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Immigration—the flow of people from one place to another, typically with the intention of settling in that second location—is a topic that is difficult to discuss without politically tinting the issue.
Research indicates that immigrants tend to do quite well compared to their native-born peers, but that success tends to translate into greater wealth and other sorts of positive outcomes for everyone.
But the politics of immigration tend to be based less on data and more on emotional, reflexive responses to the concept. To some, all immigration is good and should be supported, and to others, the opposite is true: immigration is bad, immigrants are undesirable, and thus, we should do everything we can to hinder or block immigration of all kinds.
Setting aside the political and social complexities of immigration, though, there’s evidence that the main consequence of people freely flowing from place to place is a likely a net-benefit for societies in which such movement is possible.
There’s evidence that we’re more creative when exposed to different ideas, perspectives, and cultures, because such engagement challenges us to see things from different angles, to refine our sense of what we currently believe and understand, and to more clearly delineate between facts and other externally supportable beliefs, and opinions that we cling to because of tradition or a lack of recent reassessment.
The mechanism behind these benefits are thought to be similar to the mechanisms that make denser urban areas more productive, wealthy, and competitive than their rural kin.
Folks who live in dense areas like New York City have more exposure to more types of people, and thus a higher willingness (borne, perhaps, of necessity) to trust strangers, a heightened taste for novelty (both the acceptance and the pursuit of it), and a higher likelihood of judging individuals based on their singular attributes and merits, rather than perceiving them as just one part of a larger group and gauging their worth through that lens.
This acceptance and embrace of the foreign, the unfamiliar, and the intellectually and ethically challenging is not a panacea for humanism or open-mindedness, but it does seem to result in psychological changes that can influence our behaviors, how we organize into groups, and our perception of people, things, and ideas that otherwise might seem frightening.
Just as a more varied workplace or society has advantages in an ever-changing world, then, because it represents a variety of views and thus can perceive new ideas with less (or perhaps just more varied types of) bias, the human mind, too, seems to benefit from having a greater diversity of acceptable positions from which to assess the unfamiliar.
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