Why Are We Scared of Aliens?

(Not the extraterrestrial kind) — My thoughts on immigration

Prehistorically, humans were inferior to their environment. We were weaker, smaller, and slower than the animals that preyed on us. We were easy meat. The only thing that elevated us above our hunters were our brains — specifically, our ability to communicate. This was a great asset; because of our strange ability to communicate specific thoughts, humans realized that, in order to survive, we had to band together to create a massive quantity of us. The only problem was that amassing a large quantity of individuals with selfish desires tends to cause friction, and by friction, I mean a boulder to the head. That’s where communication comes in. We were able to solve our differences — most of the time — without killing each other, by expressing our thoughts and desires, commence trade, and express danger; where the enemy is, how many of them there are, and whether we should fight or take flight. Our numbers swelled until we posed a major enough force to oppose our common prey. We shifted from hunted to hunter — all because of the mutual flapping of a pink muscle and our ability to commune somewhat civilly.

Humans are creatures of community. We live and we die in the arms of community. The environment we live in shares language, fears, loves, and desires. When a beloved actor battles depression, we tune in to our favourite news stations and, in a mutual language, absorb every reported breath and uttered word until we’re sick of the subject and divert our attentions to the next viral trend. Our place in the world is verified and we have a place that accepts and understands our lives. When foreign humans try to jam their keys into our lock, our tumblers scrape and clang against their teeth and we reject them — we grow cold and even more dependant on the things that fit our world-view. The same ideas and news we’re familiar with are regurgitated at a faster pace and the doors leading out of our echo-chambers are sealed off. How is this possible when the organizations that feed us content relating to the outside world are still functioning? It’s simple, really. When our content providers realize that we simply don’t want to accept news that doesn’t fit our world view and the demand for what we want to hear mushrooms, they supply. I don’t blame them, honestly. They’re humans just like us and they have to make a living. An easier way of saying it is that they’re a business; no demand for non-echo-chamber content equals no supply. If it comes at the cost of creating less susceptibility to diversity then they have the perfect excuse: they’re giving us what we want.

What we want

We don’t want people that don’t share our culture to invade our perfectly cultivated world-view. For this, (forgive me), I’ll be using a Stalin quote:

The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.

I’ll be changing it up a bit:

The arrival of one immigrant is a tragedy, the arrival of millions is a take-over.

We’re deathly afraid that a massive influx of non-community foreign people would eventually outnumber the people who are community and what we are familiar with would be washed out, leaving us stranded without a place to call home. We’re afraid that our home will become their home. And their home is different from ours; we don’t fit in to their version of home. Plus, we’re just a tad territorial — we were here first; this is our turf — leave now or we’ll push you out.