The thing is, everyone should have a right to change countries/cultures as they want - it shouldn't be determined by the birth lottery.
Every nation must have the right to choose the people it wishes to assimilate and those it doesn't. I should not be allowed to go kicking in doors and demanding acceptance. This is the fundamental basis of sovereignty.
The only exception is that a nation must accept those born to its own members, as stateless persons create a potential burden to others.
I don't necessarily disagree with this notion, but it has its limits. Slavery, Jim Crow laws, Sodomy laws, and voting restrictions on females have all been reflections of sovereignty...and they were all fucking terrible decisions. And they were eventually overthrown not by a peaceful process of deliberative change, but through massive grassroots dissent that was absolutely illegal in every respect.
If our sovereign decision is to decide that we don't want rapists and terrorists in our country, I don't have a problem with that. But if terrorist or rapist becomes conflated with brown people, restricting all of their entry regardless of their individual merits, that's gonna be a big fucking no from me dawg. I will gladly and willingly help subvert those laws, because they are unjust laws motivated by pure racism. They deserve to be subverted.
There is no such thing as a sovereign individual. Unless you refer to the Libertarian cranks hassling cops on YouTube.
In practice, nations can restrict people from moving if they choose to. Perhaps mine won't, but China certainly will.
The reason, by the way, that Oklahoma and California can't restrict migration between them is that US states are not sovereign. The original colonies ceded essential parts of their sovereignty to form a national federal government. This is US history 101.
Why do you have sovereignty over your condo? Why can't I express my right to sleep on your couch, regardless of your consent? If you can express access control rights over a particular piece of territory or property that you consider your own, then why can't a collective group of people also express access control rights over their common, government-managed and administered property/territory?
I think there's enough responses in the thread regarding open borders that I won't belabor that point again. To the question of birthright citizenship, I'd probably be ok with eliminating it if we replaced it with service-based citizenship a la Starship Troopers (to include volunteering in the Peace Corps, volunteer firefighting, and maybe law enforcement). But it leads to the question of: if people (including native-born ones) don't meet the citizenship requirements, do they become stateless persons? Do we deport them? To where?
https://www.liberties.eu/en/news/why-refugees-do-not-take-th...
https://blogs.berkeley.edu/2016/02/11/why-dont-refugees-fly/
>>>but in order to qualify for such status they need to be [almost] drown in the sea or [almost] killed at the border.
There's not much we can do about natural geography. I'm not sure what alternative course of action is suggested in the case of, say, Cuban or Haitian refugees attempting access by boat. Secondly, no one is "almost killing" refugees that show up at designated legal points of entry to the country. Finally, anyone other than Mexican citizens attempting to seek asylum/refugee status by crossing the US-Mexico border is probably in error (I wouldn't go so far as to say "not acting in good faith").
Consider this from: [1] "Once refugees or asylum seekers have found a safe place and protection of a state or territory outside their territory of origin they are discouraged from leaving again and seeking protection in another country."
In other words, Hondurans/Guatamalans/etc... should not be transiting Mexico to seek refugee status in the US to begin with.[2]
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugee#Restriction_of_onward_...
citation needed. Are you claiming that some invisible hand assigned me to this planet and this time in history for reason specifically tied to myself?
> it is by no means random
Please provide evidence.
We don't seem to get wrapped up in questions of why a particular tree is "that" tree and not some other tree. It seems to me, as an atheist, that once you start carving out a special metaphysical nature for humans you're dabbling in the religious.
What requires evidence is this spiritual "you" that was "assigned" to this planet. If we admit that, whether the mechanism is a spiritual hand or a spiritual lottery machine is purely a theological question.
This isn't some mere abstract debate - the meme you're expressing is a radical egalitarian (Protestant) system of ethics being smuggled in under a secular guise.
Less sarcastically we have no evidence that democracy, unrestricted immigration and welfare states are compatible. I’ll happily bite the bullet and see massive restrictions on immigrants’ and even their children’s rights to access the state’s largess as the potential welfare gains are enormous. But that’s probably among the least important and disruptive changes of open borders. The EU, Canada or the US could easily attract immigrants in similar numbers to their total current inhabitants. You think their politics could cope with that well? California can’t even force the amalgamation of the Bay Area into a single city or copy working models of dealing with the homeless. The US can’t copy international rail infrastructure. The EU can’t get it together enough to pay Erdogan his bribe to not let the Syrians into Greece and the rest of the EU. Canada barely has an internal market in goods and services. Politics doesn’t work very well as is. How will it work with a sudden huge increase in non-native non-citizen population?
This chips away at the advantages those winners have particularly when they don't have much else going for them (see the many low education, low income people being vocal opponents of any kind of immigration into their country). Which is why a lot of those people see someone changing country as a big threat. It's any group's right to choose who they want to let in and they will use this to make sure that either the newcomers pull them forward too, or they don't get to move at all around that group.