Immigration is a serious issue. It is an issue for all countries. With the world population growing and climate change affecting how people live, millions of people will want or need to move during the next decades. And millions of those will want or need to cross country borders.
Farming and food production are already being affected by too little or too much rain and higher peak temperatures compared to past normals. We have seen massive damage to businesses and homes here in the U.S. due to flooding. Although we don’t hear as much about other countries, there are severe weather and rising sea level problems affecting millions (if not billions) of people throughout the world. And when resources get scarce, and life gets hard, violence and even wars occur, providing another reason for people to move.
Research suggests it will only get worse in the coming decades. Both climate change and population growth will increase. The U.S. may not be affected as much as other parts of the world. But it is a world problem that affects all nations. Europe has already seen millions of immigrants fleeing wars and violence.
I am deeply disappointed that our leaders, on both sides, are not talking about the long term. The U.S. leaders should, at the least, have people looking into and projecting immigration patterns and coming up with ideas about how to deal with millions of desperate people. If we are only talking about the current conditions at our southern border, we are being very short sighted.
For all of the political fighting about our border with Mexico, it is really not going to make a lot of difference one way or the other. Those options are still being discussed within our existing immigration laws. Those options only make sense for a small piece of what should be a comprehensive look at our immigration policies and future planning. What if instead of a caravan of 10,000 a group of 500,000 are sitting outside our border and demanding entry?
I can’t tell anyone else how to feel. I can say that it is normal to want security, to want to protect what we have and our opportunities. It is also normal to have empathy for others. I have both sets of feelings. I remember that no baby gets to choose where they are born. I feel lucky to have won that lottery by being born a U.S. citizen. I don’t want to give up my life. But I also don’t want to have millions of people forced, through no fault of their own, into desperation while we just watch.
What should we be discussing about immigration? Here are a couple of my ideas, but the point is that our smart people should be coming up with ideas, doing a little “outside the box” thinking.
Of course a starting point is to review our current immigration policies with regard to the numbers allowed and how we process and handle requests and asylum requests. It sounds like we are underfunded and quite inefficient in dealing with the paperwork itself. We are a nation of over 330 million people. Certainly we can figure out how to deal with 10,000 or 100,000 people. We have football stadiums that seat close to 100,000 people that manage to provide bathrooms and food – we know how to handle a large group of people.
Broader thinking would have us be proactive. If very large numbers of people are displaced, what can we do to help them stay in their own country or work with other countries to find a place for them. Financial analysis might find that it is well worth spending our dollars to build housing, to fund business startups, to work toward a more stable situation for citizens of other countries before they become refugees.
Here’s a simple example of being proactive. When the news covered the 10,000 person caravan as it crossed from Honduras into Mexico on its way to the U.S. border, I wondered why we couldn’t immediately start dealing with these people rather than wait until they got to our border. What if we paid Mexican officials to start gathering information, even filling out U.S. paperwork if it looked like it might be applicable. For those who would not have a chance of being accepted into the U.S. let them know right away. Make it clear that walking across Mexico was not the solution. Wouldn’t that have been more humane and efficient at the same time?
That human migration will become a very large problem seems obvious. I have read far more emphatic opinions, referring to a tremendous problem with massive uprisings and massive suffering. For the last couple of decades researchers seemed to settle on a prediction of world population peaking around 12 Billion. Now I see more mentions of between 10 and 12 Billion. We are at 7.5 Billion now. But what I don’t read is what will cause the growth to stop. One can hope it’s not because so many people have to suffer and die due to lack of resources, made much worse by climate change. I’m afraid I cannot share in that hope. Tell me I’m wrong, tell me how we avoid it.
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