by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright February 2016
One of the distinctive aspects of the American lifestyle is moving a lot for a series of job opportunities. Currently this is common in America.
This constant migration, and immigration, affects the American character. It has a lot to do with what it means to be an American. This means that if it slows down or stops, America's character will be affected. It will change.
As cyber takes over mass production-related jobs ("commodity jobs") migration will be affected the world over. It will slow because there won't be migrating for commodity job opportunities. This means the migrating will be supported only by dilettante job opportunities.
This essay is about how migration is going to be different in the 2050's.
As dilettante jobs become the main focus of human work, the question of how much migrating dilettante jobs will support becomes important.
o What will be the magnitude of these opportunities?
o Who is going to pay to migrate people for dilettante jobs?
Here are a few answers:
o There will be migrating for entertainment jobs, as there currently is. And entertainment will become an even bigger part of human activity than it is in the 2010's.
o There will be migrating to "spread the word" about religions, and related, migrating to support social justice warrior activities such as "helping the poor".
o What else? ...nothing comes to mind.
In sum, Total Entitlement State (TES) lifestyles will not be migration friendly. If everyone everywhere is living in a TES, and most of those people are living living-in-basement lifestyles, moving for a new and better job will become much less compelling and much less common.
Add to this lack of moving incentive that there will be no harsh reality check on Us versus Them instinctive thinking, and the procedural hoop-jumping to get permission to move around will increase. People's instinctive suspicion of strangers will be able to get a lot stronger, and this will support lots of procedural hoop-jumping applied to immigrants. Because of the instinct, this will happen even with pervasive surveillance cutting way down on the magnitude of criminal activities.
What this means is that the average person's thinking is going to change, and one of the big losses with less migration is live-and-let-live tolerance thinking. People will not experience people who have been living different lifestyles because they have been living in different cultures located in far away places.
This means The American Way is going to be quite different in 2050, even if the old truisms about equality still get spouted in school classrooms.
--The End--