Forced Labor in Malaysia's Electronics Industry | Hacker News Reader

Forced Labor in Malaysia's Electronics Industry

theatlantic.com

220 pointscraigjb241 comments

There will always be capital willing to exploit labor to the fullest extent that it can. But as the poor of the world continue to rise and the global oversupply of labor diminishes, will labor gain enough leverage to end the abuses?

In time, yes.

I’m not so sure. With an ever closer relationship between global capital and governments, and advances in technology that could facilitate incredible levels of surveillance, any form of resistance against the status quo could be shut down far more effectively than it ever could have been in the past.

Yes, this is what I'm concerned about as well. We've entered another gilded age, with skyrocketing inequality. Some argue that's fine so long as all boats are rising. But with incredible wealth disparities come political power disparities, and I don't think it makes sense to acquiesce to relative marginalization even if in an absolute sense things are improving.

It certainly remains to be seen.

The consequences of electronic media are unknowable. The scope alone is surely incalculable.

Since the mid-20th century, American culture has revealed a notable propensity for sensational hampster-wheel architecture. Possibly not by coincidence, labor has been no match.

Media, electronic or not dictate the extents of social functionality through an unknowably complex process. I think it can loosely be illustrated as a culture of preferred data structures in a software design. Redesigning the softare to adapt to a newly preferred data structure will require a radical refactoring. With software, we aim to understand that refactoring in order to implement it, which we do before it goes to production because we are individually punished if we do it after. But when adapting to a new media form, the punishments are expected to be received by society as a whole, and the individuals wasted by the process. Acknowledging the phenomenon depends on a mass of individual comprehensions working together to illustrate the threat. And that's only to acknowledge the the threat exists...

Why do you assume that the global oversupply of labor is going to diminish? It seems quite plausible that the next, say, 50 years might bring an increase in the oversupply of labor, especially as the living standards rise and that labor becomes more expensive while at the same time the cost of automating the same tasks is shrinking.

It's an easy argument to make that for 95%+ of history, for thousands of years, there was a global oversupply of labour. The last 50 years has been the massive aberration, but because everybody was born in that very weird situation people think of it as normal.

Africa will come back online after China's labor becomes too expensive.

Sub-saharan Africa already has some of the fastest growing economies on the planet. Ethiopia, for example, is growing at 8% GDP.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/05/ethiopia-africa-faste...

Does anyone else remember being taught in Econ 101 about globalization and comparative advantage and how great it is? Either the educators didn't know this would happen or it was a campaign to sell the public on the idea. Or maybe it was just bad teaching. I wonder which one it was.

The campaign one.

We also learned about externalities, two of the biggest being sociological and ecological.

Bingo. Externalities make it sound like just a cost of doing business, which in a hyper capitalist system, the exploitation of human beings is exactly that...

The "competitive advantage" that many countries offer has always had more to do with their willingness to grind their workers into bone meal than any sort of technological or agricultural capability.

Do they not teach you people about the Cultural Revolution? Those workers were bone meal long before they walked into a Foxconn factory. Inequality is a precondition for exploitive labor practices, not a result of them.

There is an advantage, the advantage is that you don't have to pay the full cost of their labor, you can offset it onto the workers so the price you pay is lower, looking like a savings.

What lives do you think these people would be living if not for globalization?

The person in the article would most likely still be with her family. She doesn't get a net benefit from her work, she was caught by the system and now cannot leave.

I remember my Econ 101 teacher being much more cautious - noting that trade produces benefits on average, and that the benefits everyone iff there is political action to redistribute the benefits; and that fiscal is better than monetary stimulus, but in most Western political systems that's harder to push through.

Generally those simple adages are very much spherical-cow observations, with assumptions of rational (i.e. operating in the system's interest) leadership, rule of law, and priced-in externalities; when those professors go from their intro classes to their research they start to account for more of the real-world complications.

Any econ 101 teacher who goes off script talking about politics shouldn't be taken seriously. My micro and macro classes did not mention political actions at all unless you consider describing the potential actions of the Federal reserve as inherently political.

Economics is inheritantly political. To not talk about politics in an economy class is to deny reality.

Or worse, to assume their implied political position as "natural" and everything else as a "distortion".

Any econ 101 class that talks seriously about a) fiscal effects, or b) trade (and hence the usefulness of Pareto-optimal game states) needs to talk about politics, because they are part of the system in question.

This professor specifically specialized in the study of recessions, in which government action is essential; and took special interest in the effectiveness of different government interventions.

Studying these subjects without talking about policy and politics is like studying security and ignoring human-factors research. I am in fact seriously skeptical about the quality of your econ classes that did not mention the effects of government spending, trade policy, taxation, or price controls.

I would argue the opposite. Especially for Macro. I'd argue that any econ 101 teacher that doesn't consider politics shouldn't be taken seriously. Ignoring political realities is precisely what is wrong with a lot of (but by no means all) economic reasoning in our society.

Or maybe it's a complicated subject and the outrageous aggregate wealth increases might plausibly be seen as worthwhile even if they create this kind of localized disaster.

Basically: if you want to argue against "globalization" and for a return to, I dunno, the world of the 1960's, recognize that you are arguing for a return to the 1960's, and the 60's were by modern standards a human rights disaster basically everywhere.

Progress is good. It's not "all" good, and needs attention and regulation. But ludditism is never the answer. What was that about bad teaching again?

Don't be obtuse. When people talk about going back to the 60s in this context, they are talking about a return to the economic conditions that actually saw a steady improvement of QOL for the working class in the US - namely, organized labor and high marginal tax rates. Shoehorning in the orthogonal human rights abuses is just a distraction.

High marginal tax rates don't create steady improvement for the working class. They might create a single step of improvement by lowering their taxes, but it doesn't increase the rate of improvement beyond that one jump.

>Basically: if you want to argue against "globalization" and for a return to, I dunno, the world of the 1960's, recognize that you are arguing for a return to the 1960's, and the 60's were by modern standards a human rights disaster basically everywhere.

That's one of the more bizarro strawmen I've seen.

He doesn't suggest some kind of time travel -- so that we have to take it all, the good and the bad, of an earlier era.

In that he doesn't even say anything about going back to an earlier era.

He speaks of going back to an earlier practice.

Which is what humans who shape their future, as opposed to being taken left and right by some impersonal forces, can perfectly do, without having to adopt anything else.

>Progress is good.

Progress, outside of technology (which is accumulative), is a myth.

History has ups and downs and can go either way. The horrors of WWII were worse than whatever 19th century came up with. American politics, for one, where better in the 60s and 70s than today. And so on....

> He doesn't suggest some kind of time travel -- so that we have to take it all, the good and the bad, of an earlier era.

He/you are hardly illustrating a clear example either. You're just flinging poop, basically, with your "bad teaching" and "progress is a myth". The bottom line is that trade with the developing world over the past half century has been a staggering engine of growth. So if you don't want "globalization" then you have to explain how you get China to grow at 9% year after year for like three decades (or whatever the numbers were) without that trade. You don't get to wave a magic wand and assume that part.

>He/you are hardly illustrating a clear example either.

My argument is: if we want to change society in a way that resembles how one thing was in another era, there's no law or necessity that dictates that we also adopt everything else from that era.

We can pick and match.

>You're just flinging poop, basically, with your "bad teaching" and "progress is a myth"

Not sure what the "bad teaching" refers to.

The "Flinging poop" part, I find rude.

With 'progress is a myth' I made a statement, and gave two supporting examples just below it.

>The bottom line is that trade with the developing world over the past half century has been a staggering engine of growth. So if you don't want "globalization" then you have to explain how you get China to grow at 9% year after year for like three decades (or whatever the numbers were) without that trade. You don't get to wave a magic wand and assume that part.

I don't want "China to grow at 9% year after year". I want them to have a stable economy and work on redistribution. Similar for everybody else.

I don't want ever growing pies and larger slices. I want better cut slices of the already existing pies. Growth "year after year" is not sustainable (not just not sustainable itself, not sustainable for the environment and society either).

Besides, the net result of that "growth" was to make a middle class in China by deflating the middle class elsewhere (including the US).

The rich get to produce stuff in China and increase their margins (so the "economy grows"), but their country's working class (that used to produce similar stuff at home) is dealt a heavy blow and the middle class is squeezed.

The end result is not some large pie / bigger harmony slices and other fictional unicorns, rather it's trillion dollar bailouts of Wall Street and Detroit, plus "99% percent" on one side, and the "Tea Party" and Trump on the other side.

> I don't want "China to grow at 9% year after year". I want them to have a stable economy and work on redistribution. Similar for everybody else.

No one who knows anything about the cultural revolution would make that statement. A China starting in the 1960's with a "stable economy" and "better redistribution" would, today, be a dirt poor backwater having survived famine after famine. Think North Korea, but with a billion people.

You're fantasizing about a world that doesn't/didn't exist. There's no way to get modern Chinese wealth without "globalization". And without that wealth you have a humanitarian disaster.

>You're fantasizing about a world that doesn't/didn't exist. There's no way to get modern Chinese wealth without "globalization". And without that wealth you have a humanitarian disaster.

China existed for milennia without "modern Chinese wealth" -- and was the biggest economy on earth for many centuries before the European powers started their colonial plundering.

Economies can also grow slowly and organically -- as opposed to a mad rush to "year over year N% growth" consequences be damned -- and can also chose which areas NOT to grow, and not to pursue, when those areas might be harmful etc.

What on earth are you on about? It genuinely seems like you're arguing that the only difference between the literal famine of the cultural revolution and modern China is... I dunno, attitude or something.

Something had to build all that infrastructure: the factories, generators, plumbing, aqueducts, cell towers, refineries... If you have an alternative economics that can get all that without "economic growth", then you really need to start explaining it to people.

>What on earth are you on about? It genuinely seems like you're arguing that the only difference between the literal famine of the cultural revolution and modern China is... I dunno, attitude or something.

Who said modern China is what's needed or that it's a sustainable model? I, for one, didn't.

You can avoid famine without having "modern china". They could avoid famine even in the "great famine" era -- as long as they didn't have the stupid bureaucratic policies that created its conditions (forced migrations, mismanagement, agricultural regulations, etc).

> Progress, outside of technology (which is accumulative), is a myth.

I'm really not sure what definition of progress you're using here but calling it a myth isn't very meaningful unless you give a good definition first.

I'm using the usual casual meaning of progress that conveys some overall, non-necessarily monotonic but steady, betterment of humanity in all aspects.

And in particular I (and many scholars -- though others of course disagree) say that:

1) there's nothing inevitable about progress in the areas where it has been made. Even technologically we could regress a la Mad Max if we hit e.g. continuous climate conditions, or a lengthy major war (nuclear or not).

That this can happen locally is a plain fact -- there are tons of places where it has indeed. Libya, for one, were more technological advanced, prosperous, safe, and progressive a mere few decades ago. I'm also saying that it can happen globally too.

2) actual cumulative progress, while itself volatile (see 1), is only increasing for the most part in the area of technology and/or knowledge. Not in moral norms, or in arts, etc.

Morally populations can regress on a dime, and we have ups and downs all the time, plus there are modern norms that are worse (or less progressive by even our standards) than older norms. There are also eras that produced far crappier art than earlier or later eras (e.g. medieval art vs classical).

It's a hard one to teach, because everything carries so much baggage. Comparative advantage as they teach it is not a bad idea. It's a long road from that premise to the conclusion that free markets are all you need to know about humans.

Migrant workers have been for thousands of years and still are, the most powerless class of people. They have no political power, almost by definition. The levels of minimum standards protection they get make a big difference.

I think this is an area that the UN could have done something about, but never did.

The pedagogues might not have been clued in, but their masters certainly knew. If Jim Crow didn't make it abundantly clear, Norbert Wiener spelled it out again in 1950:

"Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor."

That was a comment on the perils of mechanization/automatization, not globalization:

Let us remember that the automatic machine, whatever we think of any feelings it may have or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor. It is perfectly clear that this will produce an unemployment situation, in comparison with which the present recession and even the depression of the thirties will seem a pleasant joke. (...) Thus the new industrial revolution is a two-edged sword. It may be used for the benefit of humanity, but only if humanity survives long enough to enter a period in which such a benefit is possible. It may also be used to destroy humanity, and if it is not used intelligently it can go very far in that direction. There are, however, hopeful signs on the horizon. Since the publication of the first edition of this book, I have participated in two big meetings with representatives of business management, and I have been delighted to see that awareness on the part of a great many of those present of the social dangers of our new technology and the social obligations of those responsible for management to see that the new modalities are used for the benefit of man, for increasing his leisure and enriching his spiritual life, rather than merely for profits and the worship of the machine as a new brazen calf.

Is there a difference, other than what the parts are made of?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumford#Megamachines

It's easy to look at how bad things are and lose sight of the possibility that this might be an improvement.

Somehow foreigners keep coming, despite the abuses, so either these people are complete idiots who can't figure things out even after decades of being taken advantage of, or things actually work out well for most of them.

Keep in mind that the exploitation may be just as bad, or worse, in many of the places these people originate from.

"better to be exploited and have food than to be free and starve"

than to be not free and starve

> Either the educators didn't know this would happen or it was a campaign to sell the public on the idea.

Globalisation has resulted in the greatest reduction in human poverty to have ever occurred. The benefits are not uniformly distributed, and there are losers and winners, the losers deserve protection, and the shortcomings should be decried and fixed, sure.

But to conclude from the fact that some migrants in one country are having a rough time that globalisation as a whole is a negative thing is errant nonsense; the equivalent of stubbing your toe and deciding that the entire concept of furniture was a mistake.

The mere fact you're posting on here makes it clear you're part of the global 1%. As such, you have the luxury of preferring policies that avoid making you uncomfortable. Others face harsher constraints.

I mean I guess define globalization because the thing immediately preceding it--colonial mercantilism--was just as global. That rise from poverty coincides with both the death of nominal colonialism and also frankly the rise of Soviet and Maoist communism and the CIA's banana republic crimes in Central and South America. Further "Free Trade" as usually used to characterize Globalisation still doesn't exist in any useful sense even in things like NAFTA which has free trade in the name.

> Globalisation has resulted in the greatest reduction in human poverty to have ever occurred

Correlation ≠ Causation. How can you so easily attribute one to the other? I'd argue advancements in science have done far more to alleviate poverty and suffering rather than lowered trade barriers.

It's a common theme worldwide that most of the gains from globalisation have gone to the elites while environmental damage has been externalised.

That's not a bad point IMO, and one that I often vaguely wonder about too. Just how much of the reduction in poverty is because of capitalism/globalization, and how much is because of improved technology?

I'm not sure I know the answer to that. Then again, I'm not sure it's so easy to separate out these things - capitalism almost certainly lead to more technology.

To conclude that globalization is a positive thing for the poorest people of the planet without qualification is also errant nonsense.

The greatest reduction in human poverty is due mainly to China, where globalization has been managed in order to develop the country.

The standard narrative is that this is not necessary. Just open your markets and everything will be OK. Don't protect your industries, don't manipulate your currency, don't 'steel' 'intellectual property', etc and everything will work for the best.

That's obviously not true, but it's a line that keep being pushed.

Macroeconomics is essentially a public relations campaign on behalf of wealthy private business interests.

Adam Smith explained the downsides of capitalist in the original book on the topic. "Conservative" teachers just prefer to see them under the rug.

That isn't what comparative advantage is - it is a recognition fo opportunity costs. If you have one country that can grow wheat and cotton better than their northern neighbor who can just grow wheat with lesser yield per acre it would make sense to get as much cotton as they need in the south and trade with the north for wheat because suitable acres not spent growing cotton are a loss in comparison.

I know my teaching of the industrial revolution emphasized that things were dirty, nasty, and brutal. There was exploitation of the desperate masses but it was still sadly a better alternative than being killed in a pogrom or starving to death in a famine and eventually after many lives were lost reform arose to shift the balance.

While the sort of scamming and defacto debt slavery are unacceptable - they were also unfortunately precedented, especially when desperate people are involved and it become less worth asking 'is it a scam' first.

Industrialization is a morally messy process on many levels with no comfortable answers let alone easy ones. Take something like child labor for instance - clearly it is better off to have kids learning and preparing for the coming next stage of the economy instead of toiling or risking injury. However banning it and enforcing it too early perversely leads to increased child prostitution (no pun intended for such a somber subject matter) as they still need money to survive.

> "If you have one country that can grow wheat and cotton better than their northern neighbor who can just grow wheat with lesser yield per acre..."

You're describing absolute advantage, not comparative advantage. Even if country A is worse at growing wheat than country B, it can still gain by specializing in exporting wheat to country B... so long as it's even worse at making other goods.

Off the coast of Thailand, in international waters, hijacked migrants from Myanmar and Cambodia are conscripted to slave labor aboard fishing trawlers to produce the raw materials required by the multi-billion dollar American canned cat food market. Even massive public support for a boycott would fail to put a dent in the trade. Similar scenarios are playing out among Bangladeshi textile workers, Chilean copper miners, Madagascar vanilla harvesters, and on and on. And that doesn't even consider the global daily traffic in sexual exploitation.

Blockchain and DLT actually begins to look like a viable solution to tracing supply chains to their origin transparently and contractually.

Is this perhaps the natural / granted horrific progression to developing? It's not like the existing first world nations just skipped the exploitative or their own gilded age phases.

Has anyone made the jump developing without going through such an phase?

I'm not trying to justify it, just wondering.

It's only "natural" in the sense that this is what capitalist/market-oriented development inevitably causes. It would be just as natural for wealthier countries to simply give poorer countries capital, build infrastructure, teachers, etc. There is actually a lot of left-wing literature on political economics regarding whether capitalism is truly necessary to achieve the transition to an industrialized economy (and this was one of the biggest issues between the Trotskyist and Stalinist factions).

The only countries that have skipped this transition, to my knowledge, have been the wealthy oil producing gulf countries. But that is simply because they owned very valuable land

I think the silent downvotes mean you struck a nerve.

Arguments about the moral qualities of capitalism v socialism are always an unproductive pissing contest, doubly so on the Internet.

Yes, but in this case I don't think it's unproductive or irrelevant to acknowledge that the problems from the article are rooted in the intersection of political and economic factors

Generally on the internet there is a lot of "that's just capitalism" and then the discussion degrades and it's just a bunch of "that's capitalism too" and you realize you are comparing real world capitalism to someone's theory that is bound by nothing and I'm not sure there is any point in that.

Can you cite some of that literature? I'd like to read it.

Arguments against stage theory:

The Permanent Revolution, by Trotsky

Three Conceptions of the Russian Revolution, by Trotsky

On New Democracy, by Mao Zedong

Arguments for stage theory:

On the Theory of Permanent Revolution, by Bukharin

Excerpts from Das Kapital on Historical Materialism and the stages of development

There are also a lot of less professional sources you can find about it online.

It looks like the newest of these was written around 1940 - is there anything more modern on the subject?

Has the field of economics really progressed so little in the past 80 years that these writings are still the best available?

These aren’t really mainstream economics. Marxist economics don’t really get funding / studied in capitalist economies for obvious reasons

The other reason these are all from around the same time period is that this was when all of the biggest successful communist revolutions took place. I’m sure there has been literature about the subject since then - these are just the most famous/influential because of who wrote them (so these are translated to English. Most of the other literature would be untranslated Russian/Chinese/etc.). Notably Deng Xiaoping instituted capitalist reforms in China as a departure from the traditional Maoist assertion that a period of capitalist development was unnecessary

You can also read Ha-Joon Chang: Kicking Away the Ladder.

Oil countries have lots of slave labor.

In any given country,labor laws and human rights are addressed by that country's people and government. This is a local issue. The article makes it clear that multinationals are not directly part of the problem but their supply chain vendors are.

What is the expectation here? Should a company headquartered in a different country enforce it's views on labor,hiring practices and human rights on local vendors? With what rights? That is an absurdly arrogant way of viewing the problem. If the local govermnet cares more about economic prosperity than decent treatment of humans then they have every right to do so,it's their country and their people. I don't like it but I have no right to tell someone else how to run their country. It would have been the same way if the tables were turned. Western standards can't be enforced without western prosperity.

I think,just maybe,western individuals don't apperciate enough just how much western rights and liberties depend on a stable prosperous economy.

In my opinion,the best way to solve this is by aiding the local economy,by giving more work and business to the local vendors/supply chain. The more they prosper,the easier it is for the local working class to demand and get better treatment. There is change and there is sustainable change. Isn't China a good example of how working conditiond have somewhat improved over the past 10years or so?

Unless you can afford to retire now. We are all in varying degrees subjected to Forced Labor. We've made many advances in making everything efficient and more abundant. Yet we still work to the death.

I'm forced to work, but nobody's forcing me to work 9-5 every weekday.

it beats subsistence farming (tilling fields is hard work) or hunting for my food though

Good for you. But for most of people in the world. 9-5 is a dream come true.

Farming technology has advanced so much that you don't need much manpower to grow food. Yet most of humanity doesn't have access to these technology nor the lands to use. Yet there's so many idle lands and idle factories. So many wasted food and unoccupied houses. Yet many are dying from hunger and homeless. One must wonder why.

Is there a way to determine which products use slavery and to what extent?

Edit: https://knowthechain.org might work. Don't drink Monster.

I really get skeptical of attitudes like this. It's not enough to just make a conscious decision to not buy them yourself because it won't accomplish much. You need systemic change or significant pressure on the slave shops at the very least.

Getting "systemic change or significant pressure" starts by individuals spreading awareness and campaigning politically, and determining what goods are produced using slave labor is a big part of that.

Perfect is the enemy of good. Individuals cannot effect systemic change, but they can reduce their own responsibility. In so doing, they might convince others to do so, which can effect systemic change.

Changing individual behavior is concrete and demonstrable. It's also harder and requires more of a sacrifice, which is why people don't do it. On the other hand, effecting systemic change is ill-defined and hard to measure. It's a lot easier to attempt (and fail) a monolithic task with no skin in the game than it is to clean up your own side of the street.

I'm not trying to completely solve the problem. I'm trying to be less complicit in it.

I'm thinking of the story of the English factory workers that refused to use the products of slave labor. It didn't stop slavery but they at least weren't complicit.

Probably most products that you purchase and use.

It's highly embedded in the global food, textile, and raw materials systems. Typically at the lowest levels.

For example, Cobalt is a mineral that is used in virtually all batteries. The supply is heavily concentrated in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which notoriously utilizes slave and child labor to extract the mineral. Sure companies are trying to avoid slave extracted cobalt. However it is extremely difficult to do that. Slave operation A can just simply sell their product to Legitimate operation B and sneak into the supply chain.

Some links on food / agricultural labor abuse: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/02/01/582214032/wa...

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/07/28/426888946/be...

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/03/29/521971468/in...

And you can find articles on the textile industry's labor abuse everywhere online.

It's not a new concept. Most consumers like you and me benefit from this via cheaper prices, and will not stop consumption patterns.

I strongly suspect not all products are the same.

Your second link has such a database. https://knowthechain.org

Thanks :)

There are significant policy failings here that need to be addressed, but assuming that will take a long time or is disincentivized from occurring at all, are there technology solutions that can be built to help these people? At the very beginning of the pipeline, before people emigrate from their home country to find work, do these people yet have access to basic smartphones/internet, or are they simply too poor? What about text messaging? How can information be gotten to people about the actual conditions before they leave, and even more importantly, how can collective information about the good and bad players be made available? In developed countries we have everything from Yelp to Glassdoor and beyond, but what do these underprivileged people use? Are they purely reliant on word of mouth?

Perhaps this may be realistically solved through increased automation: no dirty jobs for humans. I visited an Industrial Automation exhibition in Shenzhen last week which was held in conjunction with a Machine Vision exhibition. The number of systems and components available was substantial and the field seems prepared for an explosion: prices for precision gear are low and dropping, young people have increased access to legoesque mechatronic toys, and software knowledge is becoming pervasive.

I don't really like how sensationalistic this is, there are way more problems than just forced labor going into manufacturing. Energy used by manufacturing, local waste and pollution that goes unchecked, rampant corruption in factory owners, monopolistic control of the factories, ports, transit of goods, export, shipping, etc.

We're a LONG way from freely competitive market and open, transparent regulation would do WONDERS for it.

This article highlights one reason why I had huge issues with the Trans-Pacific Partnership ("TPP") agreement and more specifically Malaysia's inclusion in the regional partnership. Pro-trade supporters would argue that the US is "great and can out-compete" any country. I would argue that the US workers can not compete with international free labor.

These articles sadden me. As a resident of a developed country with a decent salary I am definitely the beneficiary of the exploitave practices that keep manufactureed goods as cheap as possible. It is sickening to think that my dollars flow to the people and companies that make these practices possible. It doesn’t seem necessary, and is the result of callousness and greed. Whatever your views on capitalism and market forces, the practices that make this kind of exploitation of fellow humans possible are simply not necessary or worth it to save a couple of bucks. Does anyone know what individuals can do to combat this type of thing or have further reading to recommend?

Whatever we do, it cannot be tariffs on countries that manufacture products with slave labor.

Sarcasm?

Campaign and contribute to people who want to restrict goods to come from places with good labor protections.

Spend a few years as a subsistence farmer in one of these countries. It will both drastically reduce your consumption and give you an understanding of the life you want to force on people to “save” them from exploitation.

False dichotomy. European imperialism has been creating the conditions that make peasant farming hell for centuries now (and millennia if you count their own people).

Every single sweatshop laborer takes a job because it is better than the alternatives, but their range of choices is dictated by imperialist aggression.

Peer pressure built up over generations through awareness.

Just as to exhibit homophobia today is seen as brutish, it can be done with this as well if you keep things in people's faces.

This is why companies go to extreme lengths to hide the realities of manufacturing and resource procurement from the public.

The only real solution is to develop automation that is cheaper than the human counterpart.

You could give back the money you indirectly took from those laborers.

Foreign domestic workers (maids) are often treated poorly in Malaysia.

http://www.malaysiandigest.com/features/723621-malaysia-can-...

That's merely an extension of what is covered in the article, legal immigrants must pay a commission (two bribes AFAIK to immigrate) go to Malaysia and the visa/legal immigration is tied to the employer who uses that leverage and the debt to force the immmigrant employee into a different arrangement much more advantageous to the employer in tech or fisheries or domestic work. It's seems no different than what we've been reading for years about Abu Dhabi or United Arab Emirates.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/19/nyregion/workers-at-nyus-...

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2014/oct/23/m...

If people could migrate freely around the world to seek work, economists crudely estimate that world GDP would roughly double, and that most of this enormous windfall would go to the poorest people on Earth. There is literally a hundred trillion dollar bill on the sidewalk for bringing together third-world labor and first-world legal systems, capital, and service demand.

Instead the first world does its best to wall itself off from economic migrants, because the right fears that migration will threaten their culture and the left fears that migration will threaten the welfare state.

As with any prohibition, the economic opportunity gets colonized by criminals. People seeking a better life will be taken advantage of and some of them will even wind up worse off than they started. But the root problem isn't the criminals, and it isn't customers who want cheap electronics. It's the prohibition of migration.

See "We Wanted Workers" by economist George Borjas for a more skeptical treatment of this "hundred trillion dollar bill" lying on the sidewalk.

I haven't read his book. But Borjas, who is to be clear a bit of an outlier among economists who have studied the problem, has in the papers I've looked at estimated that immigration is (slightly) a net economic negative for the very least skilled workers in the first world. This is nowhere close to saying that the net economic effect of immigration, including the benefits to the immigrants, is negative.

It's a short and well written book, I'd recommend it if you're interested. One point that Borjas makes repeatedly is that he believes there is a suppression of reporting on the negative impacts of immigration liberalization. He also notes how on several occasions colleagues expressed surprise and dismay that he chose to publish findings that "went against the narrative", out of fear that they could embholden enemies of liberalized migration. Therefore, I would be cautious of drawing much from consensus or deviation therefrom.

> has in the papers I've looked at estimated that immigration is (slightly) a net economic negative for the very least skilled workers in the first world.

How can you possibly recognize this and still decide that your proposal makes sense, in light of events like the presidency of Donald Trump and Brexit? What we have now is a drop in the bucket compared to unrestricted migration, and it's already quite possibly indirectly causing massive political upheaval that threatens to destabilize the first world.

While I'd love that to be true, economist's predictions don't have a good track record. Is there any good examples we can use to give evidence of thus massive claim?

Why do you believe economists' predictions don't have a good track record?

Maybe because of their track record?

Can you share any examples?

Well, the inability to predict recessions, or the general moves of the economy for a start.

That seems a little shortsighted. Do you also think climatologists and meteorologists are charlatans because they can't predict hurricanes or blizzards more than weeks in advance?

You'll have to do better than that, because the majority of economic literature does not attempt to forecast movements, it attempts to model them and understand them. The "track record" you speak of is not actually the track record of economics, it's just a meme armchair economists like to repeat (generally without a non-snarky defense of their point).

It's not exactly hard to find anecdotal evidence. For example, Haitian households living in the US had a 2015 median income of $47,200. I don't know exactly how to translate this into per capita terms, but Haiti has a per capita GDP of something like $730. I'm sure that these groups of people are not perfectly comparable in every way, but it's certainly suggestive that people can make a better life for themselves here than in Haiti. How do you think you would fare in Haiti?

If you want a more rigorous extrapolation, which tries to account for confounding factors and isn't limited to one pair of countries... you are going to have to look at the research (of economists).

A large part of what makes the first world so productive is its culture and welfare system. When new people come in they need to be trained to understand this culture and system. This training takes work and time and that puts a limit on the number of yearly newcomers. I do not find it irrational to want to keep this working in a sustainable way.

"economic migrants" need almost zero training. However, I do agree that this will put pressure on already complacent welfare system, or group of people and may cause new economic, social regrouping, wealth distribution etc. To provide services, one would be incentivized to integrate.

>To provide services, one would be incentivized to integrate.

Only as long as one doesn't have a sizeable presence in the host country.

I disagree. Incentive to get recurring business mandates integration. Also, if the presence is not sizable enough, they would largely go unnoticed, so, integrate or not, it doesn't matter.

> On can't/rarely provide services and choose not to be aware of local customs/traditions. [...] To provide services, one would be incentivized to integrate.

It is completely possible to provide services without integration in insular communities, which tend to appear when newcomers come faster than they can integrate.

it's absolutely possible to spend whole winter in a thin cotton shirt, but most of us prefer not to do.

I can't prove that there is no limit to how many migrants the first world could absorb without losing the rule of law, but it's pretty obvious that if there is such a limit it's higher than the status quo!

> A large part of what makes the first world so productive is its culture

In view of history including colonialism this statement sounds very naive indeed.

Eh, you don't need to dismiss the impact of colonialism or have any notion of inherent racial qualities to think this is true. Having strong, consistent institutions and relatively low levels of corruption (or at the very least, concentrated and generally legal corruption) is a per se advantage of operating in a developed economy. If you don't have experience with the other side of things, you probably don't have a clear sense of just how gummed up the works can get with nonsense.

This is a naive, or maybe even a Pollyannistic view on migration.

The right and the left (as quoted) are not wrong.

Though this doesn't mean countries should isolate themselves, but there seems to be an intrinsic human limitation on how many people it can trust and relate at one time.

But their living costs will rise immensely and that's not assuming they are not take advantage of like the "polish" gamemasters who took advantage of their own country men.

Telling them oh all those benefits they aren't for polish workers - not quite slavery but not far off.

Your proposal relies on said economists being entirely correct, not having reasoned with broken models and metrics. Yet widespread distrust caused by the results of their overarching prescriptions is exactly the crossroads we're at. Opening up a closed system can only work if the assumptions of that closed system are compatible with openness!

Under the present monetary policy of an inflationary treadmill, wages are generally consumed by rent rather than able to be saved into distributed wealth. This undermines the natural feedback whereby workers would build individual bargaining power. Increasing the competition would (of course) immediately benefit the poorest labor, but would further undermine labor's overall bargaining position thus exacerbating the modern winner-take-all trend.

We at least need to figure out how we can get developed societies' equilibrium for "full time employment" down to around where it should be from technological progress and women having entered the workforce (say 15 hours per week) before we go stoking the pyre with even more workers, lest we all end up as forced labor.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the underlying motivation to this is essentially to make us all into forced labor. That probably would be great for global GDP, if that’s your only metric for success.

>Instead the first world does its best to wall itself off from economic migrants, because the right fears that migration will threaten their culture and the left fears that migration will threaten the welfare state.

Well, unless you also propose the dissolvement of the world's countries as sovereign states, having a country means protecting its culture, way of life, and assets for its inhabitants.

How would the freedom for "everyone in the world" to move there, for example, would work for Switzerland, for example, a cosy country of 8 million people?

Would it be totally find if e.g. 9 million people from another culture come in, change the cultural climate in the place, and vote their politicians into power?

"If people could migrate freely around the world" what would stop that from happening?

Or why not just bring in 350 million Chinese into the US (they'd have more than a billion more to spare), and have them rule the place?

> "If people could migrate freely around the world" what would stop that from happening?

Most people wouldn't want to move. The EU has freedom of movement, and there's plenty of migration, but it's not like everyone from Romania up and moves to Germany.

Romanians cannot just move to Germany, because they are not in Schengen zone. The other East European countries also couldn't, they had 7 years long limitation on movement (they could enter, but not work in the bordering countries). Nowadays, they can work there, but they still have no right to request social security or other social services.

You can not have both free social services and totally open borders without ruining your economy. Pick one or another.

(1) Just because a country isn't in the Schengen area doesn't mean that you don't have freedom of movement. Switzerland isn't but via EFTA most EU citizens are free to live there -- the Eastern bloc included. Same with Norway.

(2) The accession process is meant to smooth the transition, nobody is suggesting opening up the floodgates tomorrow and seeing what happens, that's hyperbolic. Any abolition of movement restrictions would have to be gradual to be successful, and you could use EU accession as a model.

(3) EU member states are required to meet certain very high standards on social services and welfare. The whole bloc has socialized medicine. Member states have reciprocity agreements ensuring migrants have access to the same level of care they'd get back home (look up EHIC cards for instance). This is not much different from how Canada administers social programs between provinces.

Europe absolutely has free social services, democracy and freedom of movement -- and a very successful economy. The GDP of the EU is 21T PPP adjusted in 2017. The US is 18T.

(1) Not that free. You can enter for up to 90 days, without right to work or settle, with mandatory registration where you stay. After that, you have to leave, if you don't have the permit to stay longer or work. The only advantage EU citizens have is, that they can get the permit in Switzerland; all the others have to go to embassy in their home countries.

Switzerland is a classic model of controlled borders and mandatory visa regime, which in some cases and for some purposes can be waived.

(2) What happened in Germany and some other EU countries in 2015, is antithesis to gradual opening of the border.

(3) That's only for the citizens of EU; not for citizens of third countries, i.e. not exactly what proponents of open borders fight for.

They could have moved to the UK but not all of them did.

The weather is bad there.. That actually is an important factor.

A lot of people did move though. In the last 15 years, the population of Belgium increased by 10% due to migration. Those are incredible numbers.

Sure, that seems significant, but it didn't increase by 100% which is the premise coldtea bases their point on.

Honestly I think the people suggesting this are usually totally fine with people invading western nations and voting to take their shit as long as they’re still profiting from it.

There is a certain accelerationism to the idea. If you don’t believe in the welfare state this is a mechanism for heightening the contradictions of redistribution.

High quantity immigration could be defined as a sybil attack on the native population's norms.

It's interesting, why do you think individual states in the US "giving up their sovereignty" by way of control on migration was successful, but doing so at any broader scale wouldn't be? That's 325M people -- they're not all in California and New York, are they?

How about within Europe? The Schengen area alone is 400M+, the EU is 500M+ and Europe is 750M+. The amount of complaining about freedom of movement is really quite limited in reality given the scope of the free movement area. They've even developed a program to smooth out bringing in new countries; read up on the accession process.

Why is it that going from 5M (free movement within, say, New Zealand) to 35M (free movement within Canada) to 325M (free movement within the US) to 500M (free movement within the EU) all work -- over 2 whole orders of magnitude -- but expanding it any further would turn the world into a post-apocalyptic hellscape? Why would 1 more order of magnitude cause apocalypse when that hasn't happened yet?

Moreover, why doesn't everyone in the free movement area in Europe pile into Switzerland? Plenty of people move from eastern Europe, but there's still last I counted 38M people in Poland. They're not all in the UK, Germany or France. Local language, local culture, local jobs, economy, opportunities, family -- these all tie you to a place.

If offered a permanent life in Switzerland, would you drop everything and go? Why not? Probably all those things I listed above. I'm an EU citizen. Through EFTA, I absolutely could, forever, without restriction live in Switzerland, and yet here I am, somehow not in Switzerland. Fascinating.

This sounds like tribalism to me.

Didn’t the EU have strict capital requirements for countries joining it? I am from Ireland originally and I seem to recall this being a topic of discussion when I was younger.

I would imagine that countries within the EU don’t have the same Standards of living/earnings gap between them as say a developing country & a western one. Hence, their is not the same incentive to mass migrate.

The color coded map on this article is a good example of this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PP...

The GDP Per Capita of Poland is $12K USD, and Germany is $42K. This is comparable to the difference between the US territories of the Northern Mariannas and American Samoa ($13K) and California ($58K). Somehow rote economic prosperity is not sufficient to make everyone up and move or there wouldn't be an American Samoa.

[NOTE: I didn't adjust for PPP so the discrepancy is not as high as I implied it to be although it is still high; I couldn't find sufficient data in time].

I’d also make the argument that restricting migration out of a country can be of benefit to that countries economy. This was the case with South Korea after its civil war:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_South_Korea

“Following the Korean War, South Korea remained one of the poorest countries in the world for over a decade. In 1960 its gross domestic product per capita was $79,[57] lower than that of some sub-Saharan countries.[58] The growth of the industrial sector was the principal stimulus to economic development. In 1986, manufacturing industries accounted for approximately 30 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) and 25 percent of the work force. Benefiting from strong domestic encouragement and foreign aid, Seoul's industrialists introduced modern technologies into outmoded or newly built facilities at a rapid pace, increased the production of commodities—especially those for sale in foreign markets—and plowed the proceeds back into further industrial expansion. As a result, industry altered the country's landscape, drawing millions of laborers to urban manufacturing centers.”

A good book that talks about this economic transformation and how it was achieved is bad Samaritan’s:

https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capital...

The books author is a Korean economist who grew up during this period. One point that he makes which is very interesting is that South Korea had very strict laws preventing its academics from migrating to other countries. Those that did travel abroad to study were forced to return and participate in the economic development of the country. He attributes this as part of the reason for South Korea’s turn around.

China is another economic success story that restricts its citizens movements. Not saying that I agree with either of these policies. Just bringing them up as eastern counterpoints to the notion that unlimited free trade and free movement are the optimal states for economic development.

>Somehow rote economic prosperity is not sufficient to make everyone up and move or there wouldn't be an American Samoa.

Probably those Samoans don't assume that they would be welcomed and be making $58K in California. More likely they'd join the millions of piss poor latinos, just without their families and old communities.

And still, with a Samoa population of 200K, there are 100K Samoan immigrants in the US and 150K in New Zealand. Most of the Samoan population (400K) live outside the country.

It won't work because the us is so super duper awesome. Everyone would want to move here and take our guns or something.

Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

>It's interesting, why do you think individual states in the US "giving up their sovereignty" by way of control on migration was successful, but doing so at any broader scale wouldn't be? That's 325M people -- they're not all in California and New York, are they?

For one, who said it was successful? As you say, those US states lost their sovereignty in the process - which is exactly what I maintained nation states would probably want to maintain.

Second, unlike existing nations, those states were "tabula rasa" from a cultural perspective, huge empty areas to be filled with people (although even in this case, things didn't ended very well for the actual natives, the native Americans).

Third, it's not like those states have much of a meaningful local culture, or much on taxation and other such policies. Thank's to gerrymandering and a broken party people they can even get a president most of their people voted against. And the coasts have to suffer the politics and politicians voted by the mainland states, and vice versa.

Surely they are not the best example to make the case for "open borders while maintaining one's sovereignity".

But I guess your question is not predicated on that, but on the migration patterns to those states. As in, people didn't just jump in there from all areas -- e.g. to all end up living in California or New York and so.

But that's also a broken analogy. If NY had a much better standard of living than the other states, so much so that people were willing to leave their own states, local communities and connections, people would immigrate there in droves.

Lots did actually - e.g. millions have immigrated internally into California during the Dust Bowl crisis, creating shanty towns and lots of turmoil in the process. But while there is still work to be found around most of the 50 states, there's no much reason to predominantly prefer one over the other. And the US has been relatively stable and prosperous economy, in fact the #1 economy in the world for a century or so.

Here we're talking a billion (or more) people from developing countries that wouldn't mind to make the jump to another western country.

>Moreover, why doesn't everyone in the free movement area in Europe pile into Switzerland?

For one, because the difference in quality of life is not enough to leave e.g. Sweden or Spain, or France, or even Hungary, and go to live in very expensive country, without a job waiting for you.

You are right that "Plenty of people move from eastern Europe, but there's still last I counted 38M people in Poland. They're not all in the UK, Germany or France. Local language, local culture, local jobs, economy, opportunities, family -- these all tie you to a place." -- but we're not talking about people with "local jobs, economy, and opportunities", but about hundreds of millions in much poorer regions, that start from much lower conditions.

Second, because you need to obtain a residency permit, and prove that you can sustain yourself while in Switzerland for any stay over a few months. So willy nilly migrating there without money in the bank, being accepted into a university, or a job waiting for you is not an option. And not just that, but the Swiss have voted to restore immigration quotas for EU citizens (and already have special stricter quotas for specific countries in EU, namely the poorer ones).

New Zealand is an interesting example, as NZ and Australia essentially have freedom of movement. Australia is a higher income nation than New Zealand, with ~25% higher GDP per capita.

There are 650,000 NZ citizens in Australia, which is about 15% of the population of NZ. New Zealand has the second highest proportion of natural born citizens living abroad in the world, after Ireland [1].

The only reason that this arrangement works well is that New Zealand has a small population compared to Australia (5 million vs 25 million). If Australia had a lower income than New Zealand and 15% of Australians came to New Zealand, it would be chaos.

New Zealand also has a large Polynesian population (but not freedom of movement). Once again, this arrangement works because the Pacific Island nations have a much smaller population than New Zealand.

If you opened up immigration from India to the USA, you wouldn't see such a beneficial relationship, as there are 3 times as many people in India than the USA.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2016/01/15/the-co...

Open borders is a great idea but is not compatible with democracy. Garett Jones writes well on this topic. Immigrants from parts of the world with bad institutions will likely lower the quality of the institutions in their new countries, but only in democratic nations.

I prefer other forms of governance to democracy, such as Futarchy and certian forms of meritocracy in which standardized testing and sortiton are combined. One thing radical open borders would do is bring in an era of competition in governance, as for the first time there would be significant competition for citizens. Overall it is a good idea, but those who believe in the welfare state have little choice but to shun it.

> Immigrants from parts of the world with bad institutions will likely lower the quality of the institutions in their new countries

The world's leading democracy, the U.S., is populated almost entirely by immigrants from non-democratic parts of the world and their decedents. With every wave of immigration, the claims are the same: They don't share our values, they won't assimilate, etc. It goes back to German immigrants around the time of the American Revolution (Ben Franklin had some particularly harsh words for them), and then Irish, Italian, Chinese, Eastern European, Latino, Catholic (Papists!), Muslim, Jewish, etc. etc.

The results never seem to match the theory; the current democracy and institutions of the U.S. are built by those people. Democracy means faith in governance by the people, and the very good news is that it works out very well relative to other forms of government.

I can't really understand the downvotes here, these are facts. Here's a brief history of anti-immigrant propaganda in the US through the years to back up OPs claims. The anti-German sentiment in the late 1700s is new to me, to be honest.

Franklin on Germans: “A Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them and will never adopt our Language or Customs any more than they can acquire our Complexion.” [1] Boy was he right, Freunde.

[1] https://immigrantarchiveproject.org/brief-history-anti-immig...

Those stupid, swarthy Germans. [0]

[0] https://qz.com/904933/a-history-of-american-anti-immigrant-b...

> Would it be totally find if e.g. 9 million people from another culture come in, change the cultural climate in the place, and vote their politicians into power?

I think that might be an exaggeration and not likely what would happen. People would move to where there is demand for what whatever work they are able and wanting to provide and then approaching a stable equalibrium would hopefully occur.

Would cultures change? Yeah but that's what they do.

Edit: eh, fuck this site, instant downvote for disagreement is just as bad as Reddit. Thanks.

I think its sweden that has one of the most liberal migration policies but yes, the idea is to let people move, which would tap into the potential like.. 66 trillion or more dollars we waste by using byzantine trade policies and silly immigration controls. Protectionism is used by the lazy to hopefully shore up against "der taking arr jerbs" when it does nothing but tank the economy.

>Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family, next, to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small settlements, city-states, nations. We have broadened the circle of those we love. We have now organized what are modestly described as super-powers, which include groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds working in some sense together — surely a humanizing and character building experience. If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth. Many of those who run the nations will find this idea unpleasant. They will fear the loss of power. We will hear much about treason and disloyalty. Rich nation-states will have to share their wealth with poor ones. But the choice, as H. G. Wells once said in a different context, is clearly the universe or nothing.

-Carl Sagan

I think we’ll get there. But not overnight. People must be willing to put down their parochial concerns.

My guess? Interplanetary travel will do this. Unification is intrinsically linked to transportation and communications breakthroughs.

> Interplanetary travel will do this

That's optimistic. Do you mean when the first person steps on Mars (or orbits Venus!) or large scale travel?

> Do you mean when the first person steps on Mars (or orbits Venus!) or large scale travel?

Interplanetary capabilities will rapidly collapse the list of releveant societies. Reducing then number of parties in the room facilitates agreement.

Nah, then we will end up having interplanetary strife between earth, mars, and the belters.

A unified Earth fighting a unified Mars is still a unified Earth.

People a few hours away can have different cultures and languages, but you think people literally months away from each other will somehow be more united? Why? How much in common will a third gen asteroid miner who can die if his environmental controls so much as hiccup have in common with someone living in a functioning biosphere? A coal miner and s Wall Street banker already see each other as practically from different species, just wait until they more or less are.

I can understand the culture argument in smaller or isolated communities. Sometimes they can feel like they dislike incomers from the next town over.

With the free market in the EU why has the whole population of Greece not yet moved to Germany or France for the opportunity? Even with freedom of movement many won't want to, or have financial and family ties. The biggest surge came when the poorer Eastern European nations joined the EU and we had noticeable Polish and other communities forming - but were far from being swamped. The UK didn't become less the UK because of it. London, Manchester, Liverpool and the other major cities have had big immigrant communities since the early 1800's, long before passports and border controls. Border controls only really started in WW1.

America is more interesting. It was built on immigration and looks back to origins far more than many other nation's immigrants do - as seen by so many self identifying as Italian American, Irish American etc, and visiting their roots in Europe or wherever. With that identity so commonly given, it _is_ a big part of the culture already. That melting pot became America. It is America.

Why did it stop being a source of pride and development and become something to discourage? They don't lack space or opportunity.

>With the free market in the EU why has the whole population of Greece not yet moved to Germany or France for the opportunity?

Those who could (spoke German or English, had degrees, had no prospects in Greece, had connections abroad, etc), that is, around 500000, have already immigrated in the last 10 years.

That would be like 16 million Americans leaving the US in a decade, including most 20-40 with a degree. That's on top of two millions or so that immigrated out of Greece in the 20th century.

Not everybody left, because there are benefits (cultural and otherwise, like the climate), that they don't want to miss, they have strong family ties (including a strong culture of taking care of their parents), they have houses and property here (and would have to start from nothing abroad, and they have no degrees. Last, but not least, the civil servants (close to 20% of the population with their nuclear families) still have jobs, while 2 million others (out of 10) are too old to go anywhere and start any career abroad (50+, pensioners, etc).

It's still just 0.5% a year. If Chinese emigrated at the same rate it would be 7m a year. Well within the scope of other countries to manage.

After the war the whole British Empire had the right to live and work in the UK - all 1bn of them. Even with adverts encouraging them to come they only came in tens of thousands a year. The economic differential was even higher then. I think the French Empire gave the right of residence in France around WW1.

The significant mass migrations have come from wars and disasters. Such as Syria most recently. Economic migrations have always been far lower.

>If Chinese emigrated at the same rate it would be 7m a year. Well within the scope of other countries to manage.

Other countries would be "well within the scope" to manage 70m Chinese coming in in a decade?

(Other countries being the 5-10 more preferable immigration destinations -- the US, UK, France, Germany and co -- it's not like the Chinese will go en masse to Chile or Romania).

You do seem to be missing the point that history shows that people do not migrate in large numbers, outside of war, famine and other natural disasters.

Even with open borders Chinese would not migrate at that rate when they are in a very different economic state to Greece. China is a place to migrate to rather than from as it grows in world status. It's inconceivable they would leave at that rate without first being a basket case (difficult without a Euro-comparable situation), or war and the traditional causes of significant migration.

Has EU freedom of movement resulted in dissolution of sovereign states? Did the absolute and total freedom to migrate by the two major empires result in the dissolution of UK and France?

>why not just bring in 350 million Chinese

I don't think 350 million humans can just "come in" anywhere. I don't think it is logistically possible.

BTW, this isn't just an observation for observation sake. The magnitude of actual immigration that occurs is FAR lower than the current existing population because there are just physical limits to how many people can fit into a single plot of land. It makes arguments like the one you make far too abstract to be relevant to real life.

There are countries that had 5-10% or more or their population being new immigrants in the span of a few decades.

For a country like the US, with no ethnic cohesion, and even less cohesive culture, where everybody is an immigrant of at best 10 generations anyway, this might not be a problem.

For other countries this can have a significant impact in everyday life -- especially when it's not Indians IT scientists with H1B visas coming in, but immigrants lacking skills or coming from widely different cultures.

Does this sort of slippery-slope crap convince anyone? There are about 3.5M Chinese immigrants in USA right now. Can anyone imagine any sequence of events that would lead to that number increasing a hundredfold in any conceivable period of time? We couldn't get that many if we paid them $10k a head... One wonders what you intend to argue here, because this is nonsense.

>One wonders what you intend to argue here, because this is nonsense.

There are places that have now received (in the span of a few decades) millions of immigrants, despite the countries themselves originally being in the order or 5-15 millions to begin with.

That's the equivalent of 32 million Chinese (or whatever else) coming into the US in 2 decades.

And some of these countries regularly receive hundreds of thousands of people a year still.

It might be nonsense for rural Idaho to conceive that, but it's something that goes on elsewhere.

I thought you were talking about "350 million Chinese"? Exaggeration for effect is fine, but it would be nice to have an actual argument in addition to the exaggeration.

Which nations of 5-15M have gotten "millions of immigrants"?

https://www.economist.com/the-world-if/2017/07/13/a-world-of...

What would the rent be for an apartment in San Francisco or New York or London if anyone in the world could move there? I think the real windfall would go to property owners in the most desirable places to live.

Probably about the same. I'm presuming that the people able to pay the current high prices already have pretty high freedom of movement.

People in other parts of the Bay Area still don't move to San Francisco or have any desire to, even if they have the means.

Open borders are truly one of our civilization’s best low-hanging fruits.

https://openborders.info/double-world-gdp/

Yeah, I don’t particularly care if economists think it will boost global GDP by 10x, I’m never going to be on board with that. Abolishing borders is essentially the same as abolishing nations, and in that case who has the power then? Certainly not me, or anyone that has anything in common with me. Our “democracy” sucks enough as it is, why the hell would I want to sell out national sovereignty to global capitalist interests? Honestly, I’d rather make a change in the opposite direction and have governments that actually represent their people at the cost of halving global GDP, if that’s what it takes. There are many more important things than money.

Assuming you're writing this from the US, your county and state authorities already have a lot of power even though they don't control immigration.

Another way is to bring economic freedom to poor countries.

This is a great summary of many world problems

While broadly I agree with this comment, I'm annoyed by the smug South Park centricism of "the left and the right are both wrong", when in the current political climate of the US the left generally want less restrictions on immigration while the right are literally taking babies away from mothers to try and scare away future asylum-seekers.

> the left generally want less restrictions on immigration

Frankly though, many do to "import the proletarians" and use them as a permanent underclass to point at, and to further their political agenda. That's not necessarily "right" either.

Except it doesn’t work like that. I’m from Bangladesh. What would happen if 100 million Bangladeshis moved to the US? Would we continue to have a first world legal system, etc? The answer is no. Instead, we would be tearing down the statue of liberty: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/world/asia/bangladesh-...

We know this will happen. Bangladesh was in fact a grand experiment in this regard. After independence in the 1970s, an intellectual elite gave the country a western style constitution, with principles of secularity and freedom. What did the Bangladeshis do with it? They quickly repealed those provisions, made Islam the official religion, etc.

It is a popular mental dysfunction in the west to deny that culture matters. To believe that the west’s material wealth is the result of random chance, rather than what people believe, how they act, and what they do.

>What would happen if 100 million Bangladeshis moved to the US? Would we continue to have a first world legal system, etc? The answer is no

It's ironic that people in the US who have such great fear of immigrants worry about being overrun by criminals, when the US itself already has by far the highest amount of criminals locked in prison in the world.

>Instead, we would be tearing down the statue of liberty

Quite silly to point to mere symbolism (whether or not a statue exists) while ignoring the physical reality of human suffering behind bars.

Who said anything about criminals? Bangladeshis are by and large law abiding. But more than 1/3 believe that people who leave Islam should be put to death. The problem isn’t crime.

Is country X's incarceration rate not related to the quality of it's legal system and institutions?

Not in the direct manner you seem to be implying.

The article that rayiner posted was in reference to overzealous policing of arbitrary culture based moral offenses (not being islamic). Are many of the laws in the US not overzealous and arbitrarily moral based as well? For instance non violent drug crimes being punished with harsher sentences than violent crimes?

To a first approximation, incarceration rate is equal to rate of crimes times percent reported to police times percent of solved cases times prosecution rate times sentence length.

Some of these are bad things, some of these are good, and the last one is ugly.

Starting at the beginning of your equation, is what constitutes a "crime" not defined by the legal system to begin with? Perhaps the US has run wild with their definitions and militaristic enforcement of crimes

They could have stayed part of Pakistan. It could have been worse. My family is Ahmadi. We left for the US in 1986 right before I was born over this death penalty for apostasy business.

You're referencing poll data and using that to project human behaviour across demographics. Not sure that's good science. Secondly you don't factor in that often capital punishment has majority/plurality support in most nations.

Since people change their opinions and traditions very slowly, changing cultures probably takes generations.

For example the United States constitution didn't happen quickly - there was a long period of people writing and discussing about such things, the age of enlightenment (I'm still grasping to understand how it happened, it seems so unlikely). There were also only under three million people living in USA when it became independent.

This is something which always gets me.

So it is widely accepted that there is no/negligible genetic difference, but there are cultural differences at least when it comes to prosperity.

However it is also the case that cultures are extremely slow to change - multiple generations - almost to the actual speed of evolution. Essentially conceding the point that even if it isn't genetic there is some kind of heritable negative/missing positive traits which can last multiple generations.

No, humans have not evolved in hundreds of thousands of years, well beyond the beginning of recorded history.

That's preposterous and obviously false. We're seeing fast evolution on the scale of thousands or even hundreds of years. See Baujau, for example.

You seem to be arguing that this is a protective notion, when really it argues the opposite. If you bring two large groups of people together, their respective cultures are not going to change quickly. And if their cultures clash with each other, you have a recipe for enduring intra-national strife.

Is there an actual historical example of this? Most civil wars throughout history aren't due to immigrants, it's usually due to geographical and cultural divides that have long existed in a country.

Most countries in history didn't have immigrants from the other side of the world either.

The United States imported Africans as slaves for 100+ years. While some flair ups occured, black people never fully revolted into a situation that could be called a civil war. The US Civil War was fought over slavery, but it was fought between the North and the South, not black vs. white.

Ditto on Chinese immigrants in the later 1800s, Germans, etc. The point is that immigrants are always a minority in their host country, so they naturally have less of a base and thus power.

I would argue that most intra-national strife comes from histories of wars and blood feuds. The Balkans being a case of this.

> And if their cultures clash with each other, you have a recipe for enduring intra-national strife.

Feels logical but also feels unproven.

I didn't argue it as a protective notion.

Exactly. I would much rather live in Singapore, something of a dictatorship, than Bangladesh, a democracy. Democratic freedom is often worth very little. Open borders would work well if sovereignty were held in competitive non-democratic institutions like Futarchy or a standardized-testing/sortition based rotating aristocracy, as both would be held in check by the freedom to exit that would exist in a world with true open borders. However, if we just keep our government as it is and allow open borders it will decline in just the manner you mention.

Singapore is hardly a dictatorship. It's not a very free democracy, but they run free elections and a significant part of what keeps PAP winning these days is stealing opposition policies.

I don't see a massive distinction between Singaporean elite-driven one party "democracy" and American elite driven two party "democracy". Both fail in certain ways but they function up to a certain point.

well if you cant see any difference it probably mean you know very little about the institutions of one or both countries.

Having lived in both, I like saying that Singapore is a fake dictatorship, whereas Hong Kong is a fake democracy.

>standardized-testing/sortition based rotating aristocracy

We had that for a couple centuries where the test was birth right. Somewhere down the line, we decided to cut their heads off.

Democracy in theory gives ordinary people power to choose their country's destiny. As someone who has a loved one in sg, I think their situation is peculiar but part of it is that their "aristocracy" actually does a decent job of providing for most of the people, so they don't feel the need to revolt against the PAP. In the US, we too have an aristocracy (although people might not want to admit to it) but they have not done a good job of taking care of people and so they is currently a lot of unrest that is flaring up here and there. It has a different flavor, but there is certainly political strife. So, imo, aristocracy is not a stable system because that aristocracy, being unaccountable, can turn against the people that hold it up, and thus be vulnerable to deposition.

> What would happen if 100 million Bangladeshis moved to the US?

> we would be tearing down the statue of liberty

> It is a popular mental dysfunction

This characterization of people who disagree with the parent, along with the comments above, does not seem to invite discussion, but rather a flame war.

> it doesn’t work like that.

In fact it has. People have been making the same predictions as you about immigrants to the U.S. since the first immigrants arrived. Can't trace your family to the Mayflower? You shouldn't be running the country. (I'll save redundancy by citing my other comment):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17437962

And yet the evidence is that the wealthiest country in the world and its leading advocate of democracy (over a longer timescale) is run by those very immigrants and their decedents.

Freedom and democracy are universal values; they are embraced in "cultures" all over the world (U.S., almost all of South America, Japan, Taiwan, S. Korea, India, Europe, etc. ...) and provide the most stable governments, the most freedom, and the wealthiest economies. Bangladesh might have had a bad experience - there are no guarantees - but of course we don't know how much that depends on poor execution nor do we know if other forms of government would have been better or worse. Maybe democracy was actually the best option.

If freedom and democracy were universal values then they would have shown up in some of the earliest cultures, which they did not. You also wouldn't get large groups of people who don't think democracy is a good idea, and yet we have China.

Universal values are closer to, don't have sex with your mother or don't eat people and we still have notable exceptions for those

> If freedom and democracy were universal values then they would have shown up in some of the earliest cultures, which they did not.

TIL that the Greeks were nei bother. Rome was also originally a Republic.

Why is this entire thread full of bollocks history and bollocks sociology?

Rome and Greece showed up thousands of years after early cultures. Rome also had its democracy replaced by a dictatorship.

Id go as far as to say that someone thinking that Rome and Greece are early cultures might be the person with "bollocks history"

Rome was still ~BC, Alexander the great was ~300 BC. How early counts in your book?

Are you suggesting that Christ's birth was the marker for early history? There was the Egyptians, the Akkadians, the Hittities, Sumerians, the early Chinese, and the early Indian just to name a few organized civilizations that are thousands of years older.

Additionally you are using Alexander the Great as your earliest marker? How was he democratic at all. He was a literal military dictator as were the Hellenic kingdoms that's descended from his empire

oi. Lets not forget you start with:

> If freedom and democracy were universal values then they would have shown up in some of the earliest cultures, which they did not.

We have a ton of resource from the Greeks because they wrote shit down. By invoking "the earliest" civilizations you're hiding behind a greater unknown because we lack an equivalent level of written resource until ~3500 BC. So written resource becomes available 5,500 years ago and democracy has written examples available 2,000 years ago, 3,500 years after written record. Ergo, according to your bullshit if something occurs 3,500 years after writing is established even though that was 2,000 years ago that means _nothing_ toward "universal values".

I can't believe you'd twist history like this to much such bollocks points. What the fuck does "universal values" even mean? We can barely trust the tablets we have and we have limited to no written record of societies beyond 3,500 years ago. But because of this window of 3,500 years between writing and democracy not appearing you classify it as "non-universal". You're full of shit by basing your entire argument on this window that conveniently fulfils it. Humans have existed for hundreds of thousands of years yet this 3,500 year window is all that matters to you. Dwell on that.

For reference, I am not arguing that democracy IS a universal value but just against that you can prove what is or isn't a universal value by cherry picking our patchy written record like you do.

Alex is a shit marker to be fair but gives a general gist for the rise of the Hellenic world. Examples of democracy within city states existed prior to 6 BC Athens but 6 BC Athens is the best known one.

First off, you can calm down, no need to call me full of shit because you don't like my arguments.

As to your points. We have written history from thousands of years before the Greeks. The code of Hammurabi predates them significantly. We also have scattered historical records from other ancient cultures and it's not like their government system was a mystery. They had Kings and emperor's, not elected leaders.

Even with the Greeks, how many of the city states had any sort of democratic system and weren't a monarchy or oligopoly? Youre accusing me of cherry picking but all you can point to is a single geographic area in a relatively small span of time and even then, only a few of the population centers had any sort of democracy.

Since we just asked you to stop breaking the site guidelines and then you posted this, I've banned this account until we get some indication that you will use HN as intended in the future. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com with that.

In HN comments, it's more important not to turn this site into a flaming pit than it is to be right about Hellenic antiquity.

Because it's the internet. Please don't make the threads even worse by posting unsubstantive comments. Annoying as things may be, this is not the way to raise the quality of this site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

you complain at this point? I feel like this is complaining about someone sneezing during a flood.

Perhaps; we don't see all the comments. But other people breaking the rules doesn't make it ok to break the rules.

> If freedom and democracy were universal values then they would have shown up in some of the earliest cultures ...

Certainly there is plenty of writing throughout recorded history in many cultures about freedom and oppression, and democracy as a form of government at least goes back to ancient Greece and Rome (a republic).

We have no idea how often it was implemented on a small scale (a village, etc.), but I find it hard to believe that nobody thought of taking a vote until 1776.

Implementing those things in government might have been difficult, but so was developing physics, literacy and the Internet. That doesn't mean people didn't want those things throughout history.

> Universal values are closer to ...

I don't think it's worth debating the meaning of 'universal'.

Greece and Rome are nowhere near early cultures, they came thousands of year after organized civilizations. It's also not useful to point to them when their democracy's were short stints in their historys and overtaken by authoritarian governments.

Based on the responses I've had to this post I think people might believe I am against democracy. My point was that it's not a universal value of humanity and so if we want democracy it needs to be supported. It will not be supported by base human instinct

Er, wasn’t there a dictatorship and a coup along the way?

It’s a complicated wrinkle to explain. Yes, the amendments happened during Ershad’s regime, who took power in a bloodless coup. Calling it a dictatorship is a strech: Ershad tried to have elections, in which one of the two major parties participated. More importantly, since Ershad left power in 1990, nobody has moved to change the constitution back, Islam plays a bigger role in politics than ever, and and 82% of the country (according to Pew polling) suppoets making Sharia national law.

One anecdotal bad thing some Bangladeshi did does not prove the entire ethnicity is bad or that they can not co-exist with modern western values. And I am not sure what you want to prove by saying that the initial western value based constitution did not persist, are you implying that this can never happen in that country, that the specific ethnicity is somehow different or not capable of something better? It is not like this kind of thing does not happen in other places (this kind of thing has happend in the USA too).

Not mentioning how this amendment happened was sloppy on his part.

Say what you want about BD (and the analogy the religious right used in [1] about national symbols was grotesque) but in Pakistan if a government minister said what that guy did in [2] about removing the state religion he’d probably be shot. My BNP supporting former boss in the states seems to think doing so is selling out to India. That’s progress I guess.

[1]https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/03/29/world/asia/bangladesh-...

[2]https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/bangladesh-isl...

sorry, you're basing the entire dismissal of a posit by our OP that offers massive economic benefits, death of a sordid black market and freedoms for all because of an article where someone removed a statue of a woman?

People would have to arrive, in numbers for a long time, have kids, retain the culture perfectly in that regards as it blends into US cultures and then override the existing culture to do so. That's like 100 years in a vacuum. That's like imagining you'd see to eye with your ancestors from 1918. Ya think?

The melting pot of the US worked wonders in many regards. But its capacity is limited; the rate of arrival, compared to the country's population, has an upper bound when melting still works fir the newly arrived, when cultural transfer is still seen as valuable, as opposed to just keeping to live the way they used to, and failing to blend in enough as not to pose serious problems.

I don't think any of those concepts have established enough mathematical proofs to discuss with such confidence.

If 1M people of culture A arrive to a territory inhabited by 1 person of culture B, which culture will prevail? With a high confidence, A.

If 1 person of culture A arrives to a territory inhabited by 1M people of culture B, which culture will prevail? With a high confidence, B.

If we assume more or less continuous, non-chaotic behavior of this function, the range of A/B ratios where the change is hard to predict must be somehow narrower than [1/1M .. 1M], likely closer to [0.5 .. 2].

This is not a mathematical proof, of course, just an illustration. Mathematics is only possible where axioms hold; in human world, very-very few, if any, axioms ever hold.

thank you for posting this! Progeny of the developed world are not allowed to say such things.

Culture is important, but history and context are very important too. For example, it explains well why the US thrived economy post-WWII almost immediately while it took time for European nations to catch up.

Moreover, it sounds like there's a jump in logic in your post. Immigrants don't export their culture usually, they mostly adopt the new country's culture for the most part. Certain things are retained but people who've never immigrated before don't realize how much moving to another place changes you.

I'm not going to tell you that there won't be problems caused by increased migration. Anything that changes the world so much will cause problems. I'm not going to tell you that America's material wealth is the result of "random chance", either. But I do think that quite a lot of it is the result of centuries of immigration, each wave of which was met with much the same objections.

It's one thing to caution against removing all barriers literally overnight. I don't know that it would be a disaster, but I don't know for sure that it wouldn't, and it's reasonable to exercise some caution. But, at the risk of making an inflammatory analogy, it would have been morally defensible to ask if there was a way to end chattel slavery in the US without a civil war that killed ~3% of the population. It was not morally defensible to oppose ending it. Global apartheid is an evil of a similar scale, and first world governments its active cause, not innocent bystanders. It is our duty to figure out how, not whether, to end it.

A deeper problem for the rich countries is that the entire economic system is built for perpetual inflation. Everything has to always go up. Free migration is deflationary. Wide nominal wage declines would cause cascading default across the entire economy.

My professor always said, ideas are like hemorrhoids, every asshole sooner or later gets some.

"If people could migrate freely around the world to seek work, economists crudely estimate that world GDP would roughly double, and that most of this enormous windfall would go to the poorest people on Earth. There is literally a hundred trillion dollar bill on the sidewalk for bringing together third-world labor and first-world legal systems, capital, and service demand."

You realize that many, if not most third world countries are third world countries because of the mentality, religion (won't mention it, no worries) and tribal thinking? This is exactly the problem we have in Europe. I don't mind immigrants, not at all. But they come here and bring their beliefs, values (about women, violence etc.) and tribal thinking and create here exactly the problems they have in their home country. They see our apples and they want to have apples too. But they don't get the idea that the apples could have anything to do with the tree they are growing on.

> My professor always said, ideas are like hemorrhoids, every asshole sooner or later gets some.

What does that contribute? That could apply to your idea too, or mine.

> they come here and bring their beliefs, values (about women, violence etc.) and tribal thinking and create here exactly the problems they have in their home country. They see our apples and they want to have apples too. But they don't get the idea that the apples could have anything to do with the tree they are growing on.

This is really an incredibly broad stereotype to paint on hundreds of millions of individuals. Perhaps like you, they should be judged on their individual actions and have the right to believe what they like.

And who is the parent to judge others and take away their rights? I don't like the parent's beliefs (which I find especially based on "tribal" ideas)' should they be ejected from my country if they are my neighbor? (No, absolutely not.)

> What does that contribute? That could apply to your idea too, or mine.

It is intellectual over-engineering of cultures. It looks tremendously good on paper.

> This is really an incredibly broad stereotype to paint on hundreds of millions of individuals. No, it really isn't since Europe is not flooded with Chinese, Americans or Australians but with people with a very low skill set, very different attitude towards violence and women, from tribal societies and with a religion they feel is far superior.

> And who is the parent to judge others and take away their rights? I am not judging them. I don't even say that their culture is inferior. If an industrialized society breaks down (think Mad Max if you want) they are in a far superior position. The question is: If women should have no rights, if you have the best religion, if you want to bury gay people alive, why not stay in your home country?

By the way, I am just visiting Romania. Romania is willing to take refuges but refuges are not willing to take Romania. Why? No living on welfare...

Please don't cross into fighting nationalistic battles on HN. I realize the GP semi-invited it, but that's no reason to dive fully into the mud.

Also, your first sentence is a nasty personal attack. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do it again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Instead the first world does its best to wall itself off from economic migrants

Wouldn't free economic migration lower the standard of living in the wealthiest of countries?

It’s starting to happen already. The rich can migrate freely today. And their are more rich everyday in poor countries. We used to send money back to our relatives in india. Now they could be sending us money as their land investments have been very profitable. Once google translate is a little more flawless and real-time from audio to audio, we will see real movement. Already with Uber and internet it’s much easier to travel without being scammed.

> the right fears that migration will threaten their culture and the left fears that migration will threaten the welfare state

Perhaps the parent is trying to be even-handed, but I don't see the left opposing immigration; they seem to support it. It also matches the philosophy of the center - the Clinton democrats and internationalist business people of the GOP. Here are some surveys I quickly found; both say immigration is supported by the left:

https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/americans-views-immig...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/01/22/a...

The left fears no such thing. There are no serious anti-immigration voices on the left.

To give an example, in a 2016 interview Sanders referred to open borders as a "right-wing" "Koch brothers proposal". Trump is worse, is that what you want to hear?

I'm not trying to draw a moral equivalence. But I think the barriers to immigration raised over the last century and more everywhere in the first world are something that can't be blamed on any single party or political movement.

When the Democratic Party had full control of Congress and the Presidency, they were (collectively) very much against illegal immigration[0]. This is why they passed no "reform" legislation whatsoever.

[0] now-Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=728SW65tlU0

The Democrats are a party of liberalism, not leftism. Try again.

The problem is that it's not the third world's population should go to first-world countries. It's first-world's legal and economic (and associated societal) technology should extend to the third world.

Third world's elites fear it because it will render most of them irrelevant (and it will). Third world's nationalists and leftists fear it because it will change the local culture to look like the fat bourgeois western culture (and it will).

The previous foray into this was tried at the times of colonialism; the results are ... mixed even by the most favorable account.

I'm conflicted on this issue.

First off, I'm an economic migrant. I also had the privilege of being able to move without a skilled work visa.

I'm all for freedom of movement, I think that borders are an artificial construct that cause more harm than good.

But we need to balance that with the fact that unchecked migration can cause excessive strain on infrastructure, cause cultural clashes, and potentially cause lowered quality of life for residents of the country being emigrated to, caused by residents being priced out of the market by workers willing to work for near-nothing because it's still better than the wages back at home.

New Zealand has suffered a lot of these problems.

Auckland in particular suffering from the strain of high levels of immigration on its infrastructure. There simply isn't enough housing for all the people. You end up with people sharing rooms and packing out apartments like a slum. I've heard of people fitting 4 people to a room using bunk beds. So you've got 12 people in a 3 bedroom apartment. The apartments aren't designed for this kind of population density, and it pushes out people who want a decent quality of life and a room to themselves, as they're priced out by people willing to share 4 to a room.

High immigration with a low barrier has also caused deflation of wages. Some Indian workers come to NZ and work for under minimum wage, either by employers requiring repayment of wages or underpaying wages (which is illegal), or by working for gig-economy services like Uber (which is legal).

For a lot of immigrants, working for $5 an hour and sharing an apartment with 10 other people is still a better quality of life than back home, but it drags down the quality of life for other Kiwis.

I think part of the problem is that it's possible for people to move anywhere in the world within 30 hours. Instead of migrating to a neighbouring country that has a slightly better economy to yours, if the world had total freedom of movement, everyone would flock to the most prosperous nations, causing the middle nations to miss out completely. How many undocumented migrants to Europe want to stay in Italy or Greece? They all want to get to Germany, France, or the UK.

I think that maybe the best solution for the world would be freedom of movement between bordering nations. Most bordering nations will have similar economies, running as a continuum across the globe, and will also have similar cultures (as I said, borders are an artificial construct that cut through ethnic and cultural lines). The USA-Mexico border is an exception here, with a massive economic disparity between the two countries. I think that it's wrong that just because you were born on one side of a line you're condemned to a lower quality of life than your neighbours, earning a fraction of the same income for the same work.

Oh its Malaysia apartheid with a brown face (originally thought they meant china) I seriously looked at a full ride expat job there but after doing some research decided not to.

I ended up feeling sorry for Singapore's dictator and the BBC world service report on ethnic rioting that had the line "several dead bodies lying in the street".

Also id have had to cut my hair - I have a pony tail

Just a reminder that the US prison labor industry is billion dollar enterprise paying 90 cents per hour - against the constitution, but no-one seems to care.

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2017/03/16/prison-la...

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

Slave labor performed by convicts might be morally abhorrent, but it isn't unconstitutional.

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