How does immigration affect a country’s economy, culture, and social stability?
Question 116 in Faith Seeking Freedom: Updated & Expanded
This question is from Faith Seeking Freedom: Updated & Expanded, available in paperback, PDF, and Kindle.
From the economic point of view, laborers who migrate from a low wage area to a high wage area are performing an arbitrage and making the market function more efficiently in the satisfaction of human wants. But human beings are not merely laborers, and they bring with them more than labor hours.
Immigrants bring with them their own experiences and customs, and often their own languages. It is true that a culturally heterogeneous population can experience social friction because different cultures can dictate dramatically different expectations from one another. For example, in some cultures, direct eye contact may be considered presumptuous and aggressive. In others, avoiding eye contact may be viewed with suspicion. This is not only true of international immigration. Cultural differences may also be present within different populations in the same nation-state, such as those between New Englanders and southerners in the United States.
People as social creatures are also immensely adaptable. Customs can be consciously learned, and linguistic features are often acquired without conscious effort or awareness. Every person grows and changes over their lifetime, including in their customary behaviors and language, and they will adapt to their environment.
While some traditions and customs may indeed be ancient in origin, local culture is by its nature a transient and dynamic thing. Attempts to freeze a culture in time to preserve it are based on the mistaken idea that culture is static and stable. It is not. Even if some cultural clashes may greatly annoy adults, such displeasure need not persist in succeeding generations. Indeed, combinations of previously unacquainted peoples have sometimes resulted in explosions of cultural creativity, such as the innovative jazz and blues styles of music that developed in the culturally complex Mississippi Delta region.