| HN Mirror

Generally speaking, we see poor people going to rich countries as trying to take advantage. This is one reason Trump wants to build a wall.

But wealthy folks going to poor countries typically don't see themselves in similar terms at all. They typically feel superior to the people they live among and feel like they are clearly and unquestionably adding value and should be appreciated, obviously.

I did some research for a piece I wrote about a massacre of Native Americans that is little known. Natives hunted, fished, etc and lived lightly on the land. They were a mobile people. They had campsites they routinely used, but no permanent settlements.

Trappers and fur traders were the first to show up. They weren't that different from the natives. The natives were tolerant and welcoming, figuring there were plenty of resources to go around.

Then settlers came. The natives still saw no problem. They welcomed them.

But settlers built fences and homes and claimed land. Once they staked out a parcel of land, they saw the natives as tresspassers.

The early settlers took the best parcels. Soon, the natives were extremely restricted in where they could hunt and gather and were consigned to the least productive tracts.

Looking back on it, in order to protect themselves, the natives really should have murdered every trapper and settler as they showed up. They shouldn't have saved the settlers at Plymouth.

The Europeans coming here did not see themselves as theives taking the lands of the peoples who already lived here. The natives had traditional areas and an alien culture. The Europeans saw only open, undeveloped land free for the taking.

As the settlements grew, the natives became increasingly impoverished and we're soon begging for food from the settlers. The American response was to send in the military and massacre them. They were viewed as behaving badly, as troublemakers, as theives, as lazy, as unproductive.

The real theives were the oblivious settlers who did not see themselves as having taken anything from the natives.

People from developed countries routinely go into less developed areas, improve their own lives at the expense of the existing locals and then frame it like the locals are uneducated, stupid, unambitious, etc. They typically fail to acknowledge that they victimized them.

It's not quite that simple. The reality is that a hunter-gatherer lifestyle requires large amounts of land to support every individual. So tribespeople that live that way often have fairly brutal practices for limiting populations. Agriculture supports larger populations on the same amount of land and modern agriculture even more so.

Life expectancy is also generally higher in developed countries for various reasons. Quality of life can also be higher, though it isn't necessarily evenly higher.

But those gains frequently come at the expense of doing terrible things to local natives, natives who often helped the intruders initially survive at all. And this is how we repay their kindness.

My mother is an immigrant. I would love to spend some time in another country again before I die. But I'm not comfortable pretending that locals should just be thrilled I'm there, bringing my money and superior ways with me and so forth.