[AEON] As the world’s ranks swell, population shifts have emerged as a major global challenge with potentially catastrophic implications. Endless debates over immigration rights have failed to produce the faintest hint of an acceptable solution. So perhaps an alternative approach would be to factor in an underlying basic law of chemistry. At the risk of gross oversimplification, what if we saw the flow of populations as the human equivalent of osmosis?No penalty if you stop reading here.
In high-school chemistry we learned that, in a container of water divided into two halves by a semipermeable membrane, uneven concentrations of salt resulted in movement of water from the more dilute side to the side of greater concentration. The greater the discrepancy in solute concentration, be it a salt molecule or a complex plasma protein, the greater the force to equalise the concentrations.
Now imagine the world as a giant vat subdivided into a number of smaller containers (nations) separated from each other by semipermeable membranes (borders). Instead of salt, provide each container with differing amounts of food, shelter and essential services. In this scenario, population flow from nation to nation will be a direct function of the degree of difference of goods, opportunities and hope.
This shift of populations isn’t just an ethical or metaphysical dilemma to be resolved at the level of ’us’ versus ’them’. It isn’t about the right to own land and enforce borders, or the relative worth of individuals versus groups. Instead, the pressures driving immigration should be seen as natural and unavoidable ‐ like chemical reactions; from that perspective, a reduction in the gradients would be the only possible long-term solution.
Sadly, most policymakers focus on how to best perpetuate the imbalance. The most popular and immediate reaction is to increase the impermeability of the membranes separating countries. But beefed-up border security or the erection of theoretically insurmountable walls does not take into account the enormous power of desperation. As the British-Somali poet Warsan Shire has written: ’No one leaves home unless/home is the mouth of a shark.’
About the author: Robert A Burton is a neurologist, author and the former associate director of the department of neurosciences at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center at Mount Zion. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, and Nautilus, among others. His latest book is A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind: What Neuroscience Can and Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves (2013).
