What is the Mayflower mindset and how does it affect our globalized world?

In November 1620, a ship from England landed on the American shores carrying a bunch of venturesome sailors and passengers who sought a new life in the unexplored “New World” which was by and large still a mystery to Europe. The name of this ship was Mayflower. What followed was a flurry of immigrants to the American shores, all seeking settlement on the virgin soil and possibly new and more prosperous lives. The new settlers quite naturally came in direct conflict with the natives whom they crushed with ample ease using their modern weapons. As years went by, these new settlers deemed themselves to be the masters of the New World and their future generations saw themselves as the most natural heirs of the abundance that America had to offer. Most significantly, they sought to consolidate their position and developed serious contempt for any future arrivals from the Old World.

This hypocritical mindset is called Mayflower thinking and it represents a tendency among countries and their populations, of being hostile towards any immigrants while conveniently forgetting about their own arrival many generations ago.

As a matter of fact, human populations have throughout history been in a constant state of flux, migrating from one part of the world to another in search of a better life, or to escape calamities, political upheavals and other threats. Thus, the notion that “I found this place first and therefore it’s mine!” as propagated by the Mayflower mindset is not just simplistic but also very infantile.

We are moving fast towards a globalized world where national boundaries are getting increasingly blurred. Capital and labor is moving across the world at a breakneck pace. In such times, Mayflower thinking sparks xenophobic violence and mistrust towards the relatively “new” arrivals. Much of Donald Trump’s politics for instance, has centered around this thinking and hate crimes in the US are a clear manifestation of it. Interestingly, this social tendency exists not just in the highly urbanized and cosmopolitan regions of the world but even in the smaller pockets, say Kashmir, where the majority Muslim population that itself arrived as late as the 14th century, now ardently seeks to protect a law that bars non-locals to buy property in Kashmir. Quite clearly, it acts as an impediment for a free world where easy mixing of races, cultures and languages is in line with our evolution as a global society. It has serious implications for global business, travel, international relations and peace. Such rough edges need to be smoothed out soon and populations need to be sensitized in order to avoid ugly xenophobic incidents and to open the floodgates of cross-border migration, people-to-people contact, cultural exchange and thus a more peaceful and heterogeneous world.