We may never stop arguing about which historic currents swept President Trump into the White House.

Klaus Schwab, chairman of the World Economic Forum, is unlikely to have had Trump in mind when he described the fourth industrial revolution in Davos in January 2016:

We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before.

Compared with previous industrial revolutions, Schwab continued,

the fourth is evolving at an exponential rather than a linear pace. Moreover, it is disrupting almost every industry in every country. And the breadth and depth of these changes herald the transformation of entire systems of production, management, and governance.

First Schwab looked at the bright side:

The possibilities of billions of people connected by mobile devices, with unprecedented processing power, storage capacity, and access to knowledge, are unlimited. And these possibilities will be multiplied by emerging technology breakthroughs in fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and quantum computing.

Schwab then turned his attention to the downside. Many “workers are disillusioned and fearful that their own real incomes and those of their children will continue to stagnate,” he said, and the “middle classes around the world are increasingly experiencing a pervasive sense of dissatisfaction and unfairness.”

We tend to think of immigration — now fracturing parties of the left and right both here and in Europe — as distinct from technological innovation, but the two issues are intertwined on many levels, even down to the fact that most unauthorized immigrants are people who fly here and overstay their visas, not those who cross rural borders on foot. And air travel is the least of it.

In an August 2015 Times story, “A 21st-Century Migrant’s Essentials: Food, Shelter, Smartphone,” Matthew Brunwasser described the situation that obtains now:

In this modern migration, smartphone maps, global positioning apps, social media and WhatsApp have become essential tools. Migrants depend on them to post real-time updates about routes, arrests, border guard movements and transport, as well as places to stay and prices, all the while keeping in touch with family and friends.

Long before this, Douglas Massey, a sociologist at Princeton, described the link between immigration and technology in a 2003 paper, “Patterns and Processes of International Migration in the 21st Century”:

The same processes of economic globalization that create mobile populations in developing regions, and which generate a demand for their services in global cities, also create links of transportation, communication, as well as politics and culture, to make the international movement of people cheaper, quicker, and easier.

There are innumerable social and economic pluses and minuses. In politics, however, the emphasis has often been on the negative.

“The IT revolution improved living standards and its great technical achievements enjoy a high level of consumer and political support,” Mordecai Kurz, an economist at Stanford, wrote in a June 2017 paper. “However these sources of social benefits are also the cause of social losses and rising inequality that threaten the foundation of democratic society.”