The New Passport-Poor
nybooks.com
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The whole angle about passports being a recent phenomenon is a red herring. Routine international travel is also a new phenomenon, enabled by relatively new technology (airplanes). That passports were not common in the 19th century does not suggest that people back then believed that controlling their borders was unimportant.
This seems like a narrow definition of freedom, something like, freedom is whatever rights are granted by the nations I like. I would think it is possible for something to be an impingement on one person's freedom, while being the exercise of another's.
Under the current framework of International Law, that is what it is. Sovereignty basically comes down to "bigger army diplomacy," as CGP Grey puts it. Even in the US. It's the sovereign US which uses its power to assert rights on behalf of its citizens.
Perhaps this could change. Perhaps we could establish individual human rights as the foundation of law on future colony planets. I'm not sure that game theory and human nature would allow it, however.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights ..."
Perhaps it's time for an update to our global practical ethics.
Now, should we have borders? Borders can be justified on utilitarian grounds because they allow a state to impose laws, provide safety, and control a market. But borders split people and therefore create a relationship between them. And that relationship can have moral and historical dimensions. For example, if a country has caused harm to another in the past, there would be a moral responsibility to rectify that wrong. The argument that the West should let in refugees is predicated on the West's history of colonialism and military adventures in the third world. Note that this moral-historical point of view is in opposition with the utilitarian case for borders. And this is where the author of the article and you disagree, and the point at which the battle for refugees is being fought.
Most of the time in the public discourse near me, under no circumstances is there any argument at all made in favor of the claims "borders should be open" and "let's bring third world immigrants here" and similar.
Instead these claims are widely accepted as unexamined premises that are self evidently and foundationally true, and that to deny them for any reason is the mark of dangerous lunacy.
Personally I find this situation ridiculous in both the epistemological and practical sense, but there you have it.
I leave it to the reader as an exercise to determine why these claims occupy such a privileged position in our public discourse.
I don't understand how this issue has epistemological dimensions. Can you explain?
The epistemological dimension, along which I find this ideology particularly ridiculous, comes from the "self-evidently true" and "doesn't need proof" parts.
It seems clear to me that the vast majority of people believe that the global status quo of closed borders is correct, or else there wouldn't have been a huge wave of anti-immigration leaders elected globally.
That is, I suspect the reason we're having this argument is that border enforcement is getting too extreme, with too many burdens and moral problems that people are compelled to start asking whether borders are even necessary at all.
Even small cities have borders in a sense, but those borders only are visible or enforced in ways that are usually invisible to the average citizen in the US.
I've worried as I've become older that the younger generation will have not known what it was like to live in a US society where border enforcement and airport security was close to nonexistent. When there was no Department of Homeland security, and, as Samantha Bee has recently pointed out, no ICE.
Now, in retrospect, would I want to return to a society with no airline security? Probably not, but I do think the pendulum has swung much too far in the opposite direction, and I worry younger generations will just take for granted that the increasing authoritarianism in the world is the only way to live.
Ironically, international travel is one of the best ways to realize that many cherished assumptions that your society has about the right way to do things may be false. Reality permits far more flexibility than societies generally allow, and when it doesn't, societies tend to ignore it anyway.
In my opinion, these are two very different things and if you don't treat them as such, you will inevitably end up in a scenario with extremist opposition.
I am less free if I can't take your stuff. The problem, is that someone else is less free in that case.
I'll bite: national security, economic wellness, and social services. A nation exists for the benefit of it's citizens and there are very credible arguments that borders are important for the well-being of the populace.
Because these are rights guaranteed to American citizens, not universal rights. The UK doesn't have freedom of speech and whether or not I like it that's totally their prerogative. There are also many cities in the world that are not free to move to (Mecca and Pyongyang come to mind).
I don't think there's any precedent for the rights granted via American jurisprudence to be globally, generally applicable.
In theory.
> makes it very clear that no one respects freedom of movement across national borders in the same way they respect freedom of speech of freedom of movement across city borders
I can certainly agree with you on that, I am an extremely strong supporter of free speech, and I not only don't respect free movement across borders, I'm very strongly opposed to it.
It sounds like you are working from a master list of universal human rights that I'm not aware of?
Why the asymmetry? Why shouldn't we apply the same standard to the rights and freedoms of the residents?
There are many, many, many way to place very light and focused restrictions on immigration that would achieve such ends, and people don't even talk about them. (E.g., if you're worried about security, make each immigrant pay a fee or bond that, in expectation, covers the costs imposed by the tiny minority of immigrants who commit crimes.)
That sounds great to me. The reason why such things aren't discussed in the US, is that proponents of such measures are tarred as "racist."
no one respects freedom of movement across national borders in the same way they respect freedom of speech
Because freedom of speech is essential to free societies. The false "freedom of movement across national borders" could well degrade a society. Why isn't there a freedom to move into your house? No government's resources are infinite. Illegal border-crossing only infringes in a less obvious and more indirect way, as compared to someone moving into your living room.
They aren't seriously discussed in almost any non-tiny developed country.
What you’re positing is that groups of people don’t have the right to control and govern physical pieces of territory. That’s facially wrong.
Borders cause suffering when people are trapped in war, violence, poverty. World leaders can ease crossing of borders to give immigrants better opportunities to live. The only reason they don't is because they need to be reelected and have careers after office, at best, and maybe they aspire to favor of the rich and white.
Sorry, but that doesn't follow. That would be tantamount to saying dating preferences ratify racism because society says it's OK that someone has never slept with an Asian woman. Just as someone might have preferences that contextually caused them to not sleep with people of a particular race, nothing precludes a country having genuinely meritocratic policies which happen to favor certain demographics at certain times. Implicit in this argument is the notion that racism is defined only by outcomes. That is illogical and destructive, because it precludes the existence of meritocratic reasons.
Again, this is just the intellectually dishonest use of "racism" as an emotional bludgeon to push an illogical political agenda.
Borders are like cell membranes which protect the internal workings of civilized life, commerce, and the rule of law. Applying human morality to sovereign powers makes as much sense as applying human morality to cells or galaxies. A sovereign power should protect the individual human rights of its citizens first. This is what makes sense.
This statement seems rather odd to me, I wonder if I am misunderstanding, or my perception of reality is wrong (and has been for basically me entire adult life).
To loosely paraphrase, it kind of sounds like you're stating that borders are (not just should be, but are) open by default, and any restrictions on that must meet a very strict level of justification.
If this a just yet another theory of "how things should be" well that's fine (and I beg to vigorously differ, as I suspect many others would), but it sounds like you think this is the way it is now.
That’s facially untrue. For example, the right to self determination. It makes no sense to say that an individual has the right to, e.g. have a democratic government. Groups of people have the collective right to form democratic societies.
Are you saying they are superficially wrong, but actually right once you dig beneath the face/surface?
How does a movement of a person though a territory hurts anyone or their nose?
Also, "nation states" are an extremely recent development.
Well defined states with foreign policies, governing systems, monopolies on the legitimate use of force, regulations, taxation etc etc have existed for thousands of years... we can go back to egypt vs kush vs the hittes. I think those were probably 'states'.
The greek city-states were DEFINITELY `states'.
States have existed for a while. And I think some of these states had well defined borders meant to interdict and restrict human movement. The roman empire definitely was pretty pre-occupied with border control/walls-see hadrian's wall.
The idea that states should have the consent of the governed or reflect a relatively homogeneous ethnic block with ties of common culture/history is more modern. which is probably what you are thinking of when you say `nation state'.
On the contrary, the idea of "each tribe on its own territory, with perpetual low-intensity border disputes between all neighbors" is literally the oldest possible social arrangement.
The US, specifically, did not have a very restrictive immigration policy in the 19th century, and while international travel wasn't routine, millions and millions migrated from Europe to the US in that century.
This is just one of the concepts. Unfortunately for quite some time there has been emerging a different concept based on teachings of Marx that everyone is equal and that means the notion of reciprocity is meaningless in this context and since everyone is equal there should be no borders. I suspect your idea of freedom will be deemed extremist in a decade or two and expressing it could cost you a lot of social points.
How does it make any sense that a future government is so authoritarian/statist that they have "social points" yet advocating against the libertarian/anarchist ideal of open borders costs you government-controlled "social points"?
This kind of "left wing idea -> slippery slope -> communist china" strawman is getting really popular, and it's disgusting. In actual China it is far more likely you would lose social points for advocating for weaker borders and thus against the government status quo, rather than the opposite.
Maybe you mean "In the context of Maoism" or want to point out more specifically the tenant of Marxism you're referring to? I can't really tell if you're trolling or not.
There's a human cost to declaring people to be "illegal", just like there is in the War On Drugs. In this case thousands of children have been deliberately separated from their parents and then ... lost?
Who's declaring this? Nobody's declaring a human's existence to be illegal. They're humans who have broken laws -- that is done something illegal. It feels like a willful attempt to control a narrative by warping semantics.
I've often wondered what a world without borders would really be like. As ChicagoBoy11 said, it would be very difficult to oppress people if they were simply able to get up and go somewhere else. Eventually I think the world would be a better place.
But in the short term, developed countries would be absolutely swamped. They'd have to completely rethink almost everything to do with work, welfare and housing. Maps like this make you realise how "small" the developed/western parts of the world are [1].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12622327
[1] http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/earth-divided-in-ten-zones-...
Here's my cynical take on what would happen: the well-to-do would benefit massively as the poor moved in to reduce unskilled and low-skill labor prices. Welfare would be stopped because society wouldn't be able to afford it. Housing would be worked out automatically by the free market, except in SF and other legally restricted jurisdictions. In the end, national inequality would rise to match global inequality, because all that's happening is that individuals are moving.
Ironically, the old Republican conservatopia vision of society (no welfare, free market, not too much emphasis on the interests of the poor) would be able to handle mass migration better than almost any other that the west has considered. If there's no social safety net at all, there's almost no cost to having somebody new move in. (Police, sure, but you can tax the work of the new people.)
I only learned about social credit scores last month. Have they actually been around for much longer? That seems unlikely, given that Wikipedia says it's still proposed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
It seems disingenuous to claim that a proposed system is in general use.
https://www.express.co.uk/travel/articles/964020/china-passe...
I did not know about this. Can someone shed some light on limits to internal travel in China?
First world countries want the best of the best, not unskilled immigrants who they'll have to support. Developing countries aren't going to want to allow non-tourist immigration unless you have investment to offer. So we end up with this byzantine system of quotas and quid pro quo which treats people like pawns. Unpleasant and unsustainable for all involved.