IMMIGRATION thread

[Montmorency]

Population growth is unsustainable in the long run. At some point, it has to stop and stabilise at realistic numbers. Importing people is just pushing the issue further into the future.

It also frees up resources in the countries the migrants left behind, potentially sustaining or even increasing the already high population growth there; in sum pushing the Earth even closer to its global population capacity.

If there weren't enough resources, these countries wouldn't have a growing population in the first place - they'd all starve to death.

It's like if you have two islands with one population each of deers. One population has 0 net growth, while the other has a strong growth. The growth of the second population could have gone on until there became too many of them, and there was not enough food to sustain more growth. Alternatively, we could continuously move some of the surplus of the second population to the island of the first, and gradually both islands would become overpopulated, even if the transferred deers adopt the zero-growth reproduction pattern of the original natives.

Does it really need to be explained at this point why this kind of assertion is so weak and incomplete? Humans have much better resource multipliers than other creatures, so the only real limit to the human population on the Earth is an administrative one.

The real problem is that unlimited growth, under disparate sovereignties, is unsustainable, because continuous improvements in living conditions and ICT factors across all populations is unsustainable.

We should be concerned by your example of the carrying capacity of deer on the islands, then, in the sense that it highlights the fragility of the current international and civilizational order. We can't roll so well with the punches anymore (the bigger they are, the harder they fall of course), with the post-war era having been predicated on the stabilizing effect of economic interdependence. Human catastrophes like Syria and Haiti are par for the course, and if the interest is long-term sustainability then learning to calmly and effectively react to situations in which millions are dying or stand to die is necessary - but this cuts against modern humanist goals. Humanists see infinite expansion of humanity into the future, and so take any 'cullings' very personally. At the same time, they take the position that death and suffering ought to be assuaged everywhere, but death and suffering, on small or large scales, is essential to the condition of living ecology rather than a "tragic" setback to the anthropic imperial project.

In other words, because the order is so brittle and the "free market" actively works against development and contingency for recurring disruptions (that kill large proportions of the population), combinations of social unrest, economic weakness, and poor environmental conditions will inevitably lead to either mass migrations or the collapse of global markets in favor of armed conflict between coordinated strategic blocs.