Isaac Asimov on immigration

Recently, I read the Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov. This book takes place thousands of years before the Foundation series, but in the same galaxy. The setting is a galaxy where humans have colonized several other worlds, and enough time has passed that the outworlders are called "spacers" and people on Earth generally don't trust them. The spacers want Earthicans to integrate with robots, (the way the sapcers have), and the earthicans simply don't want to.

I don't know if Asimov intended the book to be an allegory for illegal immigration in the United States, but it sort of works on that level. Humans don't want robots around because robots will take jobs from humans. There is almost a riot at one point because a woman refused to be served by a robot in a shoe store. Asimov makes the point that nobody wants to work in a shoe store, and eventually the woman consents to be served by the robot.

This earth is different from ours in that there is also an elaborate classification system (something I'm finding more and more in what I read) where the main character has some prestige that can be lost if he's found associating with robots. He's in luck, because he ends up being partnered with a robot to solve the mystery of who killed a spacer. This robot is different from the rest, however, in that it looks human, and fooled most humans for most of the book about what it truly is.

While reading this book, I realized that a lot of good sci-fi is just a mystery novel that takes place in space, the future or an alternate reality. This one specifically is in the future, where we have space travel and all kinds of neat technology. One aspect of the main character (who I called Deckard and imagined to look just like Harrison Ford, I forgot his name now) that I didn't like was how he jumped to conclusions quickly while trying to solve the case. He would go to his suspect, build a story that made sense, and then accuse them. His suspect then presented a logical alibi, and he had to start all over.

I think it says a lot about Isaac Asimov's writing that his books are relevant to a specific issue decades after they were written. Illegal immigration was not the problem in 1954 that it is today, and because of this, readers in the 1950's and 60 years later will get a totally different reading experience from it.

That is why Asimov is a Grandmaster of Science Fiction.