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Comment by the_mitsuhiko | Hacker News Reader

Passports and citizenship in many ways are the most unfair thing in the world as your place of birth influences what you can do in life.

For many of us the idea of having a bad passport is only theoretical in nature but it decides many things in life for others and sets stupid arbitrary ceilings that should not exist.

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I often see stories of people quitting their jobs and travelling the world and how awesome it is. It's sth I look forward to doing but being the holder of a Kenyan passport, I highly doubt I'll actually manage to "travel around the world", given all the legal barriers setup against passport holders from developing countries.

Cheer up, brother (or sister)! It seems you can easily travel to a lot of Africa, south east Asia, caribbeans and a few other places: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Kenyan_c...

What kind of legal barriers kenyans have to travel?

A good number of countries require visa. Being granted a visa is often an uphill task, with demands made for your bank statements, proof of income to ascertain you have a job to come back to, proof of hotel bookings for where you are headed or proof you have somebody to host you, any other proof to show that you are indeed visiting to do what you are claiming is the purpose of the trip. It's an endless list of demands and they could still deny you the visa.

Well, that's for everybody. I can't go to the USA because they demand visa with the same requirements you said.

Although there are many countries that don't demand visa, they will only allow you in for 3 months maximum.

I find that Chris Rock has the best summary of it with his "I'm American" routine: "What, you think you’re better than somebody from France ’cause you came out of a pussy in Detroit?"

Nothing specifically American about it though. Many people in France think they're better than Syrian refugees because they're born from a pussy in Paris.

Full transcript: http://www.cswap.com/2004/Chris_Rock:_Never_Scared/cap/en/25...

You can easily turn this around, since some people think the other citizens from EU should cater to their beliefs because they were born from a pussy in Kabul and Damascus.

I agree that country of origin is 100 percent luck. That doesn't mean all cultures are equal though.

Mine is better than yours, my government told me!

The ancestors of that pussy in Paris built an advanced society with equal rights, education, respect, etc. That's why people born from a French pussy deserve that, while people from other societies do not.

Is it our fault that other people that have had the same hundreds of years to build advanced societies haven't done it? Do we have to literally live worse because of it?

> Is it our fault that other people that have had the same hundreds of years to build advanced societies haven't done it?

For tens of millions of people that were conquered by, or had democratically elected leaders overthrown by, or had their economies crippled by (US, UK, Russia)

Yes. It is our fault.

You deserve precisely nothing because of what your ancestors did. Everyone deserves the same human rights on the basis of being born human.

People from other societies deserve all these good things too. Uncontrolled immigration may not be the best way to achieve this though.

No they do not deserve anything they and their ancestors haven't worked for. Nobody just "deserves" anything.

> Nobody just "deserves" anything.

A few comments up you're saying the French deserved their stuff because their ancestors worked for it.

Nobody just "deserves" anything [just for being born. Someone has to work hard for everything]

Yet you claimed precisely that a few comments above.

Cognitive dissonance.

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