I often joke that America could solve its immigration problems overnight if it started broadcasting images of McDowell County, West Virginia.
I could just as easily have pointed to Gary, Indiana, or anywhere in the Mississippi Delta where you might find acres of haunted shotgun shacks with sagging porches and flee-ridden dogs rambling through roadway ditches.
McDowell County has had, for decades now, child poverty rates as high as 47.9%.
While improving, it is still higher than Bangladesh.
Higher than Vietnam.
Higher than El Salvador.
It's only slightly ahead of Nigeria, although children (18 and under) make up more than half Nigeria's population.
This is not what any immigrant is dreaming of when they decide to come to America.
Because the dream they have is a boilerplate one. It is intentionally manufactured and milled through media, scattered through music and the beauty of ever-romantic cinema.
Nobody’s dream of America was built from a spreadsheet of county-level income data, but cultural vibes are highly memetic. War and conquest aside, the meme of Americana is powerful enough that I first tried Dunkin Donuts in Saudi Arabia, and the only professional baseball game I’ve attended was in Hiroshima, Japan.
Britain could equally have worked for this analogy, as I’ve eaten at Britain-themed pubs and restaurants in Tokyo, Shanghai and Accra, Ghana, but America’s memes are more potent.
Immigrants to America, like many Americans, are rarely thinking of Gary, Indiana, when they talk about “the greatest country in the world”.
The American dream in reality only applies to a small proportion of its population. And yet it is yearned for as far as Yemen.
If your village gets wiped out by war or disaster and you think of the best place to start over – the place in the world you have the best opportunity for a great life – you imagine the life of a well-heeled American. You imagine a land of milk and honey.
When you imagine opportunity, what you’re really asking for is inequality.
Yet the same people who cross oceans chasing it will, once they arrive, join a chorus insisting the power that propelled them is a moral emergency.
The war against smooth slopes
In the West, these lands now heavy (on average) with wealth, the latest thing to lament is inequality.
And for good reason! It offends our morals to have some people with so much while others suffer in squalor.
But when we say we hate inequality, we mostly mean inequality at birth. The idea that some people seemingly start their lives ahead of the pack.
Beyond birth, we largely spend our lives chasing inequality, to some extent or another.
You choose one job with better perks than another. You marry a husband with more to offer than another. You pick the ripest fruit at the supermarket. You rent, marginally, the best place you can afford.
Nobody puts a loaf of bread back on the shelf because it's too fluffy and delicious and they want a more average one in the name of equality.
Somebody will inevitably be left with the options you rejected. But surely that’s life. The dice roll, and roll again.
Everyone wants the inequality that benefits them.
In all things we seek marginal gains. We want rare benefits. We yearn for the edge of the distribution curve.
Now, being familiar with the distribution curve of the countries we live in, we usually know that local maxima is not global maxima. You could live in the nicest building on your street and still be painfully aware that some people live far, far better. A billionaire might want to end it all if he had to share your apartment.
And that, I guess, is the endless chase. It’s a circular one. A glance at the addiction and misery of many of the world’s elites should tell you that there is no “end” at the end of the proverbial rainbow.
‘Maximum’ outcomes are not worth chasing in a definitive sense. And they rarely exist. But marginal outcomes are everywhere. Increments abound.
Inequality, in small doses, still gives us useful direction. A slope to climb.
Despite our quest for a better, more equal world, the majority still, to some extent, want inequality.
People uproot their whole lives, at real cost and at real risk, specifically in search of an unequal outcome.
If Mogadishu was the same as Montana, maybe you would stay put.
Manila’s climate is actually almost identical to Miami’s. They’re both humid monsoon coastal cities. But the wealth inequality slopes one way, and so does migration.
People move because a destination country’s inequality (higher ceilings, wider variance in outcome) is what makes the move worth making. Nobody emigrates chasing a flatter distribution.
Moving doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get the best possible outcome. High-variance outcomes naturally come on a curve, and not everyone gets the shiniest trophy.
But that’s the risk you must be willing to take.
