The way some leaders talk about ‘immigrants’ as 2025 begins, you’d never believe the whole wide world was built through migration.
Whether you believe in the Creation of Evolution or not, birds and animals were the first migrants on Planet Earth, always seeking fruitful forests and greener pastures. Humankind then spread worldwide from Africa.
Back in Time, people moved beyond their eye’s horizons through and to open spaces—walking, on horseback, or sailing—establishing civilizations along the way and adapting to changes as Necessity continued creating Inventions.
Immigrants built the United States and Canada and reconstructed Britain after World War II.
But today, walls and fences dot the borders of Fortress Europe as nations that invited immigrants to come to their shores for better lives and more opportunities now gearing up to gang up against the same people who built and still build their societies.
Immigrants still do lower-paying jobs rejected by most Europeans and North Americans, but the growing failures of governments to address basic problems (like affordable housing and better social services) have led to unfair backlashes against immigrants, including those legally employed and seeking asylum.
There’s also another dark side to immigration: the mass European migration that followed the Native Genocide through Slavery and Indentureship in the 15th Century, from Asia and Africa to the Caribbean and The Americas, as well as the influx of Europeans to Australia and New Zealand and other distant countries thereafter colonised and treated as imperial properties abroad.
The Vatican’s ‘Doctrine of Necessity’ justified Native Genocide to Christianize the ‘Godless’ indigenous people whose civilisations were destroyed ‘In the name of the Father…’
Those who survived were forced into Christianity, which also later replaced African and indigenous religions everywhere Europe continued seeking new worlds to conquer.
Today, Pope Francis – a former cardinal in Argentina and the first non-European Roman Catholic pontiff who’s now announced he’ll retire in 2025 – wisely disbanded the bloody Doctrine in 2023 and has been a true champion of immigrants, especially those forced by displacement.
Incoming President Donald Trump is hell-bent on possibly using the military to round up un-documented (‘illegal’) migrants and bus them to modern concentration camps, while shipping and flying others to ‘sanctuary nations’ willing to house them while their ‘exits’ and ‘entries’ are processed.
Nonetheless, migration continues to keep the world turning and the wheels of industry and commerce spinning, everywhere and at all levels, including high-paid jobs in hi-tech and science, technology and medicine, aeronautics and aviation, even dominating the Smart Engineering at today’s IT giants, from Apple, Google and Samsung to Tik-Toc and Elon Musk’s Tesla and Space X.
Nonetheless, while it’s an established fact that there can be no Globalization without Migration, Caribbean and Latin American nationals in the US are about to possibly learn – the hardest way – that the only citizenship they truly have is that which forever entitles them access to The Green, Green Grass of Home.
That’s how the world turns today.