An Overview on my Theory of Emigration

Recently there has been a lot of talk about illegal immigration and I want to throw out a theory I have. Again this is just a theory and if you can find problems with it leave a comment and let me know because this is something I have been thinking about for a while and I would like to refine it if need be. I call this my theory of emigration as the title of this article so aptly says. The premise of this theory is that over time the completion of tasks becomes more efficient.

Take for instance farming; you have a patch of land that produces say 1,000 pounds of grain every year and there are 100 people working there. After a while you discover irrigation and begin using simple machines to do it. You can now produce 1,500 pounds of grain and only need 80 people to do it now that you no longer have need to haul buckets of water every where. Next you domesticate animals and construct basic farming equipment and now you’re down to 50 people and still producing 1,500 pounds of grain. Next comes selective breeding and crop rotation and now you are producing 2,500 pounds of grain each year with you 50 people. Industrial revolution comes along and now you have a machine that separates the grain from the useless stuff and you no longer need 10 of your people. Then a planting machine, bam 15 more gone, fertilizer and machines to spread it come along and you can now grow 3,000 pounds with only 25 people. Then along comes harvesting machines and your down to 5 people who just drive machines all day. Eventually all of your machines become automated and you now have 1 guy who sets up a program and updates it when need be and he alone is responsible for producing the 3,000 pounds of grain that at one point would have taken 300 people to produce.

This process doesn’t just affect manual labor jobs either, just 50 years ago many offices had people to crunch accounting numbers or draw design blue prints and all of those jobs were replaced by calculators and computers. For those of you who read my post “Questions of Constitutionality” on 09/22/2007 you may know where this is going. In that article I put out the idea that the best thing for American companies to do if they want to stay in business would be to automate plants in the US and have those plants provide goods to the US, and at the same time build plants with manual labor in other countries to provide to those countries.

At this point I would like to refine this idea by suggesting that companies build smaller automated plants in first world counties and larger manual labor plants in 3rd world countries. Each of the plants would provide for production in that part of the world and distribution / exports from any particular plant would be restricted by necessity to nearby area’s and countries. At the larger manual plants the workers are paid reasonable wages by those countries’ standards, when the cost of labor gets to the point of being inefficient when compared to automated standards the plant is then replaced with automated plants.

The concept of this plan is that people would emigrate from 1st world countries to 3rd world countries in search of jobs. This would be a reverse of what we have now and the way I view it is that the demand for educated people (College degree of some sort) in 1st world countries would go up and the demand for uneducated people would go significantly down. In 3rd world countries however the demand for uneducated people would go up. Slowly but surely 3rd world countries will become 1st world countries and the bulk of the human population will continue to move to new developing nations. By the time the whole world is completely covered in developed countries and there is no need for uneducated workers anywhere on this planet hopefully we will be colonizing other ones.

While such a suggestion may seem like science fiction it has been almost 40 years since we have been to the moon and the technological breakthroughs since then have been astronomical, lunar research stations followed by colonies are not only plausible but imperative as we continue to use up this planet’s resources with the ever growing human population.