The truth about migration: How evolution made us xenophobes

All the evidence suggests that migrants boost economic growth. So why don’t we just fly people who want to work to countries where there are jobs and welcome them with open arms? Prejudices rooted in humanity’s evolutionary past may be partly to blame.

“Perceptions of competition drive a lot of our thinking and are difficult to avoid,” says Victoria Esses at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. Humans think of their support systems as a zero-sum game – so if one person gains, another must lose out. Such perceptions were accurate during our evolutionary history as hunter-gatherers when the appearance of others on our patch meant fewer mastodons or mushrooms for us. If they were close relatives they might share – or at least our common genes would benefit from their success. But anyone displaying different cultural markers was likely to be a competitor. A modern capitalist economy is not a zero-sum game – if you add more workers, it grows (see main story). Regardless of this, our evolutionary hang-ups make it difficult to accept the economic sense in welcoming immigrants.

That’s not all. We are instinctively wary of close contact with strangers because in our evolutionary past this helped us guard against infectious disease, says Mark Schaller at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Separate groups of people often have different histories of exposure and acquired immunity to pathogens. A disease carried innocuously by one might devastate another, as happened to the Native Americans after Europeans arrived.

Steven Neuberg at Arizona State University in Tempe notes that groups also evolve different survival-enhancing practices. “Foreigners with different rules might interfere with the social coordination you need to do important tasks, or might get members of your group to follow their rules instead,” he says. “Chaos could emerge if your group makes decisions by consensus but theirs is authoritarian.”

Schaller and Neuberg believe that for both these reasons, human cultures evolved to be wary of close interaction with people who were different from their group.

This xenophobia persists, says Neuberg, who has found that people feel threatened by groups with different values of many kinds. Ethnic groups in modern cities often form enclaves rather than mixing randomly – which can foster strong local communities but also engenders wider mistrust. To live in multicultural societies, we will need to learn to get past such evolved tendencies.

Read more on the truth about migration here

This article appeared in print under the headline “The origins of xenophobia”