Segregation keeps being resurrecting because some people apparently derive more satisfaction from population control than anything else. Manipulating people by keeping them from coming or going when and where they want is preferable to manipulating the components of their physical environment.
But, perhaps they have no choice. Perhaps some people are so practically inept that getting others to do for them is the only option they have for getting sustenance. Certainly, we are all in that situation at birth. Some people, apparently, never develop beyond the suckling stage even as their bodies grow larger and larger. We provide succor to the elderly, largely because we recognize and associate infirmities with old age. But, if personal experience is at all relevant, the only real difference is that in providing care to the very young and the very old one need not take their personal preferences into account.
The arrogation of the phrase “population control” as a euphemism by people who don’t like their own kind very much and prefer the total number of humans to be fewer, has had the ancillary effect of disguising the perhaps more pervasive totalitarian impulse, universally expressed in various strategies (bribes and penalties) to keep humans from relocating themselves at will. Indeed, the numbers may serve as an ulterior motive to disguise that the real objection is to humans moving where they are not wanted–much as pollution control is actually aimed at keeping pollutants from going where they aren’t wanted, rather than their total elimination. Population control programs and pollution control programs do have the same result — nobody’s satisfied.
Motivation does count. Do humans want other humans to stay in place as a power trip or because their dependence on other people makes it an imperative? If it’s the former, then there is no reason or benefit in accommodating their segregationist agenda. If it’s because of the latter, we can accommodate their dependence by caring for them even as we go about our business. Of course, in order to do that, we in the U.S. have got to get over the notion that everyone has to earn his or her keep. After all, we keep millions of pets. Why not a few million incompetents? Then, perhaps, we wouldn’t have to put up with people making a nuisance of themselves just to survive.