The other side of migration

This (its a pdf, but it's short) came out recently, and I figured it would be a nice time to take off my not-understanding-economics hat and put on my misunderstanding-anthropological-concepts hat.

The argument, which is not hugely revelatory (Amy Chua wrote a pop history book along the same lines about a year ago), but still pretty important to reiterate, is that migration is a powerful force for cultural change, not just for the migrants but for the societies they leave and join. The implicit/partly explicit political point is that while military conquest is central to empire-building throughout history, it was only when empires offered a better way of life than their competitor societies (kind of a survival of the fittest empire-style) that they could expand their influence non-militarily. Obviously, the points we should be taking and applying to our current situation are that a) migration is a sign that we're doing something right, at least compared to other countries around the world) b) migrants will have a profound effect on our cultures, no matter how hard we wave our flags at them or make them eat our food and c) because migration occurs for a reason (and that reason is either directly or indirectly a product of certain cultural traits present in the target culture), it is highly unlikely that a "wave" of immigration from a particular country will destroy the underlying reason why they've arrived. American conservatives and their comrades in the far, far right in Europe have made a lot of noise about too many brown people spoiling the multicultural broth, but they might not realize that all those brown people came for a reason and, unless they are relegated for a few more generations to unemployment and ghetto-itude, they aren't going to be tearing European society apart from the inside. Immigration is, as Richerson and Boyd put it anthropologically, a sign of a healthy selection process acting upon cultural institutions: the ones that work the best (nothing can be said about their moral value) for the purposes of human existence survive and expand at the expense of those that don't work so well.

In anthropology, from time to time and with great trepidation, we discuss the effects of selection pressure acting on cultural institutions. Richerson and Boyd argue that the process of migration places selective pressure in three ways: it selects for the cultural variants present in the target society, selects against the cultural variants in the original migrant society, and it selects for certain traits within the migrant community (traits that make migration and assimilation more effective, like a cultural predisposition towards saving or earning money). Obviously, there are a number of pitfalls in applying a biological approach (evolution and selection) to culture - so very many - but the basic idea, that the survival (and success) of an individual in a new environment requires certain behavioural traits and the presence or absence of these traits will have a differential effect on that individual, is a broadly accepted concept in anthropology. For example, I wrote a lengthy tome of an essay last term on the first successful migration by modern humans out of Africa (~80,000 BP) and on to Australia. One of my main points was that, for such a massive migration to occur and succeed meant that certain cultural traits had to be in place - in my mind, simple watercraft technology, coastal living, residential mobility, an economic emphasis on high-value, low-cost resources like shellfish, and a highly sophisticated system of contact between different early groups to prevent demographic collapse. In other words, these properties were strongly selected for - individuals may have deviated from this scheme, but they would have had a very hard time surviving, at least according to me, archaeologist extraordinaire.

Anyway, I think the Richerson and Boyd article is neat because it's an attempt to take an anthropological question and reframe it for a modern, politically-minded audience. I will try and do that a little more as this blog of ours chugs along, and I promise that it will somehow be about China.