> I think it will be a shame if we have mass immigration and no borders - the rich differences between us will dissolve into one globalised, corporatised, undifferentiable and utterly debased culture.
I see this a lot and I'm skeptical of the argument's force. Arguably, this is already happening and has almost totally already 'happened' with the expansion of capital (particularly Western capital) and capital's nature as a homogenizing force in which every aspect of society must be commodified and sellable - any use of time which cannot be commodified is therefore useless time in the eyes of capital, and worse, an "opportunity cost". So the culture we are left with around the world is only the culture that could be commodified - that is to say, it is culture that didn't speak out too strongly against this unifying force. I'd argue that capital's indifference to the qualitative aspects differentiating one culture from another leads to a monoculture in the first place. When everyone is selling culture, those same sellers will switch to whatever is the most profitable at the time and abandon whatever they were selling before, even if it was "genuine culture". I'm not saying it happens all the time - some individuals have the nerve to stand up to capital, but few succeed. As a famous German philosopher once said, considered as a process of history, we can't hold these individuals responsible for the society they foster, however much they may try and subjectively raise themselves above them.
It doesn't make much sense to analyze the possible cultural effects of an "open borders" policy under the totality of capital - whatever culture looks like (and indeed how people act about it) in a post-capital world will be radically different to how it looks today. What would the pressure for homogenization and commodification be in a world without capital? At first glance, it seems like such a pressure would not exist.