September 3, 2026

The Future We Imagine Is Already Diverse

I’ve been thinking about immigration lately — not really as a policy question, and definitely not because I think I’ve cracked the correct arrangement of borders, visas, and who gets to live where. It’s more of a philosophical question that’s been nagging at me: what kind of future do we actually imagine for humanity, and does the way we talk about immigration right now line up with that future at all?

This started after listening to DHH talk about immigration, London, Denmark, and the presence of Roma people in Danish society. Trying to understand where he was coming from, it struck me that he was expressing something pretty common and probably natural: a reaction to change.

You grow up somewhere. The language, the food, the way people talk to each other, the architecture, the small unspoken rules — all of that becomes part of who you are. Then immigration changes the place. The streets look different. You hear different languages on the bus. The customs you grew up with stop being the default. What used to feel unquestionably like home starts to feel less familiar.

I’d be lying if I said that produces no legitimate emotional reaction. People don’t experience culture as some abstract idea in a textbook — culture is language, trust, the way families take care of each other, humor, manners, memory, and a thousand small unwritten agreements that let people understand one another without having to explain everything. It’s part of how a community functions and how a person figures out where they belong.

But understandable discomfort doesn’t automatically mean sound judgment.

I say that as the son of immigrants, and as one myself. I’ve felt this from what seem like opposite directions. I get the person who watches their surroundings change and feels like something’s being taken from them. I also get the person who moves somewhere new and tries to hold onto something they love about where they came from. If you ask someone to leave their country, their family, their whole landscape — it seems a little cruel to also expect them to erase every trace of where they’re from the moment they land somewhere new.

At the same time, I spent about half my life in Mexico, so I also get why people there feel intruded on when wealthier foreigners show up and start buying property in Mexico City. I grew up around people who aren’t evil or xenophobic — just ordinary people watching their neighborhood become a place they can no longer afford. That’s not an academic concept to them. That’s losing the place their life was built.

That’s immigration too, and it messes with the tidy story where movement is always liberation and pushing back on it is always prejudice. A Mexican moving to the U.S. and an American moving to Mexico are both migrants on paper, but they don’t show up with the same economic weight behind them. Movement can create opportunity and real human connection. It can also put a cost on people who never agreed to pay it.

This is, I think, why the whole subject is so hard to pin down. Race, culture, nationality, citizenship, class, and legal status all overlap, but they aren’t the same thing, and a conversation can start as a debate about illegal immigration, drift into cultural assimilation, turn into a conversation about race, and end up as an argument about housing prices — all while everyone thinks they’re still answering the same question. They’re not.

I’m not trying to settle whether open borders or closed borders are “correct,” and I’m not arguing we need to get rid of borders to make progress. What I’m actually asking is whether the emotional, sometimes dehumanizing way we talk about migration lines up with the technologically advanced, philosophically expansive future a lot of us claim we want.

Which is where science fiction comes in for me.

Almost every future I find compelling is multi-ethnic. When I picture humanity decades or centuries out, I picture massive cities full of everyone and everything — different faces, languages, food, religions, accents, combinations that don’t even exist yet. When I picture spaceships or colonies or humanity spreading past Earth, I don’t picture a future made up of only one country’s citizens, whoever happened to be wealthiest in the twenty-first century.

A technologically advanced future made up of one race or culture doesn’t feel like the future to me. It feels like the past, just with better lighting.

That’s not proof open borders would work — science fiction isn’t a policy paper. A fictional megacity doesn’t tell you how the housing got built, who paid for it, or whether the people living there actually have any power. A lot of those fictional cities are diverse specifically because they’re dystopian — places where money mixed everyone together without ever getting around to justice.

The point isn’t that fiction proves anything. The point is what it says about my imagination, and maybe about ours. Why do we keep drawing the future this way? Is it just useful shorthand for “the world got bigger and more connected”? A commercial choice? Wishful thinking? Or does it say something we actually believe underneath it all — that if humanity has a future, it probably involves more mixing and cooperating, not permanent separation by nation?

We picture humanity spreading across the solar system, but how exactly do we think we get there? Do we really imagine becoming a multi-planetary species while we’re still fighting over which kinds of people belong in which neighborhood back on Earth?

Obviously a Mars settlement would have real limits — air, food, energy, space, the sheer difficulty of getting anyone there at all. You couldn’t send everyone even if you wanted to. But those are practical constraints. They don’t tell you which cultures deserve a spot in the human future.

Which is part of what confuses me about certain tech guys. I think I make the mistake of assuming technological ambition comes bundled with progressive values. It doesn’t. Someone can be genuinely excited about AI, self-driving cars, and colonizing Mars while still holding onto fairly conventional or exclusionary ideas about who belongs where. Being technically brilliant doesn’t automatically make your moral imagination any bigger.

Still, there’s a real contradiction worth sitting with. If someone talks enthusiastically about “building the future of humanity,” who exactly do they mean by humanity? Is that future for the species, or just for whoever clears today’s economic, cultural, or national bar?

I don’t think immigration policy can be some clean filter that produces a perfect society of only the smartest or hardest-working or most “culturally compatible” people. People don’t sort into categories that neatly. The person one generation views as undesirable is often the one who ends up building part of the world the next generation inherits.

At the same time, treating every concern about immigration as racism is its own way of refusing to think. Questions about housing, wages, schools, hospitals, and how a democracy actually decides these things are real questions, and the people dealing with those pressures aren’t just obstacles standing in the way of some morally superior future.

Even “democratic legitimacy” is messier than it sounds. We like to say communities should get to democratically decide how they change, but how confident are we that we actually have that? Money, institutional power, media, and who actually shows up to participate all shape what gets called a democratic outcome. Even the countries closest to their own civic ideals aren’t all that close.

That doesn’t make democratic consent meaningless. It just means we should be a little more modest about treating it like it settles the argument.

Modesty is probably what this whole conversation is missing. People reacting to harsh immigration rhetoric need enough restraint to tell the difference between a real policy concern and plain hatred. But the people doing the talking need that same restraint — to remember they’re talking about actual human beings. When a group gets described as animals, invaders, or some kind of contamination, whoever’s saying that has stopped grappling with a hard problem and started flattening people into a threat. That’s out of pocket, honestly, and you don’t get to claim you’re bringing clarity to a massive human question while using language built specifically to stop people from thinking about the humans in it.

Migration isn’t some glitch in civilization that needs patching. People have always moved — for hunger, war, love, weather, work, ambition, persecution, or just the hope that life might be better somewhere else. Governments can restrict it, manage it, punish it, profit off it, or build systems around it. What they can’t do is make the underlying impulse go away.

So maybe the point isn’t that borders need to disappear. Maybe it’s that our sense of who counts — our moral circle — needs to be bigger than the nation, even while nations keep existing. Humanity working together would probably get further than humanity permanently fighting itself. That might be a little naive. But being an adult shouldn’t mean giving up on every big idea just because it’s hard to build. It should mean holding onto the idea while dealing honestly with how hard it is.

The migrant isn’t disposable. Neither is the person who already lives there. Culture matters, and cultural change isn’t automatically the same as losing it. Movement is a kind of freedom, and it can also come with real costs. Borders can organize responsibility, and they can also protect privilege that was never really earned.

All of that can be true at once. I don’t have a system that resolves it — that was never really the goal. What I’m actually trying to understand is why the future we picture is so diverse and interconnected, while the way we talk about it right now stays so tribal and certain of itself.

Maybe that contradiction doesn’t get solved in one essay. Maybe the most honest thing I can say is that we’d all do well to calm down long enough to actually see the size of the question we’re arguing about.

The future doesn’t have to mean a world with no culture, no history, no sense of belonging. It could be a world where culture gets preserved and changed without anyone using that as proof some people deserve less of the planet than others — where movement gets managed without dehumanizing anyone, where local communities get protected without demanding purity, and where the people building the future actually get to include everyone who might live in it.

I don’t know if that’s where we’re headed. But it’s the future I keep picturing anyway.