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Comment by pradn | Hacker News Reader

I am less free if I can not cross a border. That part is simple.

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.

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>> "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."

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 agree that hardly anyone argues for totally free borders. But many argue for more open borders for refugees (who by definition need help). Others argue for more free immigration from former colonies. Whether you are okay with that depends on your stance toward reparations, multiculturalism, helping those in need, and the duty of historical oppressors and colonizers.

I don't understand how this issue has epistemological dimensions. Can you explain?

Many people in my area regard "3rd world immigrants have a right to come to America" as a proposition so self-evidently true that it could not possibly merit proof, argument, or thinking about.

The epistemological dimension, along which I find this ideology particularly ridiculous, comes from the "self-evidently true" and "doesn't need proof" parts.

I'm confused - are you saying that "borders should be open" is a claim that is widely accepted as self evidently true, or the opposite?

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.

Like intellectual property and some other issues, I have often felt that the appearance in public discourse of arguments for two very opposite, extreme positions is a signal that something is really wrong with the current situation.

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.

> 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.

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 not cross a border. That part is simple.

I am less free if I can't take your stuff. The problem, is that someone else is less free in that case.

That’s like saying “I’m less free if I can’t move into your house without your consent.” It doesn’t comport with how we think about freedom and rights.

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