There are immigration crises happening in North Africa with people trying to get away from the catastrophe that Libya has become, from West Asia, trying to escape the civil wars in Syria and Iraq, from South East Asia with people trying to get away from Myanmar and more. There's an imaginary crisis of people coming from Latin America into the US and the very real one of cruel deportations back. These all reflect real problems in the regions these people are trying to escape. No one nation can hope to accommodate all the refugees, nor should they. Much of the hostility toward immigrants, in both our country and in others, is racist or xenophobic.
in the 19th and early 20th centuries, there were massive immigrations to the United States from nearly every part of the world. In hindsight, nearly all of these groups have been widely accepted, although there was certainly a large amount of intolerance when they were first coming over. Small amounts of this remains, especially towards groups who can't pass for Anglo-Saxon. These groups enthusiastically embraced American culture and added their distinctiveness.
It all went well, because America had wide open spaces. It had small cities wanting to become big ones. It had seemingly inexhaustible natural resources, including water, oil, coal, aluminum, iron and lots more. Perhaps most importantly, it had lots of places to dump the stuff you couldn't figure out what to do with. That included setting off atomic bombs in secret when you weren't quite sure what would happen and wanted to make sure nobody was watching.
Today, this is gone. There's basically nowhere that isn't feeling some pressure from overcrowding. Even the great barren places of the southwestern desert and the almost uninhabitable hinterlands of Alaska are seen to be somebody's back yard. There is really nowhere left, anywhere on the planet, if you truly want to be left alone.
I think this is all a symptom of an ecological phenomenon called Carrying Capacity. The carrying capacity of an ecosystem for any particular species is that which is stable, consuming only the resources that the rest of the ecosystem can produce. If it exceeds it, the population will crash, and won't recover until the resources are replenished. These crashes are very traumatic, and many ecosystems never recover.
There are ways to fool this: a small, well tended aquarium can support lots more fish than a much larger, poorly maintained one. The same is true for people. Sophisticated farming and transportation can provide food well beyond what a foraging culture could achieve. Well managed countries have much higher carrying capacities than corrupt or incompetently managed ones. If something bad is happening in your community, you will do what you can to get away from the problem.
I think the carrying capacity of the planet is somewhere between 1 and 2 billion people. We crossed 1 billion shortly after 1800, and 2 billion in 1929. Today we are over 7. Several countries have recognized that their excessive population is a problem and have acted with various levels of aggressiveness to deal with it. In many cases, this has left them open to the consequences of immigration from countries that have not done this. Immigrant populations always struggle to fit in, but if the whole society is struggling with the limits to the carrying capacity, the stress of this seems inordinately worse.
I think America's share of world carrying capacity should be about 10%: 100-200M people. (we arrived a little late, crossing 100M in 1915 and 200M in 1968). The infrastructure we have, which was mostly built in the 1940s through 60s, could handle this. Instead, we have about 320M, and we quit building and repairing infrastructure in the 1970s. We need to understand what we are doing to ourselves. I think we need to look at various incentives and barriers to get our population back to this sustainable level. And other countries must do the same. A lot of our problems--many of the civil wars, pollution, climate change, etc., can be greatly reduced if we do this.
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