Self-organization Simulation Applied to Migration across a Peaceful Border: A Recent Study

Self-organization using simple dynamic laws has been applied to migration across a common border between two entities, states or countries. The motion of the migrants and their final positions are presented. In the system there were two sets of objects. One set was on a side of the boundary. One side, the right side, was considered to be the better entity. That is it had a good government and the economy was strong. On the left side the entity was decidedly different with respect to the governance and the economy. Each side's objects were further divided into two groups. The two groups were referred to as strong and weak. The strong represent the governance, rich or elite and weak refers to the general population. Initially the objects were randomly distributed in this two dimensional square bounded region, and then allowed to dynamically interact for a number of iterations. The forces among all of the particles as groups were defined to be attractive or repulsive and could be adjusted to study the resulting configuration from the dynamics. Four experiments were conducted to see how self-organization applies for these scenarios. In Experiment 1 the migration took place with only the object-to-object forces active. In Experiment 2 the concept of employment was introduced. An unemployed object was allowed to move faster than an employed object thus giving the unemployed greater mobility. The employment rate on right side is considerably higher than on the left side. Experiment 3 explored changing one of the forces from repelling to attract. Experiment 3 was the same as Experiment 2 except for this and it went for twice as many iterations. Experiment 4 created employment centers on the right side. These centers provided jobs to left side migrants that came close enough to a center. If the left side object got a center job then that migrant did not move for the remainder of the simulation. In Experiments 1 and 2 there was no incentive for a migrant to remain so the migrant traveled back and forth across the border. In Experiment 4 it was assumed that the job provided incentive for the migrant to remain at a fixed location. Thus clusters of migrants formed around the job centers. The clusters that formed were not sustainable indicating lack of reason to stay. The objectives of this effort were to apply computer simulation to a group of migrants to observe the traffic patterns from one side to the other and to observe if cluster or enclaves were formed.