7 Billion Humans | Immigration Issues

Immigration: In this urbanized world where rich, poor, young and old from all cultures and with different customs and speaking different languages are packed more and more tightly together in places as unlikely as Cleveland, it may be hard to see how much these diverse groups actually need each other--but they do. As the empty pockets in Sub-Saharan Africa produce a huge population of young workers, the empty nests in Japan are building robots to take care of their elderly because they can't...
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Immigration: In this urbanized world where rich, poor, young and old from all cultures and with different customs and speaking different languages are packed more and more tightly together in places as unlikely as Cleveland, it may be hard to see how much these diverse groups actually need each other--but they do. As the empty pockets in Sub-Saharan Africa produce a huge population of young workers, the empty nests in Japan are building robots to take care of their elderly because they can't import enough Filipinos. The obvious solution is immigration. The empty pockets need good educations and salaries and the empty nests need workers to take care of them. Like a rising tide--which you can watch from a lawn chair, willing it to stop, but it will rise anyway--immigration is an economic necessity that cannot be stopped. As the world's population reaches 7 billion in 2011, 8 billion in 2025, and 9 billion in 2043, the repercussions for all of us will depend on how people move around our planet and the decisions they make as they go. Add to this the schizophrenic immigration laws in places like Russia where they push former Soviet Bloc workers out with one hand and with the other hand create programs that have huge incentives for the same workers to come in to their under-populated country. This schizophrenia just ends up hurting the tired, poor, huddled masses, and ultimately all of us.

When I started photographing the "7 Billion" story for National Geographic Magazine, I thought I would be doing a story about carrying capacity--But, basically as long as they keep inventing things like fertilizer all you can talk about is population shift. So we came up with four subcategories within which to concentrate the field photography: Urbanization, Immigration, Empty Pockets (the very fertile poor), and Empty Nests (the depopulation of aging, rich countries). These four concepts are interrelated. This gallery is the immigration portion of this story.
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