alphabets. The Tamil & Kannada language alphabets look as different as Japanese and Russian. So, I did understand their point of view but thought it was ok for me to work there since the company I was working for is a government owned national company that could very well have been setup in the state where I was born and raised.

I worked there only for nine months before switching over to yet another public sector company called ONGC (Oil & Natural Gas Commission) where I was an Instrumentation maintenance engineer in an offshore oil platform for two more years before heading to the U.S. for grad school. I had a fantastic time in that oil platform job as a bachelor working through a 14 days on/off duty cycle that allowed me to return to my parents’ place during the off fortnight that also helped me prepare and apply for grad school. Since not a lot of older engineers with family wanted to work in an offshore platform for 14 days as it took them away from family for long stretches of time, I didn’t hear a lot of complaints about outsiders stealing jobs that should have gone to Maharashtra state residents. The fact that the offshore platform was located 100 miles inside the Arabian sea also helped. We interacted only with fellow employees on a daily basis and so the platform didn’t feel like part of the closest onshore city Bombay. But I have heard of such complaints amongst employees working in on-shore plants in that state as well as it is one of the richer states in India.

Even before we hit singularity (when Artificial Intelligence starts to go past human intelligence), imagine a world where an anarchist has managed to render all silicon CPUs in computers non-functional. Even if the world comes up with a biological computer that substitutes well for all the computing power that would have gone away, millions of highly trained computer engineers (both hardware and software) will quickly lose their jobs to be replaced by this new breed of biological engineers. In such a world, if a Trump equivalent stands up and says, “I will isolate our country with real and virtual border walls and bring back the internet and the IT jobs, while simultaneously destroying the anarchists and their countries”, I am pretty sure lot of highly educated computer engineers will vote for him!

Even if we ignore jobs and economic worries, we can see arguments for borders and boundaries arising out of concerns in other domains. Look through all the countries in the world and pick the top ten that are doing very well providing excellent quality of life to its citizens sans social unrest and in-fighting. Countries like Norway, Sweden, Japan may all come to your mind. It is easy to notice that these are all very small countries with an extremely homogeneous population. So, it is possible that when there is not a lot of diversity in the population and the country is small, people don’t mind the taxes they pay being used to support someone else that look like themselves. Of course there are lot of other countries that are small with homogeneous population that are still in dire straits. It is usually because a small group that runs the country is corrupt and tends to have an iron grip on available natural resources. But those negative examples apart, these well to do small societies point to a successful state model with strong national boundaries that binds the citizens well. On the other hand when the country is large and diverse, we are often suspicious of people that don’t look like us since we don’t understand them added to the fact that the size of the country makes it hard to understand where the funds go to support whom, thus making the whole governing structure suspect.

Borders can also be justified from religion, values, culture, safety points of view. Religions are innately structured to make the followers feel special. But irrespective of the size of a religious group in a given country or society, it is easy to feel threatened by competing religious groups as there is enough historical evidence to justify such fears. Christians that form a substantial majority in the U.S. feel that their rights and values are under perpetual threat, while Hindus that form 80% of the 1.2 Billion population in India feel that they are under attack and so need to stand up and protect themselves. Same goes to Jews or Muslims in different parts of the world even if they are the majority in the country they live in. Even the Buddhists that are supposed to be known for peace and tranquility their religion preaches are attacking people of other religions out of fear that they are going to get overrun. Not to be left out, atheists feel that they are ostracized as social outcasts and it is easier to “come out” as gay than as an atheist due to strong societal backlash.

It is easy to keep writing along similar lines about how citizens of a country may feel their values, culture and safety gets diluted when outsiders invade what they consider as their agreeable societies. So whether we look at the issues on hand from economic, religious, cultural values, country size, management ease or safety perspectives, it seems to make good sense to have strong borders and cohesive societies.


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