Rethinking the Mass Migration

in society •  3 months ago

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    The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'massive crowd of people at a militarized border crossing.'

    I am in theory a proponent of open borders. I think people should be free to move across the face of the Earth without interference and nation states should all work together as one unified world. Unfortunately, this ideal may not materialize for another hundred years. Here and now, people are not allowed to move freely from one place to another.

    They're not legally allowed to move, but they can't always realistically stay where they are. Many places have been rendered uninhabitable for political and environmental reasons. People are fleeing these places by the millions. The pace of mass migrations is quickening rapidly as climate instability becomes more pronounced. This is a global problem that individual countries are spectacularly failing to address on their own.

    The mass migration crisis in the US is a major Trump talking point. He likes to focus on the small percentage of immigrants who are criminals. While his statements on the subject are misleading and peppered with lies, the numbers are troubling. Migrants now make up 75% of those arrested in Midtown Manhattan. And according to Michael Shellenberger, "Of the 7 million migrants that ICE released while their cases are being processed, 663,000 have criminal histories, 13,000 were convicted of homicide, 16,000 of sexual assault, and 1,845 face homicide charges."

    For context, these figures cover an unspecified range of years, spanning at least the Trump and Biden administrations. It's also worth noting that a criminal conviction doesn't necessarily mean a person is a menace. People can and do mend their ways, and some migrants flee from countries where it's common for the government to convict the innocent of crimes they didn't commit. So maybe US officials are only releasing a few thousand active murderers and rapists into the country every year. That still seems like a lot.

    The public safety risk here may be relatively small, but the financial cost of this great migration is huge. The federal government, the states, and major cities are all forking over huge sums of money to support arriving migrants. Taxpayer funds are being used to legally process, transport, feed, and shelter the migrants. I don't think this is wrong. Meeting people's basic needs is a perfectly reasonable use of public funds. But when I pass sprawling homeless encampments while going about everyday life and see how inescapable poverty has become the norm in communities across the country, I can't help but think that the migrant spending is about something other than providing humanitarian relief for the needy.

    One hidden factor here is our economy's reliance on migrant workers. Trump may threaten to deport millions of migrants and he might even try to make good on this threat if elected. Yet if this happened, our agricultural sector would be crippled. So would several major industries.

    Companies that pay insufficient wages don't attract workers who have other choices. In the long term, it would be great if every company that refused to pay a living wage went bankrupt. But right now, their business model is to exploit migrant labor while government assistance covers the difference between the insufficient wages and the actual cost of living. If this subsidized labor suddenly vanished, the economy would have a seizure.

    One of the most important questions about the great migrations that are beginning is the question of responsibility. Who is responsible for what? I don't think it's ethically appropriate to frame this in nationalistic terms. The migrant crisis isn't about one country or another. It's a global issue demanding a humanitarian response.

    In a political sense, if the US supports a narcoterrorist regime in Honduras and Hondurans flee their destabilized homeland for the US, the American regime may have some obligation to the refugees. And given the realities of American foreign policy, many of the refugees coming here are fleeing from other places that the US government has damaged or destabilized.

    Is it our responsibility to take care of migrants who arrive here without the resources to survive? I think it is, in exactly the same way as it's our responsibility to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless. It's also perfectly reasonable for us to say no, we're not in a position to stay afloat ourselves while also helping the needy masses.

    The shortest path to providing the level of humanitarian assistance needed by our poverty class as a whole would be a Universal Basic Income. This presumably wouldn't be paid to people who are in the country illegally, but it would give us some breathing room to decide how best to respond to the migrant crisis. People aren't going to stop fleeing conflict and environmental wreckage for the promise of a better life in the US. There has to be a better way to deal with the migration.

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      society immigration economy politics
      3 months ago by
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