Welcoming immigrants with an open mind
The story of immigration is merely the story of our innate desire to seek out new lands and cultures. Whether it is the rigours of our native climate, intensely held personal beliefs or just our sense of ‘what if?’, people have been crossing oceans and borders for thousands of years.
Perhaps inevitably, people don’t just have to overcome the elements and the geography, but people who had the idea first. This kind of conflict can probably be said to be as ancient as the time when the first modern humans bumped into their country-bumpkin cousins the Neanderthals at the end of the last ice age.
The first ‘modern’ humans didn’t just like different foods and worship different gods, but by most accounts ‘ethnically cleansed’ Europe of its natives. By our standards of successful integration, this could be characterised as ‘disastrous’, and those who grumble about today’s immigrants should probably put that historical case-study to the back of their mind.
It’s easy to laugh at long-forgotten events from history, but most people think that problems really arise when it comes to questions of national identity. Much is made of of our national character and the values it embodies. Perhaps naturally we might think of recent arrivals with suspicion. They look different. They eat foods with zany ingredients. Sometimes, they even talk a different language.
In times past, immigration could be easy as climbing aboard a ship, arriving wherever it landed and finding some means of employment. As the idea of nation states grew in currency from the 17th century (and right through to today), this free-spirited world was over-run by a zealous guarding of borders. Fuelled by the likes of Malthus, who believed that the world was running out of resources and that this would lead to mass starvation and the collapse of civilisation, governments began to evolve systems to manage the inflow of people.
We’re a long way past Malthus today. We know that we can generate ever more return from resources we once thought were finite. We also understand that sometimes people are not motivated purely by finanical reasons to seek refuge in another country.
Despite these understandings, our governments continue to ramp up controls to enter a country. Most notably, the Canada visa system has perhaps started to reach a ‘tipping point’ in terms of complexity. Every new rule opens a new set of loopholes to be exploited by those with the means to do so. As globalisation brings our world together, our borders are more porous than ever.
Perhaps its time we tried to be less uptight about this hotly debated subject.