4/9/21

By Josh Rubin

The problem of migration. That’s the thing government after government finds itself addressing. But it is like trying to patch a leaking basement in a house that is under water. It is a nearsighted, parochial approach to a problem that requires a drone’s eye view.

Migration is not a problem. It is an attempt at a solution. It is a painful one for people who make the calculation that staying where they are is worse than setting out into a poorly known future. It is a jagged disruption in the lifeline we all get to travel once. The immigrant will always see the world through a memory of what was left behind, what was lost.

But migration, though it comes with its own set of problems, is something that people do to find their way out of crisis. Treating migration as the problem simply does not work. People were built with the option of moving inherent in their natures. We need to remember, always, that our species radiated from southern Africa. To do this, they migrated. They moved, over time, inexorably, to places that had the resources to give them the lives they would live.

So, what is the problem, and how do we solve it? At the simplest level, the problem is that life in a place crosses a threshold for some of its people, into a level of misery, danger, hunger that, when presented with other plausible opportunities, makes them take to the road. Migration is one way to go. Another solution might be to find a way to make things better.

Making things better, when the things that make things bad are systemic, like inequality, corruption, climate change, and criminality, is very hard for those suffering the most to accomplish, since they have the least power. Those with the power to change things, however, are stuck, as we see in our country, in the paradigm that suggests that immigration is a leaky basement, and not the rising tide of humans who set out with the insistence that they will find a way to live.

Have you been to the ocean? The tide always wins.