Immigration
The glaciers, the floods, the winds, and all the other forces that make the earth's surface such a lively place have never left markers dividing up the lands and the seas among all the various national groups by which humans choose to set themselves off from each other. So, lacking those natural lines of demarcation, immigration has brought about violent reactions throughout human history. It's almost a natural law, akin to the one that says that nature abhors vacuums and always expands to fill them. That vacuum could apply to territory, the availability of food, employment, and other things.
In that light the current fierce opposition to "illegal immigrants" in the U.S. and the murderous outbreaks against immigrants in South Africa are cut from the same cloth, and the angry South Africans are only doing what many Americans would like to do. But as driving out people by riots is seen as being too messy in this day and age, after having already been tried numerous times in the past, other means are resorted to that nevertheless are equally violent though in quieter ways, especially by building up barriers around the whole country. So the result is that Mexicans are regularly dying while trying to cross the deserts in the American Southwest, while the Palestinians in their own homelands are being squeezed tighter and tighter into narrow living spaces by an ever enlarging system of walls and settlements by newcomers with more weapons.
Yet the ever-powerful urge to procreate keeps bringing people into the world faster than they leave it and faster than resources can be created to comfortably accommodate them all, and so human-made disasters associated with the movement of populations become as natural as temperature rises, floods, crop failures, hurricanes, and all the other phenomena of the living Earth. And meanwhile the term "illegal immigrants" has meaning only on one side of the walls that in the long run come to be seen as having been bad mistakes.
Actually, on a planet with such a natural shape as a sphere, everything is one.
In that light the current fierce opposition to "illegal immigrants" in the U.S. and the murderous outbreaks against immigrants in South Africa are cut from the same cloth, and the angry South Africans are only doing what many Americans would like to do. But as driving out people by riots is seen as being too messy in this day and age, after having already been tried numerous times in the past, other means are resorted to that nevertheless are equally violent though in quieter ways, especially by building up barriers around the whole country. So the result is that Mexicans are regularly dying while trying to cross the deserts in the American Southwest, while the Palestinians in their own homelands are being squeezed tighter and tighter into narrow living spaces by an ever enlarging system of walls and settlements by newcomers with more weapons.
Yet the ever-powerful urge to procreate keeps bringing people into the world faster than they leave it and faster than resources can be created to comfortably accommodate them all, and so human-made disasters associated with the movement of populations become as natural as temperature rises, floods, crop failures, hurricanes, and all the other phenomena of the living Earth. And meanwhile the term "illegal immigrants" has meaning only on one side of the walls that in the long run come to be seen as having been bad mistakes.
Actually, on a planet with such a natural shape as a sphere, everything is one.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 6:49 AM
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