The end of immigration

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Sept, 1995 by Llewellyn D. Howell

IT HAS BEEN increasingly clear in the last few years that migration across national borders is coming to an end. It seems a bit difficult to believe, since migration across land and sea is built deeply into human folklore and has been employed since the beginning of human history to escape physical deprivation and human tyranny.

Many of the forces of human society, physical geography, and meteorology that drew or impelled peoples to spread themselves across the face of the planet continue unabated. The Sahara Desert can expand or contract by as much as 120 miles in a year, depending on rainfall. Political, religious, and ethnic oppression exists in many countries under circumstances where there is no hope of redress for minorities. The forces of the population explosion leave some peoples barely with breathing space in their native lands. Debilitating poverty racks large populations on several continents. The thrust and the desire to move remain.

However, the irresistible force of hope through migration is meeting an increasingly immovable object of foreigner jealousy and hatred. The immigration train is grinding to a halt while the emigration struggle continues. The signs are everywhere.

An anti-immigrant mood proved to be a determining factor in the 1995 French presidential and national elections. Sentiment against Arabs and Africans is widespread and deeply imbedded. The far-right National Front Party has made notable gains at the local level, and favoritism toward native-born citizens has become ever more prevalent in French society. Of seven European Union countries that once voted to give up internal passport controls, only France continues to resist beyond the agreed-upon deadlines.

A spate of Republican candidates for the American presidency have incorporated isolationist and anti-immigrant sentiments into their platforms and rhetoric. The same sectors of the population that find anti-UN arguments appealing also find anti-flag burning amendments attractive and like the idea of Christian prayer in public schools as "a reflection of our cultural heritage." Islamic prayer is not welcome; neither are Muslims or Hindus. Mexican immigrants, whether legal or illegal, are particularly undesirable.

The Vietnamese, another potential "tribe," have found themselves caught in the middle of the changing immigration environment. Many who journeyed to East Germany to fill employment voids in the lesser professions are being repatriated to Vietnam in the aftermath of German reunification and the end of the Cold War. Germany and Vietnam recently reached an accommodation that will send 40,000 of them home over the next five years. This agreement and the social forces characterized by the skinhead movement are reversing the migration trend that dominated the post-World War II movement of peoples escaping poverty and oppression. The Vietnamese who are being repatriated forcibly from Hong Kong and other points in Asia are caught in this same migratory flux.

Even migration to Israel has become a function of these same forces. Russians married to Jews who have migrated to Israel are finding themselves unwelcome and discriminated against in a society that has been epitomized as the archtypical example of virtually everything good and bad about the dispersion of culture. At the center of this apocryphal setting is the lesson that the mixing of races and cultures will leave both parties in the mixture without a territorial home. Meanwhile, Muslims in Karachi fill the streets with blood, with two sides divided according to whether their origins are in Pakistan itself or in pre-partition India. A migration event nearly 50 years old is the grounds for the killing.

The causes of this impending closure on immigration are several. One is population growth. In politically and economically progressive societies, opportunity and space increasingly are limited. Despite the arguments of social conservatives, food sources can not be expanded endlessly, and meaningful (as well as remunerative) work can not be found for all or even most members of every society. Simple space doesn't exist in large sectors of some nations today such as Hong Kong, China, and India.

A second is the hardening of national boundaries. While a couple of countries remain with hypothetical boundaries between them, most have succumbed to the European system of nation-states, where lines are drawn on the ground as well as on maps. Those lines increasingly are enforceable as populations approach them in a paint-by-the-numbers process of filling in national and political reach. While humans have been migrating for a million years, the nation-state has existed as a global entity for less than two centuries and just is beginning to gain maturity. The state exists in great part to protect scarce resources for the nation or people that have organized it. Today, enforcers with guns, electrical wire, and land mines define borders and assert themselves in the immigration process.

Yet another cause is the demise of socialist and communist ideology as a form of supranational bonding following the end of the Cold War. Without "communism" and "democratic capitalism" to define who the good and bad guys are, the multitudinous physical and cultural identities have asserted themselves, defining who is in and who is out by skin color, language, or religious beliefs. If you are different in one of these ways from what we are, you,re not welcome in our state of scarcity. The easiest way of identifying who is not in, or course, is visual--that is, by race.