Should America continue allowing new immigrants or should stop them from coming? Why? Why Not?
I have a lot of thoughts on immigration in the United States. Immigration can increase productivity and economic prosperity, but it can also increase competition, spread diseases, and disturb local populations. Immigrants need to be transported first and foremost, and transportation technology has much more devastating effects than immigration. No one can talk about immigration with clarity without first talking about transportation. Transportation was essential for the slave trade, colonialism, wars, and so on. Nevertheless, I believe Americans should still permit both transportation and immigration on the caveat that they offset the consequences of transportation and immigration as well. Americans should offset the negative externalities of migration and transportation by creating incentives for local participation.
People are productive because they are propelled by their will-to-live to continue living. The continuance of life is effortful as explained by Newton’s Laws of Motion. Newton’s 1st Law of Motion is that work is needed to move against friction, gravity, and decay. In addition, people aren’t meandering aimlessly. People need to navigate to acquire resources to survive. To navigate is to move intelligently, which is another way to say that navigation is productive and meaningful work. The desire to survive will naturally propel people to move and navigate, thereby being meaningfully productive. So, an increase in people would naturally lead to an increase in productivity.
Transportation technology is an unnatural and recent phenomenon. Relatively recently in human history, many transportation technologies were invented. Technologies include trains, cars, airplanes, ships & vessels, motorbikes & bicycles, roads, wagons, and carriages. Transportation technologies give a super-human ability to travel large distances in a short time. While humans naturally desire to move and navigate, they do not naturally move at super-human speeds with relatively little effort.
Transportation technology produces disease. Obesity, cancer, lead-poisoning, accidents, and pandemics are consequences of transportation. Obesity is caused due to the “little effort” aspect of transportation technology. The average human body adapted to the effort required to move itself, and without self-exerted effort, the human body begins to dysfunction. Dysfunction in the body is another word for disease. As for pandemics, the pathogens of an infected, traveling person hitch a free ride across large distances in a short time. Pandemics result from the motion of infected peoples, such as the smallpox epidemic in the New World from Europeans who traveled via sailing ships (Pringle, 2015). Finally, motor vehicles are a leading cause of death-by-accident as well as the origin of lead poisoning until the ban of 1996 (McFarland, 2024). Transportation creates dysfunctions in the body and spreads diseases at high speeds.
Migration is a function of transportation. According to the Oxford Dictionary of English, the definition of migration is “movement of animals…,” “movement of people…”, and “movement from one part of something to another.” The commonality of these definitions is the word “movement.” The definition of transportation reads as “a system or means of conveying people or goods.” The words migration and transportation are near synonyms, where transportation has an additional connotation of carrying something. In short, the improvement of transportation would, by definition, improve the ability to carry people from places and thereby increase migration. In short, another de facto consequence of transportation technology – aside from spreading and producing disease – is migration.
Rapid migration has consequences on communities in local areas. One example of this is the political migration called Free State Project. The Free State Project is a group of American Libertarians in the 2000’s who decided to migrate to New Hampshire in order to change the voting demographics of the area. Critical to their project, they explicitly and consciously chose a small U.S. state where the migrant population could meaningfully change the voting outcomes. This resulted in tension with the original, local community in New Hampshire who did not consent to the political migration project that could affect their legislation.
Rapid migration is disorientating. It can result in a loss of memory because the newcomers are disconnected from the culture, geography, and history of the land. Indeed, page 167 of the class’ textbook affirms that residents can become disconnection from each other: “United States is now completing its transformation into a mosaic culture, an increasingly heterogeneous complex of separate, more or less uniform “tiles” whose residents spend less time than ever interacting and “melting”” (De Blij, 2016). In addition to alienation, poverty can result. This is because the newcomers aren’t integrated in the networks of resources as a native resident would be. Additionally, the newcomers can introduce new competition. Even sexual competition, girlfriends and boyfriends in otherwise harmonious relationships could be jeopardized by an appealing newcomer, who is alienated from the culture and unnaturally available due to superhuman modes of transportation. The increase in sexual competition as a result of transportation technology could explain the rapid rise in divorce rates from the early to late 20th century. Indeed, the definition of divorce is “separation”, such as the idioms ‘parting ways’, ‘moving on’, and ‘creating distance’ – much like the meaning of migration and transportation. Interestingly, the definition of disorient is “to lose the sense of time, place, or identity”. In short, migration very well makes someone lose their sense of time, place, and identity.
An immigration ban is problematic for many reasons. One reason is that it doesn’t solve the ‘disorientation’ problem of migration because disorientation from time and place originates from transportation technology, rather than migrants themselves. So, a proper ban on immigration would be a ban on transportation. However, this would lead to a restrictive and ascetic economy. In other words, a ban on transportation, or immigrants, would be self-imposed poverty. However, in exchange, there would be an increase in cultural identity and sense of orientation. North Korea is an example of a ban of immigration, and as a consequence, they have a strong sense of identity at the cost of self-imposed poverty compared to other countries. Another problem with a ban of immigration is a deprivation of liberty which is another key characteristic of a society like North Korea with restrictive immigration laws. In general, an immigration ban is unsatisfactory because it is authoritarian, impoverishing, and ineffective.
America should welcome immigrants, but they should increase incentives for connection to local areas and communities. One incentive is free, hot food. People tend to bond over food. Similarly, cities can legalize street vendors so that city dwellers can go outside and socialize. Frequently going outside to specific places will familiarize people and create a sense of orientation of time, place, and identity. Another nice consequence of familiarizing people over food is connecting newcomers to networks of resources so that they aren’t at risk of poverty from being disconnected to the community. America should create more opportunities for local connection, rather than ban immigration.
In summary, immigration is a symptom of rapid technological growth. Technologies that surpass human abilities create unintended consequences, like obesity or epidemics. Immigration in America is a transition to a new age of global humanity, connected together by global technology. Humans evolved in very small areas, and they have to adjust to a global area. Immigration should be allowed, but there is a lot of adjusting to do in the new global environment.
References
De Blij, Harm J., Peter O. Muller, and Jan Nijman. Geography: realms, regions, and concepts —Sixteenth edition. 2014. ISBN 978-1-118-67395-9 (hardback)
McFarland, Michael J., Aaron Reuben, Matt E. Hauer. “Contribution of Childhood Lead Exposure to Psychopathology in the U.S. Population over the Past 75 Years,” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, December 4, 2024. DOI: 10.1111/jcpp.14072
Pringle, Heather. How Europeans brought sickness to the New World: Isolated tribes who emerge today face echoes of the epidemics that began in 1492 and were repeated for centuries. Science Magazine. 4 Jun 2015, doi: 10.1126/science.aac6784