Necessity is the mother of invention. The Little Cold War, the Space Boom, the Labor Shortage, WWIII, all these things spurred the development of new technologies, but one in particular was common throughout: robotics. The post war boom in military spending on space based military assets drove robotics from industrial convenience to common market necessity. While robots had existed in one form or another for over a century, within the last twenty years they came to be as common as the home computer during the Dot-com boom. Robots filled gaps in the labor force and increased productivity to new heights. For a time robots were seen as the key to economic prosperity, but now as a labor shortage becomes a surplus, automation and life extension/productivity technologies put millions of people out of work in the United States on Earth. The most hard hit region was the new industrial belt in the American Southwest, which was almost exclusively Mexican.





Unemployment, and skyrocketing demand for energy to supply the automated workforce become ever present in the political discourse, and the election of 2080 effectively begins in 2078. The race is quickly defined by two candidates fighting for the votes of a more conservative leaning America, as the more traditionally established progressive pro-immigration candidates are marginalized in the face of crippling unemployment. The two candidates argue for closing the borders and ending nearly five decades of aggressive pro-immigration policies, but one is more radically in favor of forcibly deporting millions of people from the American South-West back to Mexico and Central America. The other, a relatively moderate Governor of Colorado, is supposedly being courted by elements of the Mars Corporation to secure a steady supply of warm bodies once Mars begins accepting new colonists in 2082. Even after the resettlement of the Anglosphere following the end of the Flood, America is still unable to manage its population density in the increasingly divisive southwest. This divisiveness is not helped by the rise of Mexico. Once a great power on the American continent, made restive after a series of wars and rebellions, Mexico has grown to be one of the top five economies on Earth, surpassing Japan as it's population begins to decline as its demographic crisis nears its conclusion. Mexico has formed a sphere of its own to secure its economic interests, held together by new policies granting votes in the Mexican Congress to those of Mexican ancestry abroad.





In Europe the Mediterranean Union enjoys an outlier of prosperity with economies fueled by business ventures to capitalize on the new wealth of the North African states as the rest of Europe and the Middle East stagnates and returns to old conventions. Atlantic Europe and the decaying Turkish sphere are filled with people clamoring for life in the colonies which promise more than the stagnation of Atlantic Europe and the fractionalism of the West Asia. Only Poland seems to have maintained some semblance of stability, even after the messy integration of the Baltic states into a Polish "Intermarium." Mars's impending "sustainable habitability" is seen as the solution to the Earth's population problems, and as the frontier of the once prosperous Arctic nations is closed once again by the cold, Mars offers hope. The same can be said for those in Africa, India, and China, who are already feeling a push back from nations that once clamored for their people to fill the labor gap. Even after America's annexation of the Anglosphere, following its decades of hardship brought on by flood, drought, and refreeze induced war, the new territories have not seen a demand for new labor.