“Open Border” Self-Destruction: A Universal Sick-Sociocultural-Cycle
(Part Two)
In the first installment of this blog I discussed the following main points:
- Modernity appears to weaken the founding religions of sociocultures, importing other competing religions can do the same.
- Both modernity and the loss of founding religions are strongly correlated with reductions in a population’s fertility.
- An increasing aged population and a decreasing young population reduces the labor available to sustain a socioculture.
- A demand for youthful laborers and perhaps other skills, increases the likelihood that a labor-deprived socioculture will recruit immigrants to fill its needs.
- The short-term benefit of increased immigration from other sociocultures can satisfy the immediate need for labor, or other personal attributes.
- Another short-term benefit goes to businesses who hire immigrants and are able to hire them for lower wages than higher-priced citizens.
- However, the long-term consequences of these factors for the receiving socioculture can be catastrophic.
Mass Immigration can cause severe damage to the receiving socioculture because:
- Businesses hiring immigrants at lower wages forces unemployed citizens onto welfare roles and other tax-funded entitlements. The fact that many immigrants will be paid “under-the-table”, and therefore not pay their share into tax revenues, exacerbates this problem.
- A large number of immigrants will not find work and they will tend to use various government welfare programs. They will often take menial jobs and be paid “under-the- table”.
- Immigrants may bring incompatible and/or competing cultural practices.
- Immigrants may bring strong tendencies not to acculturate into the receiving socioculture.
- There is strong evidence that multiculturalism all-to-often leads to social conflict and even violence.
- Immigrants may be uneducated, diseased, inclined to criminality, or worshiping incompatible/competing religions, thereby stressing and perhaps overwhelming the receiving socioculture’s predominant religion(s) and cultural traditions.
- Immigrants will tend to vote-in-unison for the political party that most panders to them, thus corrupting the existing political system.
- In the long-run, mass immigration can accelerate the “transformation” (read decline) of the host socioculture.
- This transformation of the already weakened host society is almost certain to lead to an even less viable socioculture.
If immigration is controlled by a socioculture’s rational, short and long term self-interests and if it focuses upon very compatible immigrants; immigration can strengthen a societies long-term viability.
But always, witness Europe and America for contemporary examples, the results bad immigration policies are severely damaging to the receiving socioculture.
From this emerges the penultimate question: Why has this Sick-Sociocultural-Cycle, of self-destruction by immigration continued through history, with little evidence that sociocultures have learned to avoid it?
In posing this question, I know that I have painted myself into a corner.
Sociocultural evolution is fiendishly and dauntingly complex. This, along with my own personal limitations, insures my failure to fully answer the question I have asked.
Never-the-less, I will provide what I have learned as a psychologist/researcher, a behavior therapist and an old man in hopes of contributing a few missing pieces to this great puzzle.
I hope you will stay-tuned for my next installment on this blog topic…coming soon.
V. Thomas Mawhinney, Ph.D.
8/31/15
P.S., With this particular blog I am celebrating my 1400th posting. I hope you will go to the upper right-hand area of my webpage and search for any topic that may interest interest you. There is now a good chance that you will find that topic here!