Immigration
By Jon Eden Khan
Right now, immigration is one of the most charged topics in the global political arena.
Donald Trump has declared an emergency at the USA-Mexico border, and he has begun mass deportations of illegal immigrants to nations he is then publicly threatening if they don’t open to receive those people.
In Europe, far-right parties are in government in 7 nations. Far-right parties in France and Germany are gaining increasing support. In all these parties, anti-immigration sentiment is one of their most central platforms.
In Western liberal democracies generally, as labour shortages, aging demographics, refugee crises, and spiralling climate change fuel waves of immigration, the right and left are at war over this topic.
At their best, the left is fighting for inclusion, diversity, cross-cultural integration, compassion, and the end of racism and systemic injustice.
In the shadows of the left there is a posture of moral superiority, discrimination against the very people they judge as guilty of discrimination, and a lack of tolerance and inclusivity for the experience and challenges of people who think differently to them.
At their best, the right is fighting for healthy borders, cultural coherence, as well as healthy ethnic and national identity.
In the shadows of the right there is racism, ethnocentrism, xenophobia, selfishness, unacknowledged privilege, disregard for the struggles of other nations and cultures, cruelty, and a closed heart.
Integrating and Going Beyond the Polarisation of Left and Right
In Singularity, we perceive that neither side has the answer independently. The shadows of both must be acknowledged, and the best of both is needed for us to begin to find a healthy and whole approach to immigration.
We start with the radical position that there is one indivisible and sacred Life force at the core of the Earth, all humanity, and all kingdoms of nature.
The deep truth of this Life is that no divisions between us have any real basis. This includes the story that there are approximately 1 trillion species on the planet, multiple kingdoms of nature, 195 nations, 3814 distinct human cultures, and 8 billion apparently separate human selves.
In the radical experience of this Life force, there is only One, vibrating at the heart of it all.
All separation is fiction, and the apparent diversity of our various nations, cultures, races, communities and groupings is simply the vibrant expression of that One.
This is not a philosophy. It is a self-evident truth discovered by anyone who journeys deeply enough into the mystery of the human heart, and is held universally in the mystic core of our global wisdom traditions.
Simultaneously, on a relative level, both the internal coherence of each life-sphere – whether of a kingdom of nature, a species, a nation, a community, an ethnic group, or an ecosystem – and its interconnected field of relations with others, needs to be honoured.
Coherence, Opening, Integration, Synthesis
In terms of immigration, Singularity takes the position that we need leaders who can stand with conviction for the truth that Life is one, Earth is one, and humanity is one.
Not just in words that are spoken on top of actions that maintain old lines of division and separation between East and West, North and South. But as a fully active stand that participates in the indivisible One at the heart of the celebrated Many on ever deeper levels.
Additionally, we also perceive that each ethnic, cultural, and national group needs to maintain a healthy internal sense of its own lineage, traditions, and history, and that this will provide the best foundation to receive an external influx of humans from other cultural, ethnic, and national backgrounds.
Once such an influx has happened, as in the case of immigration, there will often need to be a process of integration and consolidation that can establish a new coherence and eventual synthesis.
That new coherence and synthesis will need to include the greater ethnic and cultural diversity now present, but in a way that balances healthy preservation of the traditions, values, lineage, and cultural norms of each group, with greater interconnection and between them.
The original population must be able to receive the wave of immigrants, and learn about their culture, traditions, lineage and history, without it being existential for their own culture and way of life. Nations have a right to stable borders, physically and emotionally.
And the arriving immigrants will need to learn about and integrate the cultural context, norms, and values they are entering into, whilst also preserving their own. Over time, a natural integration can happen that establishes a new synthesis while preserving what matters most from both populations.
The Failures of Immigration
And it mostly hasn’t gone this way in the past. Major challenges such as climate migration, the demographics of aging populations in many nations, refugee crises, and labour shortages have been drivers for immigration without the above named processes having enough space. And the fact that we have been entering an increasingly global era while these issues remain unresolved is the reason there is so much tension around immigration today.
Humanity is yet to truly own the truth that we are and have always been one. Ancient lines of division have persisted for so long that for most, they are normal. Regardless of their mass acceptance, they are not true.
The history of invasion, colonisation, racism, domination, and inequality pervades the history of migration on the planet.
The wounds of this remain painfully present among the indigenous populations of the USA, New Zealand, Australia, Hawaii, South America, and others who were colonised by European settlers.
And as globalisation rose in the post-WW2 era, as well as an increasing awareness and tension around the history of injustice and inequality that exists between people living in the modern West and the rest of the world, whole new challenges around immigration emerged.
A number of Western nations experienced significant economic growth (often as a result of an unequal global balance of power that is the legacy of colonialism). These nations became the focus of immigration from economically less privileged nations, and in the process sometimes struggled to maintain a sense of their own cultural, national, and ethnic coherence as new people entered. When this process has been coupled over time with emergent economic and social challenges, large sections of these populations have started to become hostile towards immigrants, projecting blame onto them.
Often there has been no understanding that navigating immigration healthily requires clear leadership that can stand for the truth of the one humanity; the cyclic opening and closing of borders that allows all the populations in question the time and space to integrate with each other without losing themselves; government programs to support that process; and all this in a way that is also responsive to times of crisis where there is a need to offer asylum to refugees who are fleeing danger in their home country.
Instead, immigration processes have been haphazard, often veering between large-scale admittance without adequate programs to preserve cultural coherence on one side, and violent rejection and dehumanisation of immigrants on the other.
Of course there are examples of the in-between, and yet the rise in popularity of nationalist leaders today could be seen as a direct response to the liberal globalisation project having fundamentally failed to balance and steward the processes and principles discussed in this article.
A Different Way
In Singularity we’d argue that the answer isn’t an oscillation from globalisation to nationalism, although this does point to an instinctual attempt in the collective, overlaid with a multitude of shadows and additional variables, to integrate what the liberal globalisation project has been unable to.
The challenge for humanity today is, how do we collectively accept that no ‘side’ - the political right or left - is going to win this battle, because neither has the whole answer?
And rather, how do we together step into a healthy engagement with this process that integrates an uncompromising recognition that humanity is one, with an honoured diversity that includes all national, ethnic, and cultural groups, and the stewarding of immigration in a way that allows for cycles of opening, integration, and synthesis? And all while remaining responsive to the wider contexts of planetary crisis in which ecological, economic, social, and geopolitical issues are producing huge waves of immigration.
In Singularity, we perceive that these are some of the most fundamental questions for political leaders today. So far, we have not seen the emergence of leaders who, in the integration of the spiritual, planetary, national, cultural, ethnic, and personal dimensions of their humanity, can truly meet these challenges.
Singularity is dedicated to the evolution of these leaders.