Thoughts on Debt and Migration

Created by Steven Baltakatei Sandoval on 2025-01-30T17:58+00 under a CC BY-SA 4.0 (🅭🅯🄎4.0) license and last updated on 2025-01-30T17:58+00.

Background

Some thoughts I had waking up when I contemplated the absurdity of deporting undocumented migrants in the United States who work and pay taxes to put their children through school.

Thoughts on Debt and Migration

Thought 1

The whole ethos of capitalism is that we delay the day on which debts must be paid by borrowing more and more from the future, preparing our children to be able to be more and more productive.

Thought 2

Since antiquity, cycles of revenge have long been recognized as problems. Malthusian cycles of boom and bust, plenty and famine, are physically integral memories we wear in the form of fat. Storage that carries us through a long winter or a dry season. Sometimes those stores run out and mothers must rob Peter to pay Paul so their children may have a chance to live.

Thought 3

Religions such as Christianity and Islam are rooted in the concept that cycles of violence may be broken by everyone in the community agreeing to sacrifice a scapegoat so all sore sides of an ongoing conflict may feel vindicated and ceasefires established. Christianity says Jesus should be the scapegoat of last resort, but much of its teachings are about preventive measures to minimize escalation of debts and losses: the concepts of charity from the wealthy and mercy for the poor. But the root driving force for all these ideas is mothers, fathers, and siblings, grieving for their families killed during scarce times.

Thought 4

Only dynasties and lawyers really care about intergenerational debt. Dynasties because debt is their tool for maintaining power over their subjects through taxes (see David Graeberʼs Debt (2014)) and lawyers because they are priests of rule of law, mediators on the boundary layer between imperial statecraft and law-abiding civil order. Just as economics is a dumb calculator for putting whomever you want in power if enough taxpayers believe it, law is a tool to put who you want in power if enough voting military backs it. I donʼt forget that Samuel Coltʼs 1846 six-shooter won the West.

Thought 5

A society that alienates the workers that hold it up will fall. If they grow food, pay taxes, and raise children socialized in your schools, they are de facto citizens. A government fails when it cannot keep up with this fact.

Thought 6

Cycles of violence propel many into the US seeking opportunity to work. Many are raised in Christianity which teaches that the tools for breaking cycles of violence are sacrificing a scapegoat or receiving mercy from their creditors. By sacrificing and abandoning their homes instead of fighting often corrupt creditors, they are peacemakers seeking to break the cycles of violence by making themselves the sacrificial scapegoat.

Thought 7

The climate crisis is a cumulative reckoning of the externalities of burning fossil fuels that cannot be deferred except through terraforming, a process only envisaged in science fiction. Imaginary nation-state borders will not halt the mass migration of people fleeing deadly heat waves, sea level rise, and new severe weather patterns. Todayʼs “economic migration” will be a drop in the proverbial bucket. Do not expect walls and intimidation to hold back this tide.

Thought 8

Problems may be solved by tax-paying people, including the problems created by having more tax-paying people; whether they have a birth certificate or not is a formality so long as their taxes pay for the public services and infrastructure they use. If the economic benefit of tax-paying migrants does not convince people to welcome them, then the hosts likely have an ethnic nationalism mindset, a precursor to Fascism. In other words, one culture seeks dominance over other cultures rather than choosing to adapt even for its own economic benefit.

Conclusion

No real conclusion here except the obvious: the US should improve how they process migrants. Tax-paying migrants are aware of cycles of violence and, by leaving political violence and scarcity, are actively avoiding them and seeking peace. To claim that such migrants are “invading” the US is absurd; ethnic nationalism is sufficient to explain the contradiction.