Children of the Future

One of the marks of modern times is that masses of ordinary people have come to believe that their children’s lives could be a lot better than their own. Over the last two centuries, as the world has opened up, this belief has become one of the driving forces for mass migration. People sell all they have, travel steerage, often declass themselves, anything to get out; when they land, they live in wretched slums, work themselves to death in jobs the natives won’t accept, put up with vicious insults and injuries (and every time and place has a racist and xenophobic repertory all its own), subject themselves to enormous amounts of crap, and alles fur die kindelech, everything for the kids, as they used to say when I was a kid. T...