Jack of Harts

Not all mass migrations are created equal. For every nation that invaded another one and then sent their own people in to push out the native population, there are multiple mass migrations where people moved from one place they didn’t want to live to a place where either nobody or very few people lived. Often times, people just wanted to get away from powerful people telling them how to live.

The colonies that would later spark the revolution to form the United States were famously founded by religious minorities who wanted to get away from the religious authorities of the time. They left a comfortable, built up, civilized land, to try to build a new civilization in a strange climate where even the animals and the weather killed them. And almost nobody lived in the places they landed and built up.

The nation we know of as South Africa now was a desolate spit of inhospitable land on the southern tip of Africa that the Africans stayed away from because it was too harsh. And then religious minorities left Europe to build a new civilization there. And after they built it up into a rich area, people came to try to take away what they built. They fought wars to defend what they built, and they still live there today.

Israel was a sparsely populated desert wasteland on the fringes of the great empires of the late 1800s when the Jews began returning to the land the Romans threw them out of. They built water systems, and roads, and when the world finally allowed them to actually recreate their old nation, they weathered decades of Arab invasions trying to sweep them into the sea. But they brought water to the desert. They grew food and built great industries. They created a rich, multi-faith society in the land that had been a sparsely populated desert a century before.

Hong Kong was a sparsely populated island off the coast of China when they and Great Britain went to war. Just some small fishing villages and a bunch of empty land around them. Great Britain negotiated a century-long lease on the island, so they could keep a watch on the Chinese, when the war ended. And then they built it up into one of the world’s most powerful economic hubs in the world. A beacon of free speech and liberty and production. I remember a time when Built in Hong Kong was one of the most common stamps seen in stores.

Many of the world’s richest, prosperous, and healthiest civilizations right now were created by a small or a mass migration of people who just wanted to get away from where they were to build something better where nobody else was. Mass migration itself is neither good nor bad, but it can be used for good or ill by people of good or ill intent.