In both Europe and the United States, issues of human migration are front and center.

My ancestors left the region that is now Denmark around two thousand years ago in search of a better life in a less harsh climate.  They headed south.  However, there was already an established culture in north-western Europe.  The Celtic peoples populated most of the heart of Western Europe.

My ancestors were not there to assimilate or to work their way up in the established social system. They did not come prepared to pick crops and wash dishes. They came with ax and spear and shield to displace (kill) the locals. And they did. By the time the Romans arrived, the Celts were gone from northern Europe, they had been annihilated by my migrating ancestors.

The Romans held them up for several hundred years, but the southern march continued and did not stop till they had conquered nearly all of Western Europe from the Alps to Brittan to Rome and even parts of North Africa. Though they were not able to keep control of all that land and they grew into a number of distinct language and cultural groups, they never went “home”.  Some of their descendants, the Angles and Saxons became the English and ruled the oceans for 200 years. Today, the richest country in Europe is named after one branch of these migrants (Germany); and, in the United States, the world’s super-power, the largest racial group is the descendants of those Nordic peoples. Whether they are called English, German, Dutch, Norwegian or Swedes, they are all children of those same migrants.

Human migration is why homo-sapiens aren’t confined to a tiny enclave in west-central Africa. Human migration is older than humanity itself and is simply a force that cannot be stopped. Peoples will move to new lands when there are better opportunities to be had.  The Romans could not stop it and nor can any of the countries receiving a large influx of migration in the 21st century.

Americans tend to be myopic. When one speaks of immigration, the sole thought is of Mexicans moving north. But the same issues exist in Europe where the peoples of both the Middle-East and Africa are pouring into Europe.   It is a world-wide movement south to North, and while one can build literal and legal dikes and damns, they can at best slow the process.

What must be done in Europe and the US is not to try to stop the flow, but to minimize its negative effects.  I liken this unto the issue of climate change.  Like human migration, climate change is eternal. To pretend that the current climate is the only way it “should be” is nonsense.  Further, to suggest that there will be any effective world-wide effort to actually eliminate human release of greenhouse gasses is utterly outside the realm of possibility.  Rather than argue as to who is to blame or pretend that these processes can be stopped, we must marshal our resources to minimize their negative impact.

In the case of migration, the potential for negative impact is very real. Nearly all of the south to north migrants come from oppressive countries where corruption is the norm and concepts of human rights are only empty words.  Despite the untold amounts of financial and material aid that flow into these countries, the fundamentals do not change.  The pervasively corrupt and self-serving national governments lead to impoverishment, oppression, violence, and unsustainably high birth rates.  Ultimately this is why most of these people are moving.

What must be the focus in both Europe and the US is the rapid assimilation of the new-comers. I know to certain groups on the left that an expectation of assimilation is heresy. The left seem to prefer to refuses to abandon the discredited and fanciful notion of the noble savages. They argue that migrants need to preserve their unique identity over the accepting and joining into the democratic, human rights based, Western social system. I don’t mean we need to focus on the new commers learning English (or German, or French), though that is important; but we must  focus on liberal Western social values by teaching the migrants the liberal values of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

We do not do this by chasing them about with pitchforks.  We do not do this by our current American “non-policy” of giving businesses a pass when they are allowed to hire undocumented workers so the employers can skip paying their part of social security, skip workman’s compensation, avoid liability for dangerous workplaces and pay them substandard wages.  We do not do this by giving police the right to demand the “papers” of anyone who they decide looks like an illegal.

The only alternative to assimilation will be Balkanization.  For nearly 400 years the Balkans have been plagued by a nearly continuous conflict between Muslim, Catholic and Orthodox communities.   They never developed a single heterogeneous culture, but rather harbored three conflicting cultures.  In the US the secular state has long facilitated the process of melding many different cultures into a single, but heterogeneous culture.  That diversity in unity is the strength of the USA, and we must not forget that. We cannot buy into the left’s efforts to suggest that the immigrant communities should solidify around their prior cultural identities. This completely abandon’s our historic approach and leads us down a future path of intra-communal conflict.  Our motto of  e pluribus unum (out of many one) matters today as much (or more) than it ever did.  I rarely call people “un-American”;  but those who seek to undo e pluribus unum and create a new national creed of a hodgepodge of warring cultural groups are indeed opposed to the very idea of American liberalism.

A slow (or even moderate) but steady flow from south to north is good for both the US and the Latin American countries.  Without immigration the US would be facing the same declining population time-bomb as Japan.  Birth rates of my racial ancestors and other “European-Americans” have fallen below the sustainable rate. Immigrants are the salvation of the US, even if most don’t know it.  Shifting our focus to teaching (and practicing) our core values in relation to immigration, from the vain effort to stop it, is the only sensible option.

And…. I’ve got news…. this approach would (in time) help save the power base of the conservatives who most oppose immigration. Previous waves of immigration show that success in immigration moves the immigrant toward a more conservative political position, while “ghettoized” immigrants provide a reliable base for the left.

It is time for immigration reform (well not really, it was time 10 years ago, its overdue now).  With another election season upon us we have lots of talk about immigration, but few serious discussions.  The Republicans have a history of condemning illegal immigration but doing nothing to the employers while at the same time ramping up legal immigration of skilled workers to depress wages in the tech sector.  The Democrats have a history of claiming support impoverished immigrants, but  even when they held both houses of congress and the White House, they did nothing to fix our broken immigration system.  The current “fix” is an executive order that is only good as long as a Democrat is president.  A very convenient approach, that still leaves immigrants in limbo.  Both parties see an ongoing broken immigration system as more important than a fixed one.

In the US and in Europe, a comprehensive immigration policy that includes both legal status and an expectation of social integration and support of the Western liberal cultural norms must be pursued.  The migration will not stop. The only question is do we want to foster a new larger liberal society, or do we want to become like the places the immigrants are fleeing.  We will only reach the former by planning and will reach the latter if we do nothing.