On January 7, 2015, the headquarters of the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo was attacked by ***, killing 12 people.
On May 26, 2020, the death of George Floyd, a black American, ignited a nationwide bloodshed in the United States.
On October 16, 2020, outside of Paris, 47-year-old history teacher Samiel Patti was beheaded in public for showing cartoons related to religion to his students
All of this is often summed up as a crisis of immigration, or Huntington's popular "clash of civilizations", especially the violent clash between Islamic civilization and Western civilization.
Thomas Sowell, however, argues that the root cause of all this is not simply immigration, but politics, a change in the way the state is constituted. In his book Migration and Culture, he argues that in the long history of human development, the fate of migrants is inseparable from the changes in the way states are constituted. The situation of migrants can be roughly divided into three stages, along with changes in the way countries are cohesive
Pre-modern state: cohesion with the emperor
In pre-modern states, the cohesion of the state depended mainly on a group of people identifying with a ruler, and the authority of the ruler was based on military conquest and religion.
For example, the Roman ruler Caesar conquered almost all of Europe by force, and the Roman emperor declared himself a descendant of the gods on the top of Mount Olympus.
The state of Qin also destroyed six countries with the power of one country, and Qin Shi Huang proclaimed himself the "Son of Heaven".
and Louis XIV, the Sun King of the Bourbon dynasty of France, who proclaimed that "I am the nation".
Such pre-modern states were relatively tolerant of immigrants - the Roman Empire granted citizenship to conquered regions regardless of color or class, and even allowed them to enter the Senate. In ancient China, intermarriage among ethnic groups was long encouraged. 
However, this vertical identity of the ancient empire was very fragile. The Roman Empire fell apart due to the onslaught of Germanic barbarians. The Qin Empire died in the second generation.
The modern state: cohesion is about identifying with a nation
In a modern country, the cohesion of the country mainly depends on a group of people identifying with a nation, because we are the same group of people, so we live in a country.
The origin of the modern nation-state was the French Revolution. The Revolution violently overthrew the Bourbon dynasty and replaced the "divine right of the king" with "popular sovereignty" as the supreme power within the country, completely subverting the traditional political structure.
After the French Revolution, "equality for all" and "democratic politics" became political correctness, which inevitably required a standard to identify oneself and become the subject of voting. As a result, different regions began to tell different stories to create a common identity – and the modern nation-state was born. 
This horizontal way of identity brought about a far greater national cohesion, mobilization and national power than in ancient times - the nationalist France led by Napoleon formed a dimensionality reduction blow to the surrounding feudal kingdoms, and in just 10 years, swept across Europe.
However, the modern nation-state has been tyrannical and cruel since its inception – forcing the participation of the people and demanding that each individual pay the price of his or her own life. When it develops to the extreme, it also brings great disasters to human civilization.
Nazi Germany, for example, inflated its blood nationalism to the extreme, inventing the harshest way in human history to deal with the Jews, an outsider, a state-based genocidal program.
Xi history is the antidote to contemporary arrogance
At present, although the nation-state is still the main organization of national cohesion, with the confrontation of various currents of thought, the concept of the nation-state has begun to be affected to varying degrees.
After the two world wars, the West began to reflect on nationalism as the main culprit in the world wars. As a result, people are increasingly abandoning narrow regional and ancestry concepts, and seeking to rebuild the imaginary community of the nation based on the recognition of the social governance model.
Typical examples of this are the Western left-wing liberals, who have begun to deconstruct the narrative of the composition of the traditional nation-state. Take the United States, for example. Progressives deny the existence of an "American people" who share the Puritan faith, and believe that the modern "gospels" of liberty, equality, and fraternity (pluralism) are sufficient to be the foundation for nation-building. As a result, the emphasis on openness to immigrants even suggests that "American" should never be defined. Turning modern America into a "mosaic salad platter" – Americans' national identities are disintegrating, and immigrants' identification with their home countries is overpowering the United States. 
And this is a reflection of the root cause of the migration crisis in the modern world - the cohesion of the state is being dismantled.
Many people may not accept this, but in fact, from the formation of the nation-state to the present, but for more than 200 years, no one can guarantee that the nation-state will continue to exist in the future.
Today, how should we view the phenomenon of migration in the face of global issues that are tearing apart the United States, Europe, and even East Asia?
And in the future, will there be a better way to unite humanity into a more tolerant and vibrant society?
The famous British historian Paul Johnson said: "Xi history is the antidote to contemporary arrogance." It humbly tells us that there are many superficial hypotheses that seem novel and likely to us to be, and in fact have been tested by history. ”
Thomas Sowell's Migration and Culture is one such book, which shows the historical changes, conflicts, and integrations of the ways in which human states are constituted from the perspective of world history. It shows this process in beautiful writing. This book can be said to be the starting point for thinking about these important questions.
To this end, I sincerely recommend Thomas Sowell's "Migration and Culture", and interested book lovers can click on the product card below to collect it.