Integral Life | Immigration: What's Wise, What's Compassionate? @IntegralNaked | Uploaded November 2021 | Updated October 2024, 9 minutes ago.
Excerpted from integrallife.com/wicked-problems-bringing-wisdom-and-compassion-to-immigration

Immigration matters have been viewed by many as a “wicked problem” — implying a complexity that has sets of values in tension, something societies have dealt with since the very dawn of civilization itself. Human beings are by their very nature a migratory species, having colonized almost every major land mass on the planet and competed over the scarce resources provided by our local environments and social systems.

And yet, over that long and usually violent history, migration has been a powerful force in the unfolding of the human spirit. The ongoing exchange of ideas, values, identities, traditions, and worldviews has generated new forms of art, literature, engineering, science, and mathematics, while also deepening our empathy and understanding of each other, and of the human condition as a whole.

While the challenges and benefits of migration have been with us since the very beginning, in today’s world the problems have become even more wickedly complex. We are now seeing an entirely new set of pressures and life conditions weighing down on us, as things like climate change create additional drivers of forced migration at a time when the nation-state has become our primary source of identity, governance, and distribution of scarce resources, when social and institutional trust is at an all-time low, and when the boundaries between people feel more opaque than ever.

There are competing views in all this, that too many or not enough immigrants is unwise, while too few is uncompassionate, and in the ways migration impacts the economy and social life.

So how do we find a more integral approach to immigration, one that:

a) is based on worldcentric values, ethics, and moral reasoning,
b) respects the humanity, needs, agency, identities, and dignity of migrants (or the “other”, wherever we find it)
c) respects the agency, identities, and resources of citizens and understands their threat perceptions,
d) respects and includes ethnic differences without falling into ethnocentric thinking?

Watch as Magdalena, Mark, and Corey offer their own ideas and reflect on the reasons this issue has become one of the central fault lines in the culture wars.

0:00 — The “wicked problem” of immigration tensions
5:09 — The false choice between isolationism and “open borders”
7:42 — Include the values, negate the views
11:12 — Nation-state identities
11:59 — Borders: where identity and threat perception meet
17:40 — Direct causation vs. systemic causation

You can find the full 1.5 hour discussion here:
integrallife.com/wicked-problems-bringing-wisdom-and-compassion-to-immigration