Migration and Moralism

Median Age Map

The median age of the populations of different countries around the world is shown at the left. There's a fairly consistent inverse relationship with per capita GDP and the median age of the population of a country. That probably indicates that organizing for work and production eventually causes people to avoid having children for the sake of economic goals.

People in the poorest countries sometimes believe they can seek "opportunity" (a life of acquiring luxury goods) in the wealthy countries, rather than improve the lot of their own nation. When they all decide that at once, migration happens en masse.

The problem with that is the economic systems within the wealthy countries are integrated into their culture. People's beliefs and expectations and training from birth results in the overall patterns of behavior that result in millions of people spending their time on work and "career". Two cultural and economic systems have a hard time co-existing in the same geography. It's a lot like the native tribes in the americas and the anglo/american settlers trying to share the same lands. Pastoralists and farmers couldn't coexist.

Building physical walls or virtual walls of moralism and attempting to stem the tide of millions of people deciding to walk across borders is not going to "preserve" a given way of life in a world of constant change. Seeking refuge in ideologies, and fantasies like "Trad" life or fantasies about the crusades is a sad response. The physiological and psychological stress caused by two nations and systems clashing can force people into a more rigid and limited way of perceiving the world.

When anglo/american settlers encountered native tribes in the United States, and vice versa, they all really did miss out on the opportunity to learn from one another, probably because both nations of people were organized in fairly rigid hierarchies that served to benefit the upper echelons of their societies. A better response is to do something completely unexpected and novel. Maybe migration is an opportunity to collapse the hierarchy and bin the oligarchy instead of a way to ravage the common people of two nations.