Analysing the impact of migration on background social strain using a continuous social stratification model

The background social strain of a society can be quantitatively estimated using various statistical indicators. Mathematical models, allowing to forecast the dynamics of social strain, are successful in describing various social processes. If the number of interacting groups is small, the dynamics of the corresponding indicators can be modelled with a system of ordinary differential equations. The increase in the number of interacting components leads to the growth of complexity, which makes the analysis of such models a challenging task. A continuous social stratification model can be considered as a result of the transition from a discrete number of interacting social groups to their continuous distribution in some finite interval. In such a model, social strain naturally spreads locally between neighbouring groups, while in reality, the social elite influences the whole society via news media, and the Internet allows non-local interaction between social groups. These factors, however, can be taken into account to some extent using the term of the model, describing negative external influence on the society. In this paper, we develop a continuous social stratification model, describing the dynamics of two societies connected through migration. We assume that people migrate from the social group of donor society with the highest strain level to poorer social layers of the acceptor society, transferring the social strain at the same time. We assume that all model parameters are constants, which is a realistic assumption for small societies only. By using the finite volume method, we construct the spatial discretization for the problem, capable of reproducing finite propagation speed of social strain. We verify the discretization by comparing the results of numerical simulations with the exact solutions of the auxiliary non-linear diffusion equation. We perform the numerical analysis of the proposed model for different values of model parameters, study the impact of migration intensity on the stability of acceptor society, and find the destabilization conditions. The results, obtained in this work, can be used in further analysis of the model in the more realistic case of inhomogeneous coefficients.