How to Stop the Boat People

There is only one really acceptable way to stop mass migrations from the Third World to the so-called ‘Advanced’ or First World nations, and that is to make the Third World countries so prosperous that hardly anyone wants to leave. All the physical barriers in the world won’t work in the long term. For the word is out, brought to the masses in the poorer countries by what they can see every day they turn on their television sets. It’s better over there than here.

Few governments seem willing to really help people living in other lands. Few citizens in countries such as America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and all the prosperous countries of Western Europe have the will either. They see the rest of the world as a ‘bottomless economic pit’ which cannot be remedied no matter how much aid is given. Each country could give of half its gross national income and it still wouldn’t be enough. It would just disappear into nothingness.

It’s easy to see why. What moneys are now given often end up in the hands of the ruling oligarchy, corruption is rife, and besides – those people are our economic competitors. Their rise is our downfall. The better off they are, they worse off we are. These are the thoughts that prevail. And so those who want things to stay the same fight through their governments to keep what used to be called in the 1950s, ‘the yellow hordes, from our shores.

The ‘yellow hordes’ are not invading. But they are moving around the world and buying up lots of property. In a nation with a billion and a quarter people there are bound to be a many who are richer than the average person in the First World countries. So the takeover is happening anyway. Money talks. People are coming in and staying in. It used to be the Americans who were resented for this sort of thing. Now it’s the Chinese- or the wealthier Arabs.

This sort of thing will continue to happen as people all around the world compare their present economic lifestyle to those of others. The ‘economic refugee,’ as they’re now being termed by some in Australia as the ‘boat people,’ are flooding in. And it will become more and more common. As I said earlier, borders will not stop them. We can put our finger in the dike but eventually so many holes will appear there won’t be enough fingers, or customs, police, or even navies to stop them.

At the moment most nations are waging a war of delaying the inevitable. Electronic fences stretching across the United States to keep those damn Latinos from coming in. Migrant camps being set up in countries paid to keep refugees rather than let them go where they want to go, as is Australia’s current policy. It might work for a while. It cannot survive in the long term.

Opening the doors, as the USA did in the first part of the 20^th Century won’t help either. Today, we just could not cope with the millions, possibly billions, who would want to go to live in the land of their dreams; those dreams coming from what they’ve been seeing on world-wide television programs.

We in the West have a deep fear. The fear is that our lives will change for the worse if too many of these people come in. They will take our jobs, corrupt our culture, bring with them their evil ways. And well they might. Those fears are not so outlandish. We all long for the ‘good old days,’ but those days are gone. We’re heading for a multi-cultural world in which every country has these sorts of problems – unless…

Unless the governments of the world can get together and come up with a workable solution to make it so desirable that people stay in their own lands that they wouldn’t even contemplate leaving – except maybe to go on a holiday.

What a task! What a challenge!

Could it be done? Of course it could. This world wastes countless trillions of dollars on, for example, armaments and the sustaining of armed forces. When people think of wars and warfare they think of soldiers, sailors and airmen. They think of tanks and aircraft carriers, and air planes the last of which might cost maybe sixty or seventy million dollars each. This is but the tip of the iceberg. All the industry, all the workers, all the researchers et cetera have to be included. The amount of expenditure in money, energy and creativity is mind-boggling.

Who’s going to start first? Who’s going to take the risk? It’s fear that holds everyone back. Fear is the ruling component in all of our lives but most of us will never admit to it. Fear is of the mind. It is of the imagination. But it’s been with humankind since the very beginning and it will not be easy to allay it. Yet allay it we must if we are to save ourselves perhaps hundreds of years of fighting to save the autonomy of our already obsolete concepts of nationhood.

In Australia the political ‘football’ is about ‘Stopping the Boat People.’ It’s been going on for years. Millions of dollars have been, and continue to be spent, on ‘fixing the problem.’ The problem is the problem can’t be fixed. The hole in the dike can have a peg or two rammed into it to stop the flow a little. The government is hoping to bring it to a trickle. It might even work for a decade or so. In the end in won’t. People will find ways to come here. In nations which are not surrounded by oceans it will be an even more impossible task. But I’m repeating myself.

As I said at the outset, the only way to stop people coming is to make it so that it is just as pleasant and advantageous at home as it is anywhere else on the planet. This is the policy the world must adopt if we are to stop unwelcome immigration and all the travail it entails.