Thinking about immigration again.

I have said before that I think that border control is always one of the most difficult problems for any nation, at any time. And especially for a nation that is attractive to people (such as the United States) in times of world stress (such as now). And because so many people (in any country) have a knee-jerk reaction to the prospect of unknown people with unknown habits coming into their country, the problems of immigration provide a very rewarding channel for opposition political parties to state an appealing case. This is certainly the situation we find ourselves in today.

(Okay, let me digress. Last week, I spent some time with a cousin who has long lived in Portland, Oregon. Portland has, like immigration, become a target of political grandstanding by the Republican opposition. It is portrayed as a failing city, ungovernable, filled with leftist rioters and would-be rioters and led by incompetent political leadership. My cousin doesn’t see it that way. He sees it as a very livable city, with problems like all others, that simply has become a right wing talking point, without any basis in reality. A few days ago, I decided to look at what are the “most dangerous” cities in the United States. Surely, anarchic Portland must be high on that list, right? Well, according to PopulationU.com, of the 75 largest cities in the United States, Portland ranks 64th in its crime/danger level.)

I am not today going to list all the arguments, pro and con, for tighter border controls, building a wall, sending troops to the border, or any of that. That’s for another time. I am not going to write about all of the dangers and problems in Central America, Haiti, Venezuela, Ukraine, Syria….none of that. We hear enough about those problems. We know that there are tens of millions of people who have been forced from their homes by war, poverty, climate change or other causes and that all of them need to find a place to live. We know that.

I am also not going to talk about the history of immigration to America – the “we are a nation of immigrants” argument. We have heard enough about that, as well. We know that all of those “real Americans” who vote red and want to make America great again are as much the descendants of immigrants as are the third generation American Jews or the first generation Indian-Americans. In fact, I don’t want to talk about the United States at all.

I want to talk about the British Isles.

Not about today’s Britain, filled with immigrants from the Commonwealth countries (when the Commonwealth was a real thing) and from EU countries (when the UK was an EU member). I want to talk about Britain at the time the Normans came to conquer, in 1066.

As part of my reading of my Penguin paperback collection, I recently read “Britain B.C” by S.E. Winbolt, a British home archeologist who passed away in 1944, and “The Beginnings of English Society” by Dorothy Whitelock. In these books, they explain who the real British people are – not those who immigrated to Britain over the last 1,000 years, but those bedrock Brits who were there well before that.

Well, guess what? There may have been no true native Brits at all, or none or very few who have genetically survived. As early as the Stone Age, Britain was populated by peoples who immigrated to there from what is now France (the Celts, etc.), and then the “English” came (i.e., the Anglo Saxons) who came from today’s northern Germany, and then there were the Vikings and their relatives, who were Danish or Swedish, and then of course the Normans who were French. It was all of these people who made up what are considered today the native Brits (and Irish and Welsh and Scots). Without immigration, the U.K. would be as empty as Antarctica (with no penguins – but with puffins).

Similarly, I watched a video on YouTube yesterday about the earliest Russians. Well, there as well, the earliest people seemed to have migrated from elsewhere and to have at some point come together linguistically and be identified as Slavs. But wait a minute, there is more there, too. The “Russ” were Scandinavians, and the “Russians” became an amalgamation of these two very distinct groups.

My conclusion? Immigration – broad scale immigration – is inevitable over time, and opposition to immigration is just as inevitable. But the opposition never works, and just like you can’t fight city hall, you can’t fight the migration of people who are forced away from where they live, and need to find a new place to build their lives.

Yes, indeed, the “real Americans” will soon be a minority in what they consider to be their own country, and today’s “undesirable” or “questionable” immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, no matter how they enter the country, will comprise the future of the country and will probably do just fine. And you can huff and you can puff, but you really can’t do anything about it, and when you huff and when you puff, it might be your own house that gets blown down.

(I know, you say this is a very simplistic piece. You are right. But as Occam said “simple is best”. And if there is no record that he said that, I wish to remind you that there is no record that he didn’t.)