So, what do you guys think of immigration? What's your view on it? Good/bad/meh? Notice I didn't say "position" as that sort of connotes political leaning or something and I don't want to get into a liberal versus conservative thing. I just want your opinion on it and perhaps the rationale behind your view.
The way I see it is that it's a catch 22, a moral dilemma. I'll explain.
When resource bases deplete, economies collapse, wars break out or any combination thereof, all the while the population continues its growth unabated, that's population overshoot. It's when the carrying capacity of an area collapses while the population continues growing. Something has to be the release valve to shave off the extra numbers in these regions, and its usually one of two: emmigration or death. Zimbabwe contrasted against North Korea would be a good case study of one versus the other. In Zimbabwe the population pressure was relieved, for the most part, by emmigration to South Africa,etc. In North Korea millions died through starvation, further millions went malnourished for a decade and now you have a generation of emaciated children with no hair pigmentation eating long-pig (human meat) at their crypto-feudal markets. All this because the totalitarian government wouldn't allow emmigration into china or across the 38th parallel.
So while letting the latter occur, the death of millions, due to an anti-immigration policy is obviously wrong, what if letting this pressure be relieved into another region hastened its own systemic collapse? What is the "right" thing to do there? To let those in the sinking ship crowd on to another only to have both sink. Is giving a few more moments of life for those on the first ship the right thing to do considering it will drastically shorten those of the good samaritans. It's a moral dilemma. You kill some you save some, you save some you kill them all after a time lag. Personally I'm all for triage, letting those on the first ship sink to let those on the second live.
Anyway, so why do I think this is an analogous situation to the earth today? Why do I think the unabated emmigration of those from collapsing regions will be the death knell for those who embrace them with open arms? Because we live in a finite world.
And not just finite but increasingly finite. All across the earth you've got forests turning to scrubland, scrubland turning to grassland, grassland turning to barren plains and plains turning to desert. You've got minerals leaching, soil flowing off, ecosystems collapsing and resources depleting. You've got more and more hungry mouths to feed each year and they're all screaming louder and louder; a powder keg ready to blow. With food riots from Haiti to the Philippines, from the bone dry wells of Texas to the struggling fields of Arabia and from the skyrocketing shopping bills to the superspikes at the pump, it's hard to deny that our population has hit a ceiling and that ceiling is getting lower and lower as we pound harder and harder trying to break through.
And unlike the ceilings and overshoots of the past, this is a global problem. No longer can populations just emmigrate across to the lands of plenty, following the gradient of wealth. These gradients, these differences, between the carrying capacity of one region and the carrying capacity of another are all but disappearing. We're all going to wake up one day and realise we're all in the same boat now. We've all overcrowded and sinking. No one can just hop ship to another to escape the inevitable.
So when the carrying capacity of everywhere is collapsing, when everyone's ship is sinking, should we really let others, who're more far gone hop onto ours? Morally is it right if it will just quicken the pace of our own demise?
Accusations of racism aside, England is being overrun.