THE 1964 prediction of the media and communication theorist, Marshall McLuhan, that the world will become a “global village” due to advancement in communication technology, has come to pass. Amazing information communication technological inventions which have roots in the Internet have actually shrunk the world.
From that day in March, 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell spoke the first words ever into the telephone after his newly invented telephone was granted patent on March 7, other amazing inventions in ICT have continued – the GSM, video conferencing software, and now, the Social Media. But as the world is contracting through communication, physically, its peoples are forced by new socio-economic and political problems like terrorism and unemployment to drift apart.
In recent years, migration has been the biggest issue in the world, and tight immigration policies by governments that seek to stop large numbers of people from flowing into their countries have increasingly been adopted by major countries of the world.
Many countries have been more reluctant than ever to leave their borders open to the influx of people from other countries. And it was quite understandable. With migrants, refugees and asylum seekers come terrorists and locust-like populations that devour the ‘greenery’ of the land.
Immigration was, and still is at the heart of major political crises sweeping across the entire world in modern times. In the United States of America, Donald Trump had the battle of his life mainly due to what many – mostly beneficiaries of former U.S. lax immigration policies – saw as being unfair.
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In Britain, the source of the wind of Brexit that blew there was immigration. Between 1995 and 2015, the number of immigrants from other European Union countries living in the UK tripled from 0.9 million to 3.3 million. In 2015, EU net immigration to the UK was 172,000, only just below the figure of 191,000 for non-EU immigrants.
In South Africa, the gale of Xenophobic attacks unleashed on foreigners, especially Nigerians in that country, was linked to immigration. Everywhere, indigenes were alarmed by the massive exodus of other peoples into their lands, believing that when they arrive, they would compete with the indigenes for the available jobs and resources, and sometimes, some of the immigrants turn out to be terrorists.
On December 29, 2019, The Washington Post published a story entitled “Denied asylum, migrants return to place they fear most: home”. It is sad and a blight of the modern world that people have to fear their homes most and run to other countries in search of security, shelter and livelihood.
Unfortunately, many countries today are unwilling to accommodate the large number of people running away from their countries. This should be a motivation for people to learn to stay back in their countries of origin and work to make their homes a place other people would like to come and live.
It is also a clear message to governments in those troubled zones to get down to work and build safer homes for their people.
The Federal Government must sit up and sincerely halt further escalation of violence in Nigeria, hunger, unemployment and infrastructural deficits, which are major drivers of migration. If our country is safe and the business environment is made conducive, the youths upon whom the survival of any society depends, will stay and contribute their vital quota to nation building.
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