Migration problems

Yesterday, I was talking to another friend, and we got on the subject of migration. (The way we got there is a story in itself: we started talking about bands - we share an interest in music-, and how the show must go on, and how the band on the Titanic kept playing while the ship was sinking, and how his great-grandfather was on the ship that rescued some of the survivors, who were then brought to America, and how his great-grandfather, a Swabic Hungarian, returned to his home country, which had seen massive migration some centuries ago, when the Turks left). 

This prompted me to think about mass migrations, and about the many problems they cause. Human history is full of stories of local inhabitants being displaced (or worse) by newcomers, on all kinds of scales, and all over the world. On the level of continents, we have North America, South America and Australia; at the country level, we have Northern Ireland and Israel, to name just a few examples of where the situation has gone spectacularly wrong, but you can find similar examples at regional level, and even at the level of neighbourhoods. When I was young, the phrase "there goes the neighbourhood" was quite common: people were very concerned about who lived in their immediate vicinity. 

Which is only natural. Not because I have any objection per se to any particular culture (they are all equally valid within their own context, and there are usually good reasons for the differences), but simply because mixing them can cause problems that didn't exist before. Slight differences in values within a culture (between individual and social groups) already cause problems, and there is good chance that they will get worse when differences increase.

Of course, cultural differences are not the same as racial differences, which is something I have always dismissed as so irrelevant as not even to warrant much thought. In that sense, I am a bit like the white daughter of very well-to-do liberal parents in the film "Guess who's coming to dinner" who has fallen in love with a (highly educated) black man, wants her parents to approve the marriage, and can't really see what the problem is. The film focusses most on the father's struggle with something that he would definitely have defended in principle, but had never even considered might actually become an issue for him personally.




On the whole, the film was well done, but I was a bit disappointed that virtually no attention was paid to why exactly interracial marriage was a problem. Of course I understand that people are more likely to "defend their kin", and I can also see how this can be extended to larger groups that are somehow genetically related, but that is a very theoretical bond. Sometimes, it really is better to have a good neighbour (of whatever color) that a distant friend. 

In fact, from the point of view of the species, mixing genes is good, or at very least, not bad, because it increases our chances of surviving. Which makes me wonder whether mixing cultures - however unpleasant the consequences might be for certain individuals or groups - might perhaps not also a good thing in the long run, for the species as a whole. Certainly contact between different groups of humans can be linked to all kinds of important developments, including language itself. And were it not for language, I would not be writing this. 

Hmm.