Immigrant movement is world wide, felt by many countries.. and there is nothing that will stop it.

[Peacetrain]

People are terrified that thousands of people are moving across land borders, coming in on boats, in the back of trailers etc etc etc. Nothing is going to stop it..

This is not only about economic migration, or political migration.. but climate change. People have to find places where their families can be safe and live.

People cannot live in climates that man made chemicals are changing. Crops will not grow.. the Heat will kill those who do not have access to AC.. water is drying up or.. flooding is eating away communities other communities being doused with record rains. on and on and on and on.. Everything we were warned about and most of the right refused to believe and stopped us from making changes that might have stopped this.. is coming home to roost

It is everything most of us have been trying to get across to people for the last 50+ years.

We are now in a place where no one can take everyone in who wants to move. The rich will become even richer..

(Eight men own the same wealth as the 3.6 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity, according to a new report published by Oxfam today to mark the annual meeting of political and business leaders in Davos.)

https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/just-8-men-own-same-wealth-half-world

We are now seeing countries turning to dictatorships because they think a strong armed leader will keep the "other" at bay.

Truth is .. we are ALL the "other".. how we make this work is going to be beyond my lifetime, but no country, no place can do it all ..

This is the price we pay for refusing to tackle this 53 years ago.

[bigtree]

1. who is actually 'terrified?

...such hyperbolic language to describe people migrating away from danger, or to resources and opportunity.

The 'price' paid is in treating these people like they're a burden instead helping them to become assets to our nation.

From 1850 to 1915, during the Age of Mass Migration, more than 30 million European immigrants moved to the United States, and the share of immigrants in the US population peaked at 14%, even higher than today’s record of 13.7% (Abramitzky and Boustan, 2017).

[shrike3]

9. A lot of Americans, sadly. I live in a red area. I see and hear it all the time.

[bigtree]

10. really?

...they are actually anti-American in that attitude, given that our nation has been awash with immigrants and their decendants for decades and decades, forming the current fabric of our society.

Do you justify those fears? Agree with them?

[shrike3]

12. I wouldn't be here on DU if I justified or agreed with those fears.

But I also don't feel they are unusual. We are a country of immigrants who don't like immigrants. The second wave of the Klan, in the Midwest, targeted immigrants. We had the Chinese exclusion act in 1882. The Page Act in 1875. (Excluded Asian women.) Then the Johnson-Reed act of 1924 limiting the number of immigrants. Regarding the latter:

"U.S. Representative Albert Johnson, a eugenics advocate, and Senator David Reed were the two main architects of the act. They conceived the act as a bulwark against "a stream of alien blood"; it likewise found support among xenophobic and nativist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. However, some proponents, such as the American Federation of Labor (AFL), welcomed the act for reducing cheap immigrant labor that would compete with local workers. Both public and Congressional opposition was minimal. In the wake of intense lobbying, it passed with strong congressional support.

"Proponents of the act sought to establish a distinct American identity by preserving its ethnic homogeneity. Reed told the Senate that earlier legislation "disregards entirely those of us who are interested in keeping American stock up to the highest standard—that is, the people who were born here." He believed that immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, most of whom were Catholics or Jews, arrived sick and starving, were less capable of contributing to the American economy, and were unable to adapt to American culture. Eugenics was used as justification for the act's restriction of certain races or ethnicities of people to prevent the spread of perceived feeblemindedness in American society. Samuel Gompers, himself a Jewish immigrant from Britain and the founder of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), supported the act because he opposed the cheap labor that immigration represented even though the act would sharply reduce Jewish immigration. Both the AFL and the Ku Klux Klan supported the act. Historian John Higham concludes: "Klan backing made no material difference. Congress was expressing the will of the nation."

"The act set a total immigration quota of 165,000 for countries outside the Western Hemisphere, an 80% reduction from average before World War I, and barred immigrants from Asia, including Japan. However, the Philippines was then a U.S. colony and so its citizens were U.S. nationals and could thus travel freely to the U.S. The act did not include China since it was already barred under the Chinese Exclusion Act.

"The 1924 act reduced the annual quota of any nationality from 3% of their 1910 population (as defined by the Emergency Quota Act of 1921) to 2% of the number of foreign-born persons of any nationality residing in the U.S. according to the 1890 census. A more recent census existed, but at the behest of a eugenics subcommittee chaired by eugenicist Madison Grant, Congress used the 1890 one to increase immigrants from Northern and Western Europe and to decrease those from Eastern and Southern Europe. According to Commonweal, the act "relied on false nostalgia for a census that only seemed to depict a homogenous, Northern European–descended nation: in reality, 15 percent of the nation were immigrants in 1890."

Now, this act was tweaked, and virtually rolled back, years later. But we have never been as welcoming to newcomers as we tell ourselves we've been.

[bigtree]

14. we have a tiny minority of Trumpers who are anti-immigrant

...posting a page of anti-immigrant history doesn't tell us a thing about the U.S. today.

We are not a Klan-dominated nation, and immigration attitudes in the U.S. today are not analagous to that past.

From 1850 to 1915, during the Age of Mass Migration, more than 30 million European immigrants moved to the United States, and the share of immigrants in the US population peaked at 14%, even higher than today’s record of 13.7% (Abramitzky and Boustan, 2017).

Do you believe they eroded democracy here in the U.S., as you posited they have elsewhere?

[shrike3]

17. I never said they eroded democracy. You must be responding to another poster.

Trump supporters are not a tiny minority. He won seven million more votes in 2020. And missed winning the electoral college by less than 40,000 votes.

Where I live, people are terrified of immigrants. Or they simply hate them. I do not share their views; I am merely reporting what I hear.

If you think America's history has no bearing on what it is today and how its people behave, I don't think we can have a discussion. Good luck to you.

[shrike3]

21. Please point out that post to me.

[bigtree]

22. no, I'm done with this

[shrike3]

23. IOW, you can't. Oh, well.

[bigtree]

25. it was the other poster, you're right

...not going to debate this any further.

I've said all I need to in my responses, which you should understand, at this point, aren't actually for your own or the op's edification.

And farck this anti-immigrant thread.

[shrike3]

26. Fine. Good luck.

[Alpeduez21]

30. Your evidence is one of white peoples

From white people countries. Show me the evidence on nonwhites being readily accepted with the open arms policy you insinuate at. Hell even the nonwhites already here were systematically eradicated.

We are very much a country dominated by racist attitudes toward non whites. To claim otherwise is naive at best.

[bigtree]

39. racial attitudes are mostly divided among lines of race, ethnicity, and party

Nearly every American endorses racial equality. It's how to get there that divides us.

91% − of Americans believe that all people deserve an equal opportunity to succeed, no matter their race or ethnicity. It's a belief strongly shared across political parties, religious affiliations, and racial and ethnic groups.

Americans do have significant differences about the consequences of racism and efforts to combat it. A strong majority of Democrats (82%) believe that racism makes it more difficult for people of color to succeed. Fewer than half of Republicans (45%) hold that view.

And 61% of Republicans say efforts to fight racism make life more difficult for white Americans; 31% of Democrats hold that opinion.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2023/06/15/america-divided-racism-racial-equality-hidden-common-ground/70321030007/

[wnylib]

50. Both you and shrike3 are not mentioning

Last edited Mon Sep 25, 2023, 03:56 PM - Edit history (1)

why so many immigrants were accepted in the time periods that you are each posting about.

In the mid to late 1800s, the US wanted "open lands" (Native American lands) to be settled by European immigrants in order to establish more states in the quest to expand US settled boundaries from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

In the late 1800s to early 1900s, industrialists wanted an influx of cheap labor for their factories in the Industrial Revolution. They glorified the rags to riches opportunities to poor peasants who lived in more socially rigid societies.

Each wave of immigrants in the US has faced opposition from those already here. I compare it to a high school or college hazing before acceptance.

Knowing US immigration history contributes to understanding what is happening today. Corporate bosses, the equivalent of the robber barons of the past, no longer need or want peasant immigrants for work in US factories. They ship work to peasants in poor countries to avoid paying US wages and following US labor and safety laws.

So, today's immigrants are people who leave their home countries for other reasons than in the past. Some are still looking for better work and pay. But others are leaving their homelands due to wars, political corruption and authoritarianism, and for climate reasons. Increasing droughts and floods make food and other resources scarce, causing more poverty and malnutrition. Past political practices from industrialized countries left behind several regions of depleted resources, lost cultural traditions, and the effects of wars that protected economic monopolies. The result is political turmoil and corruption in former colonies of Western industrialized nations.

So today, people flee war in Syria and elsewhere, famine in Ethiopia and other African nations, floods in Asia and rising seas in island nations, extreme political corruption and alliances of drug gangs and politics in parts of Latin America. Regarding Latin America, the US contribution to corruption there goes back to US support of past dictatorships on behalf of US corporations, e.g. as the Eisenhower administration's support for United Fruit in Guatemala. The Latin American asylum seekers that Trump and other Republicans love to label as criminals are, in fact, innocent people who are fleeing the criminals in their own countries.

US corporations have no use for poor immigrants to exploit within the U.S. any more, so corporate leaders who are also supporters of Republican politics, villify immigrants in general.

Some immigrants are well educated professionals from nations that Republicans have villified for political gain after 911.

A different international scene from past immigrations to the US, and spread wider, across the world today, even when the roots of some situations lie in our own political past.

[bigtree]

52. the op is warning that, "we're now in a place where no one can take everyone in who wants to move"

...insinuating that the U.S. needs to hold this fear.

It's not supported by anything except projection, this one coming at the expense of migrants who the op surmises will overwhelm the U.S. because____.

It's just nonsense. And it's xenophobic.

[wnylib]

53. I agree that there is a lot of xenophobia behind the claim that

immigrants can't be admitted to the country. I have taught ESL to immigrants and support local organizations that sponsor asylum seekers. So I see first hand the xenophobia expressed toward those people.

The xenophobia is promoted and stirred up by economic interests. The past teaches us that (white European) immigrants were accepted (exploited) when industrialists could benefit from them. But corporate businesses no longer have any use for them because the businesses ship their work overseas. So they can stir up xenophobia as a political tool against Dems. Create fear of "the other" in order to unify their own RW base and split Dems on the immigration issue. Besides, why promote immigration to the US when corporations can better use those people abroad to do work that corporations ship abroad.

In other words, many people in the past paid lip service to the concept of "huddled masses yearning to breathe free" but never believed word of it. They wanted the huddled masses in order to exploit them in the U.S. Now they want to exploit them abroad.

[peppertree]

2. And sadly, its feeding far right politics - a win, win as far as Big Business sees it

You see this especially in countries with eroding white majorities: France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, Argentina - and of course, the U.S.

Combine that with massive corporate/big donor funding, and you have a dangerous formula for democratic backsliding.

At least.

[bigtree]

4. so you're positing that immigrants threaten democracy here?

...and just what is the problem you have with an 'eroding white majority?'

[peppertree]

6. White voters (many) are the ones who see it as a problem, and the 1% are all too happy to exploit it

As we've all seen in the last 10+ years, surely.

[bigtree]

11. we shouldn't validate their demagoguery by portraying their views as universal

...or dominate.

Most Americans Say Immigrants Come to the United States for Jobs and to Improve Their Lives
53% Say Ability to Immigrate Is a “Human Right,”
https://www.cato.org/blog/poll-72-americans-say-immigrants-come-us-jobs-improve-their-lives-53-say-ability-immigrate

[peppertree]

18. Hence the parenthetical many

Possibly even a majority of white voters, yes - but hardly universal, or even dominant.

Millions of moderate and progressive white voters are on Biden's side - but sadly, it's probably no more than 40% (again, among white voters).

It is what it is.

[ProudMNDemocrat]

3. The attitude among the RICH....

"We have ours. The rest can go to Hell in a handbasket."

Yeah! That is what Jesus Christ preached about alright.

[Bettie]

28. Remember: those rich guys prefer

Republican Jesus...so, in their heads, they are the persecuted minority.

[JoseBalow]

49. GOP Jesus

[Bettie]

51. Yeah, that guy!

He's the one they believe in.

[jcgoldie]

5. k&r

Post industrial first world countries have exploited these countries and their labor force economically for over a century, now we are burning up the planet with our own consumption and then we act like we have some moral high ground and vilify them when people are forced to migrate for the least lucrative jobs in our society.

[CrispyQ]

8. This, so much this!

There's a reason Osama bin Laden said people in the west should read William Blum.

https://thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/William_Blum.html

[BlueIn_W_Pa]

7. This is the point

We are now in a place where no one can take everyone in who wants to move.

So even at the end of this quick video that proves your point, the goal SHOULD be to help countries provide a stable society so they don't have to flee.

But disagree there is nothing we can do to stop it - unless we get a handle on it, it'll be stopped in a not so humane way.

[bigtree]

13. this is just fearmongering. U.S. population was actually declining during the pandemic

...between July 2020 and July 2021, the first full year of the pandemic, U.S. population growth fell to a historic low of 0.16%.

Even as the American economy has slowed, labor shortages still abound in sectors like hospitality, lodging and social assistance. As hundreds of thousands of refugees, notably from Ukraine, have come into the country in the last two years, they’ve filled openings at restaurants, hotels, retail stores and nursing homes. Others with university degrees and stronger English have found better-paying jobs, in accounting, nursing and other fields.

It’s good for business, too. Companies that hire refugees have found them to be loyal, and consumers tend to look favorably upon products and brands that make a positive impact on refugees, according to a survey by New York University and the Tent Partnership for Refugees.

The world’s largest economies, including Germany, Japan and South Korea, are vying to attract more immigrant workers. They have good reason: As people age and die, they aren’t being replaced due to declining birthrates. That means a shrinking labor force, which means fewer hands and minds to produce, pay taxes and support the bulging numbers of retirees.

The U.S., by comparison, has for many years enjoyed stronger population and labor force growth compared to most other advanced economies, in large part due to steady inflows of international migrants, most of whom come to work and tend to be younger. But between July 2020 and July 2021, the first full year of the pandemic, U.S. population growth fell to a historic low of 0.16%.

Stronger immigration since then led to faster growth in the nation’s population, or 0.38% between 2021 and 2022. “It’s a welcome uptick,” said demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution, but that may not be enough.

https://www.latimes.com/politics/newsletter/2023-07-07/what-immigration-means-for-u-s-population-and-economic-growth-essential-politics

[BlueIn_W_Pa]

15. Fearmongering? It's math and pretty straightforward

and frankly, one cannot compare the US to other, far smaller countries. There are plenty of people here to do the work if employers would pay.

Perpetually increasing population is not sustainable, polluting, consumerist (here) and is a major headwind against everything we're trying to do. Economically, sure, the numbers look good because that's what predatory capitalism needs - forever growth.

If we invest in the countries where people are fleeing, everyone is better off no differently than investing in urban areas enriches the entire larger community.

[bigtree]

16. it's fearmongering to suggest the U.S. is overburdened by immigrants

...it just is.

I don't need to post any more proof of that on this sordid thread.

...despicable fearmongering. And, just disgusting stuff from a poster incongruously named 'peacetrain.'

People are terrified that thousands of people are moving across land borders, coming in on boats, in the back of trailers etc etc etc. Nothing is going to stop it.

[OrangeJoe]

40. Absolutely correct

Most of the commenters here view unbridled immigration as solely an American problem. It is worldwide and actually a much greater challenge to Europe than here. Lest anyone be tempted to claim it's only white people who are upset by large influxes of immigrants I direct you to South Africa where immigrants are routinely killed and driven out of their shanties by the local African people.

An additional problem with massive immigration is the rise of right wing nationalists. We've seen numerous European countries shift rightward in reaction to the latest influx of refugees. In Sweden, the dream society of every left leaning person, right wing nationalists are a rising force that threatens to take over the state.

Clearly the world is overpopulated and until we begin to address that issue through VOLUNTARY birth control policies we will continue to see ever increasing numbers of climate and economic refugees pouring over borders.

[stuck in the middle]

20. Why are we posting videos..

…from white supremacist hate groups like Numbers USA here at DU?

That’s a John Tanton organization.

You should check the SPLC website first before posting this stuff here at DU.

[2naSalit]

29. +1

[BlueIn_W_Pa]

37. I removed it

but seriously, we need to vet every post, the founders, investors, and associates or get called out?

In any event, the math is still valid.

[republianmushroom]

24. agree

[pandr32]

27. Excellent post. TY.

[1WorldHope]

31. WOW. That was a bunch of miscommunication.

Peacetrain was not suggesting migration is bad. What I understood the O P was trying to say is that, climate change will make this mass migration unmanageable for any country. The point to me was clear. We've done this to ourselves by trashing our planet. People have been moving for survival from the beginning of time. Soon there will be no place to move to. Every country will experience this as the sea level rises. The coastal communities of US will be moving inland, as well as, every other continent on the planet. In 50 years we completely destroyed what nature has been building for a millennia.

[bigtree]

41. that opinion not only contradicts our own history, it has no fact basis in the present

...and it's directed soley at migrants which is an absurd calculation of what the U.S. will be able to absorb and sustain.

The op is alarmist claptrap. And it's inviting resentments and apprehension about migrants today, whose contributions to the country and our economy today is an infinitely more important measure of our future than these hyperbolic projections which assumes we'll find the U.S. flatfooted or unable to innovate and evolve with the evolving planet.

But most importantly, this is a fearmongering concern at a time when there is a loud and visible, demagougic movement against people migrating to this country.

[Peacetrain]

54. I have left you alone and not answered because it was obvious you misunderstood my op

but you are doing exactly what I was posting about.. refusing to acknowledge that we have to do something..

People cannot live in climates we have made by overuse of fossil fuels.. etc.. and instead of making changes which have to be acknowledged in order to be addressed.. people just refused to believe in climate change caused by humans.. and to almost quote you.. they have used terms such as "hyperbolic language" what was this one.. "alarmist claptrap"..

Well the damage is done.. it is not when will it happen.. It has happened

People are going to need help..no one country can do it all.. and that means PLANNING.. and in order to make plans to bring people in from climate deserts or in some cases .. loss of the land they live on due to massive flooding.. fires.. you name it.. you have to acknowledge it and start from there.

And that means all the countries who have benefited from the use of things that have led to climate migrants need to step up.. and in order to step up, they have to understand there is a problem, that is not going to go away like magic..this is going to take planning on the order of D day..

I have put this in here so many times.. but once again

If you do not have potable water, breathable air, arable land, nothing else of any magnitude can be addressed! First and foremost people have to be able to survive.. and now we can add temperature deviation to that list

[bigtree]

56. climate change is one thing

...whether the U.S. can handle people migrating is another.

It does no good to either cause to conflate the two, and this is wrongheaded because the projection in your op portrays migrants as the predominate threat, right from the start of the post, and climate as the mere aggravator that causes the US to be overburdened by them.

First, you lead with this fear-inducing statement; as dubious as it salacious.

"People are terrified that thousands of people are moving across land borders, coming in on boats, in the back of trailers etc etc etc. Nothing is going to stop it."

Then you come in with the dubious claim that, "We are now in a place where no one can take everyone in who wants to move," which is just more unjustified fearmongering about our nation's capacity to absorb migrating people, and ignorant of the value immigrants are providing the country today.

We are absorbing the influx right now, responsibly, and of little consequence to the economy or any other measure people use to portray migrants as threatening to the U.S. and our interests.

It makes no sense to include migrating people as a problem (instead of an asset) in some fantastical, dystopian projection of a climate-challenging future.

[BadgerMom]

45. Thanks for this comment. And, agreed.

And, as ancianita’s comment highlighted, movement of populations can encourage the emergence of strongmen and authoritarianism. I think discussion of this among ourselves, a group that doesn’t hate immigrants, is useful.

[llashram]

32. with global warming

and consequence(s) this will only get worse. The human race I think is in for a severe and frightening wakeup call with the ringing that has been in our ears from at least the 70's. I think Carl Sagan talked about the damage we are doing to our planet. Vice President Gore's Inconvenient Truth was another warning.

We along with the oil and gas corporations greed created this coming terror. And by we, I only started paying attention in the last ten years. And since I can't afford to go electric every time I start my combustion engine I am guilty of... contributing to our coming E.L.Es.

[Martin68]

33. I entirely agree with your main points Peacetrain, but I believe much of the blame for Central

American immigration can be traced to American foreign policy farther back than 53 years ago. In the 50s and 60s the US protected dictatorships to prevent "the spread of communism" and protect American corporations such as United Fruit that exploited the land and labor there at the expense of democracy and human rights.

[BlueIn_W_Pa]

38. Yes, and this is what we should be forced to fix...

[Martin68]

47. I totally agree. But we can't even get a budget passed with this Republican virus that's

going around.

[stuck in the middle]

42. Back in the early 1990s, ..

…when the anti-immigrant hysteria was really ramping up, the focus was very much on Mexico, which struck me as a little weird at the time, given our own fairly recent involvement in Central America.

Of course, it was justified by absolute numbers by country on the receiving end.

Of course, Mexico is huge, and just across the border, but I kept finding myself back then having to point out that the largest number of immigrants/refugees to the US of any nation (on a per-capita basis) was actually the tiny country of El Salvador, where at the time a full 1/3 of the Salvadoran-born population lived outside of the country, mostly in the USA, and mostly undocumented.

Mexico didn’t even come close, even if they win in absolute numbers.

[ancianita]

34. And most of the EU is turning fascist in an anti-migration panic, first caused by Putin.

As Hartmann makes clearer here, 53 years ago, worldwide media got distracted by war migrations and didn't make the bigger connection between climate migrations and the growth of fascism.

And so we mustmust do that now that we know. We should call out the lies of corporate media hype.

Only 20% of the world still live in weakened democracies. They could revive but retaining strong democracy is an uphill battle that oligarchs and big oil&gas corporations are fighting to make sure that democratic governments will lose.

https://hartmannreport.com/p/how-climate-change-accelerates-the-ff3

The government of the Netherlands fell last week. The issue that tipped it over the edge was immigration driven by climate change....

Syria was also the base for Russia’s Mediterranean fleet, with multiple deep-water ports that Putin believed were critical to his nation’s military defense. By 2015 he had a dozen battleships there, along with submarines and other warships.

He had to prevent the Assad government from falling or risk an “Arab Spring democracy” emerging — as happened for a short while in Tunisia and Egypt — that might align itself with the West and kick Russia out.

Making a long story short, Putin bombed the crap out of Syria on Assad’s behalf, virtually leveling the city of Aleppo, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians.

It was one of the worst war crimes of this century, almost as deadly as George W. Bush’s brutal and criminal invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Millions of climate and war refugees fled the country, joining Bush’s wars’ fugitives making their way into Europe by any means possible.

Thus began Europe’s refugee crisis, which just helped bring down Holland’s government. In two weeks, it may well cause the rightwing fascist-aligned anti-immigrant People’s Party to come to power in the Spanish elections on July 23...


When Russia intervened in British politics to tear apart the EU, their trolls’ main Facebook pitch for Brexit was that “those [Brown and Black] people” the EU had let in were now making their way to the UK.

While every country in the world can accept refugees in small numbers without crisis, when “other people” begin showing up in large numbers the response by every nation in history typically tends toward rightwing nationalism and xenophobia, an obsession with borders, and demands for racial, cultural, and religious “purity.”

Here in North America we’re seeing a similar dynamic. Reagan so severely destabilized Central America and Venezuela with his sanctions, illegal Iran-Contra program, and support for rightwing death squads that those nations never recovered. In the years since, climate change has bit these weakened governments deep, forcing millions of subsistence farmers — just like in Syria but here mostly from hard-hit Guatemala ...

Exploiting the climate refugee crisis on America’s southern border, Republican politicians have spent the years since Obama’s election in 2008 falsely claiming that Democrats had thrown the border “open,” producing thousands of news stories that have been used by coyotes — human traffickers — to draw even more refugees toward the United States.

Compounding that, Trump launched his 2016 campaign on keeping Brown people out of the United States, and today racism and xenophobia form the foundation of most Republican political campaigns (when they aren’t hating on queer people or women).

The result of these trends has been a worldwide shift to the right. As Freedom House noted in a 2022 report, over 60 countries experienced “declines” in democracy the previous year; only about 20 percent of people worldwide now live in “free” nations...

So far, the western world’s refugee crisis has been mostly driven by massive policy errors and outright war crimes...But all have been either triggered or exacerbated by the worldwide climate emergency. And, as we can see from this summer’s weather worldwide, that emergency is building at a rate far more rapid than even alarmist climate scientists were predicting just a decade ago.

Recent projections show that within just the next two decades as many as three billion people could be fleeing areas that will soon only marginally support human life.

As equatorial regions become uninhabitable, the mostly darker-skinned people living there will be migrating north and south into areas controlled by lighter-skinned people in numbers that will make today’s Syrian, Iraq, and Afghan refugee crisis look like a statistical blip...

These migrations have put worldwide white supremacist and Nazi movements into hyperdrive.

In addition to acting immediately to mitigate climate change and green the world’s economy, the free nations of the world must harden our democracies against reactive rightwing violence- and hate-based racist political movements....

[femmedem]

35. And it's morally incumbent on the US to welcome as many climate change refugees as possible

because we are responsible for so much of the greenhouse gas emissions that are forcing people to flee their homes.

I know you understand this. Thank you for writing, "we are ALL the other." So true.

[jaxexpat]

36. The world has been led, in many ways ,

by a nation which, itself, sometimes bows to the will of the eternally stupid half.

Desperate people will continue to evacuate the uninhabitable areas of the planet until we all die trying. There is one long shot possibility which could postpone this inevitability. For a temporary respite, a supervolcano could impose a planet wide cooling. Granted it would create mass starvation for a few years but at least global warming would not be so much of a problem for a while.

[TygrBright]

43. It is also economically FAR less consequential than the xenophobes would have us believe.

Compared to historical times of peak migration, what net recipient states are experiencing in the 2010s and 2020s is actually quite modest. Somewhere around 3.6% of the world's population is migrating, and the numbers that are arriving at most net recipient states are modest, often (as in the case of the US) much less than peak periods in the past.

Economically, migrant arrivals do little to cause long-term financial stress for populations already in place - their effect on job availability is minor to actually positive, as the jobs they take tend to be complementary to existing economic activity rather than replacements of the more skilled, experienced workers already there.

The net effects of migrants on the public budget are actually POSITIVE, particularly in a country with as stingy a social net as the US. They put in more, in payroll taxes, fees, spending and saving, than they and their families use in public services.

Migrants are also increasingly BENEFICIAL in urbanized, industrialized, aging high-income societies where there is a growing dearth of caregivers and service providers for the expanding aging demographic.

Were we here in the US smart, we'd invest in systems that would assist migration - processing, security checks, temporary housing, relocation assistance, employment location, transitional services in 'cluster' communities to provide bilingual help, etc. We'd welcome them, make it possible for them to learn the duties, responsibilities, and positive traditions of a liberal democracy, and raise their children to be successful first-generation Americans. We would ALL benefit greatly from the expanded availability of young labor demographics and diversity.

But we're not smart, alas. Not under the influence of the pluto-populist oligarchy we've allowed grow here like kudzu.

sadly,
Bright

[hay rick]

44. The immigration crises are actually emigration crises.

The "Biden border crisis" is inextricably linked to increasingly unlivable conditions in third world countries. The combination of climate change, depletion of resources, and overpopulation make previously stable societies unsustainable. One of the first casualties of the crisis appears to be the rise of authoritarian rulers who are willing to suppress dissent. The resulting repression becomes yet another driver of migration.

American democracy and our prized First Amendment rights are failing in spectacular fashion. If we are not collectively able to take the steps necessary to preserve what is salvageable of a habitable planet, we will not be deserving of that which we inherited and take for granted.

A classic limitation on free speech is the admonition not to shout "Fire!" in a crowded movie theater. Tell me that a similar prohibition should not apply to climate denialism. I'm listening.

[LiberalFighter]

46. Should have kept the Pilgrims on the Mayflower from landing.

[dalton99a]

48. FWIW Border Patrol data on illegal crossings at U.S.-Mexico border

[hay rick]

55. Useful information. Thanks. nt