If time travel is invented in your lifetime, you should go back a thousand years or so and have a talk with King Cnut — he of the legend of showing his courtier

If time travel is invented in your lifetime, you should go back a thousand years or so and have a talk with King Cnut — he of the legend of showing his courtiers just how much control he had over the tide [0] — about your views on immigration. Immigration comes because migrants are dissatisfied enough with the status quo to take risks to do something about it. That ingrained tendency is a major part of human progress. The accompanying disruption can be uncomfortable. But it plays a big role in how humanity's learning things we didn't know about reality — and in figuring out how to deal with it. Some familiar examples: The amount of life-improving technology that came from WWII, the Cold War, and the Space Race. Advances in vaccine research instigated by the global spread of covid-19. And so on, and so forth. (Back in the 1980s, Jared Diamond argued that humanity was better off millennia ago, when people were hunter-gatherers, and that the invention of agriculture was the worst mistake in human history [1]. Shockingly, his argument didn't seem to get any traction.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cnut#The_story_of_Cnut_and_the_waves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cnut#The_story_of_Cnut_and_the... [1] https://www.livinganthropologically.com/archaeology/agriculture-worst-mistake/ https://www.livinganthropologically.com/archaeology/agricult...