Should the UN try to create a political taboo (and in the long term, a ban) against sanctions towards general population when countries clash in diplomatic issues?
From a logistical perspective, I think that if my country accepted anyone from anywhere around the world, I think that the lovely little picket-fence green England I live in would turn into an absolute hellscape of poverty even faster than it already is.
I think most people probably hold those two views simultaneously and try to reconcile them.
Passport control is kind of just like a larger-scale way of keeping the supermarket checkout worker out of your Michelin-starred restaurant society Facebook group. They'd just fuck it up and make it awkward for everyone. Is it fair? No.
In a way, passport inequality is a result of economic inequality. Rich countries have no problem opening their borders to each other. And although I have no experience with it, it sounds like it's not that hard to cross borders between some poor countries either. Rich people are welcome everywhere. But allow poor people into rich countries, and everybody is upset.
Opening more borders would be easier if there weren't any refugees, economic or otherwise. If everybody was free to settle wherever they liked, I think most people would still prefer to stay near their place of birth if they could afford to. The problem is that extreme poverty in one place and extreme wealth in another, naturally draws people to the rich place. It's always been like that. In the middle ages, people moved from the countryside to the cities (and still do). Now people also want to move from poor countries to rich countries. It's natural, but the rich countries want to protect their rich-people ghettos. So we create ever stricter and stricter borders and visa requirements.
To create a more free world, we probably first need to create a more equal world. Freedom and equality need to go hand in hand. But too many established interests prefer the world the way it is.
No arguments here!
Should I expand on this? Do I really have to show that countries with a larger foreign born population (such as Sweden or Germany or Switzerland) are doing better than the UK?
You have made an exceptional claim, that is immigration will make England poorer. You should come up with some historical examples and maybe a description of how it would happen, because it would the first time it happened in the history of humanity.
I think that immigration is generally a good thing.
I think that unrestricted immigration would make any country worse off in a number of ways, not only the economic axis but social cohesion, physical space, etc.
None of those countries have unrestricted immigration.
It seems like you view my opinion as being in opposition to yours, but it's not, we feel the same way, I think. :)
Also it seems to me that your comment implies that unrestricted immigration will result in millions of “undesirables” moving to the West. I don’t agree with that.
> > > I think that if my country accepted anyone from anywhere around the world, I think that...England...would turn into an absolute hellscape of poverty even faster than it already is.
Your point about 2008 is irrelevant, whether true or not. It's already taken into account. They're not saying anything about "foreigners" but about unrestricted, unregulated, open boarders style immigration.
I'm generally pretty direct in my speech and I'm not really ashamed of it; I'm proud of my country for all of its' political faults and refuse to let a bunch of racist wankers ruin that.
> completely unrestricted immigration with zero checks and balance
EU citizens, whose passports are equal at least within the EU, can’t move to another EU country without the economic means to leave there. So one would expect this to be the most likely outcome of passport equality.
Said that, even if we assume that passport equality implies totally unrestricted immigration, the notion that it will result in foreigners migrating en mass to the English countryside to found horrid shantytowns and make everybody poorer is extremely bizarre, for such an event would be unique in the entire history of mankind.
The truth is, the world is not an equal place. Never has been, and never will be. In terms of justice, the best we can do is to make sure that those at the bottom have all of their basic needs met, access to opportunities to increase their status, and a continually rising standard of living for everyone via innovation and sustainable development.
As an individual, the best one can do is to work hard to obtain a better passport. That's what I've done, and there are many opportunities to do so.
The European Union exists. It's pretty cool. Go anywhere, no password required.
As I understand it, you still need to identify yourself in countries without such an id, like the US or UK, for a lot of reasons, like when opening bank accounts, interacting with the state, etc. But without a national id card, this can become complicated, and these countries often use a lot of defacto ids "replacements" like birth certificates, driver's licenses and so on, which increases the bureaucracy for citizens/customers and potential for fraud.
So while I see a lot of pros about national ids, what's the "horrid" drawback of ids?
(I am from a country with national id, Germany)
Of course, it turns out you absolutely can if you're not 'suspicious'. A colleague of mine is short, bald, and wears a keffiyeh. He gets stopped for identity checks from time to time. I am never stopped (obviously, this does give away my skin colour and the fact that I have an unassuming or conformist appearance).
While I can see some of the objections, it seems reasonable that a temporary restriction of freedom like that gets documented.
[1]: https://www.nrk.no/norge/har-startet-kartlegging-for-a-vurde...
[2]: https://www.vl.no/nyheter/2021/12/03/oslo-tester-ny-metode-m...
Any temporary restriction will become permanent. They always tell people it is going to be "temporary" and "there will be protections put in place". All it does is normalise such restrictions and then when anyone objects to people will say "Well it been in place now for a while, it is normal, most people are fine with it, you must have something to hide".
The same thing is done time and time again and nobody becomes any the wiser.
If we assume that driving licences are a sane system for safety reasons, I'd prefer a system in which I can show that I am the person that took the driving test, but not that this is the same person that lives at 74 Fake Street or that has bank account number XYZ.
So basically, I'd rather it be rowed back. Why would I want to be required to carry identification when wandering about outside? What possible benefit could that afford me? From my perspective it's a pure negative, I generally try to avoid things that fall into that category.
Generally I'd say "less information if at all necessary".
There are obviously situations in which people need to be identified.
If I use my car to smash into someone and then do a runner, and so the police need to find me to punish me, I want that to be a process that's governed by controls e.g. they can run the licence plate and find out it's my car, but only when they have real reason to do so and not just because road tax receipts will increase by a marginal amount if we blanket all of the roads in automated cameras and send fines to everyone.
The US at least just doesn't need a national ID for anything. Nearly everyone has a birth certificate and social security or other federal ID number. Those who don't would likely not have a national ID in any such system either. Anything achieved by a national ID can be achieved by current documentation.
I remember hearing a lot about new "voter id" laws, and how they are supposedly meant to suppress the vote of poorer minorities, who often do not possess a driver's license (or a car) - especially affecting the older generations of poor minority people most likely to vote.
From what I understand, many states with voter id laws didn't do that, and in some cases only accepted forms of id that poor or black voters were less likely to have.
When I was earning minimum wage when stacking shelves I managed to sort out an ID fine. This idea that Black people or poor people can't get ID is just the bigotry of low expectations.
I personally think it is extremely racist to assume that Black people aren't capable of filling out the required forms for Identification or being able to front the cost of an ID.
There is a big difference between having it being compulsory to carry identification and being required to show identification when my identification need to be verified.
When I am buying my lunch. I don't need to verify who I am. If I am going to the bank they need to verify who I am.
> So while I see a lot of pros about national ids, what's the "horrid" drawback of ids?
Because I shouldn't need be required to carry a piece of paper/plastic card to go outside of my house. The idea of it is bonkers if you are in the UK.
If the identification isn't compulsory and is voluntary I have no problem with them. However from what I understand many places in Europe they are compulsory.
I certainly do not have ID on me all the time. Though I do try to remember to bring my driver's license when using the car, and my passport when leaving the country.
And the same applies to travel in schengen : ID recommended but not mandatory.
I actually thought the big advantage of id cards over passports was that they would be much cheaper or free, but I just checked, and in Netherland they're only slightly cheaper. It's effectively just a form of limited passport.
And clearly not everybody has an id card. It's just that everybody has to have a form of id, which is either a passport or an id card. People with a passport don't need to also have an id card.
Here in Germany, you'd also be allowed to use a passport instead. In practice, however, your home address is only on identity cards, not on passports. So not everybody will accept a passport for validation, or at least you then need an additional proof of residence.
When travelling in Europe I am well aware of my privilege of being white, middle class, looking healthy, dressed neatly casual or in hiking gear and being two metres tall to boot (I stick out, but I'm invisible to border guards, customs officers, and police).
In international trains and near borders you can see people being asked to identify all the time if you take the time to notice it.
I agree with just about everything you said, and the world will probably never be an "equal" place, whatever that means. But I don't want to concede that the world will never be a fair place. Anyone should be able to travel the planet, regardless of the circumstances of their birth. Obviously this isn't possible today due to existing political infrastructure, but it's something we should strive for. We shouldn't give up on ideals of justice just because they're hard to reach.
From the time of the cave paintings and Venus figurines 50,000 years ago (and before that) until 10,000 years ago, there is no evidence of inequality, class society or surplus production anywhere. Nor today in the few remaining hunter gatherer bands in the world today.
2000 years ago travel 100km north of modern Stockholm and you found a completely egalitarian society.
Your history is wrong which does not say much for your prediction.
Kudos to you and I did the same in the 90s. But for some countries those "opportunities" do not exist in any practical way today. It is a sad world for many. When I think about it I get depressed.
I decide who I want to welcome in my home. I believe Thailand, Russia, Brazil, Germany are completely free to do the same and fix their own rules.
But you don't. Take the US, for example. Everyone born there is a citizen. Everyone born to an American parent is a citizen (or can be). None of the folks get a choice in where they were born, or what nationality they get. And you have all sorts of folks - people that will rape you and your family, and others that will give you food without going through a means check. You don't get to choose what the child next door will become any more than you chose your next-door neighbors.
Yet somehow, keeping out "the others" is giving you a choice? You don't even get real say who they keep out and who they let in. It isn't choice at all, I think.
People don't just come to a new country and just abandon their past. They bring their values, ideals, beliefs, problems and solutions. As the number of foreign people coming, cosmopolitanism increase.
Then you quickly reach a point where you can eat a raclette anywhere, soccer is the most famous sports, Hollywood is the main entity broadcasting entertainment. There is no point in traveling, because every place more or less lost their spirit.
And I am not talking about the fact that, if countries completely drop their requirements based on nationality, they will keep their "usefulness" requirements (who is able to take a job we are looking for)
What's going to happen? Well educated people are going to move easily. Further depriving countries of the very ones they need to develop their countries.
It will be a one way street. I don't imagine hundreds of thousands of Americans moving to eastern Africa anytime soon.
People used to say that folks with different color of skin had a different culture, and therefore interracial relationships do not work. People move across the country (in the US) and get culture shock. In other words, people don't really consider others as having the same values and culture. "Contribute to the economy" is a weird phrasing: Most of my family worked to not starve and immigrants contribute to economies as well.
If you are afraid that someone from a "leser" country with a "lesser" value system is going to mess up your life, it isn't and the actual answer is for humans to make sure their global neighbors aren't crappy countries to live in. It is, after all, partly our fault (our = "developed countries") since we rely on the slave conditions in "developing" countries so that we have toys and food.
None of it is a perfect answer, but striving for it is much better than simply reasoning, "I guess we'll just have to exploit these folks". Realistically, that's what we are doing with immigration: Keeping the folks we've exploited the most... out.
This will be nowhere near enough. Maybe 5%.
Less traveling would probably be good for the world, but it's not true that places "lose their spirit" just because they've got football, Hollywood movies and raclette everywhere. They already have that everywhere, and almost everywhere is still interesting and unique. Just more accessible, leading to more travel.
Cultural exchange is useful and valuable. What's a problem is when desperate people have no buy-in into the society. That leads to alienation, which can lead to all sorts of problems. But this can also happen to people whose parents, and possibly distant ancestors, already lived there.
I think the opposite.
It doesn't have to be this way if trust between groups improves such systems could appear. Ironically the ambitions to solve racism did create even more distrust as it seems, but the setback is hopefully temporary.
I don't think a country with strong social security could ever survive open immigration for too long. It would have to adapt and restrict social security because the societal consent has to be reestablished.
I am not from the US.
Open immigration doesn't necessarily mean open rights to social structure: After all, most places have some limits on the safety net you are entitled to now - For example: Taking certain types of social help here in Norway hurts my own immigration. You can have some controls on this: One actual answer is to make sure everyone has basic things as rights (Such as food and shelter) and work on making everywhere decent enough places to live - but for this, we need less global exploitation.
I do agree that we should make sure everyone knows how the systems work in reality, but realistically I'd want to lean into things folks would actually use instead of memorizing dates and names: You don't need to know all the laws, just how they pertain to you. You don't need all government structure, but general and the things you'll probably deal with (local government, motor vehicle laws, etc), what to do if you find yourself disabled, poor, or needing time off for surgery. Making sure everyone knows worker and tenant rights would be a step in the right direction as well, as well as what to do about these sorts of things.
On the other hand, I had practice tests on a computer (at a school). My test was full of practical things and only a little history: Mine asked me about using the health care system and the schooling system and things like that - the sort of thing that once you learned general knowledge, you didn't have to worry too much if you couldn't remember a historical name or date. I took the civics test required for Norway, by the way, and they have a list of languages you could take it in. Of course, I had to take it to continue my residence so more folks wind up taking it.
Edit, forgotten thing: Whether or not someone is stateless depends on the home country, but generally, it won't - mostly because the US doesn't make you give up citizenship before you are granted on in the US. If you want to become a US citizen, though, your citizenship is going to depend, in part, on this civics test. This is what I was referring to.
https://www.uscis.gov/citizenship-resource-center/the-2020-v....
What is insane about it?
"You don't need all government structure"
Sure, you don't need to know everything. But it sure helps if people understand the role of the three branches, how laws are generally structured, etc. You might be surprised by how many people can't name the three branches of government or don't understand their role. In my opinion, that will eventually lead to abuse/changes of powers such as we see with the federal executive branch usurping powers it never originally had over the past century. It's hard for a citizen to see when rule of law is bypassed if they don't know the rules/structure/purpose of the system.
I took a civics test for Norway. I had a 6 week civics class, and they try to give the class and the test in a language you know. Mine was in English, as was my test (I'll have to take it in Norwegian before citizenship, as they changed the rules).
Most things on the test were very practical things indeed. No need to, for example, memorize every political party that is on the national ballot, for example, and only a question or two (tops) that wanted a historical date at all. The vast majority asked things about the health care system, schooling system, and basic useful things like that. The class added more detail, but they tested basics. The test is electronic, taken at a school so it is secure (no bags/phones at your computer, for example). I could get on a government website and take a practice test, too.
I'm American. The american test is more concerned with you learning the propaganda of the country and memorizing dates than it with making sure you can navigate different systems in society. "Topics about government and history", they say. The actual website states, "Although USCIS is aware that there may be additional correct answers to the civics questions, applicants are encouraged to respond to the questions using the answers provided below." [1] They aren't testing how well you can navigate the system or things you'll need to, say, drive: Hence, insane.
Though admittedly, it is shorter than I expected: They only ask 20 out of 128 questions (mine was 30ish) - and you only have to get 12 right. Unfortunately, it is also oral, so (for me) it would be much more stressful, especially considering the brutish formality that a lot of American institutions have.
[1] https://www.uscis.gov/citizenship-resource-center/the-2020-v....
It is like capital: you can be born into money and enjoy the unfair advantage of never having to work 9-5. Just collective, shared by everyone with the same citizenship. Do we need to abolish private capital too?
I come from Soviet Union where we tried to do just that. Result was the worst passport to have, truly :) to the point that the border defences were pointed inwards - to prevent escape rather than infiltration.
If it was the point of nationhood then wouldn't we expect immigration control to be one of the first things new nations implement?
Yet the United States had wide open borders until 1875, 83-99 years (depending on who you ask) into nationhood. It wasn't until the Page Act in 1875 that restricted immigration of Chinese women that the US started controlling immigration.
That was followed by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which extended restrictions to include men.
By the end of the century they had added some restrictions on non-Chinese immigrants such as a small immigration tax, a requirement that you could take care of yourself, and a requirements that you were diseases free.
In 1917 a literacy test was added, but you could take it in your native language.
It wasn't until 1924 that the US got restrictions the seriously limited integration beyond the anti-Chinese limits. The Immigration Act of 1924 introduced per-country limits based on how many people in each country were in the US in 1890.
The official goal was to "preserve the ideal of US homogeneity". But no one really cared whether or not say the ratio of Scots to French in the US was changing. It was almost certainly about Jews.
The European countries whose contribution to US immigration had increased disproportionately were largely those that had greatly stepped up persecution of Jews, and it was Jews trying to escape that persecution that was making the immigration increases from there disproportional.
By limiting those countries based on 1890 levels they could reduce the number of Jews that got in. That's not as effective as an actual limit on Jews, but even in 1924 that would have been difficult to do.
Imagine passports issued by Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc.. to their workers or to workers of smaller companies using their cloud services. The only thing missing is armies
Shudder
You load 16 tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
It is easy to say it ought to be equal but then the resulting flows need to be equal too.
Likewise it does seem like maybe the country with the worse off passport etc maybe be worse off but its likely there are rules preventing open and complete investment in, e.g owning land without 99 year leases, 51% ownership rules, outright restrictions on foreigners etc to match more open countries too (typically the ones with stronger passports).
And I’m not sure why inhabitants of a country that made good economic decisions (e.g. Singapore) should pay for countries that made poor ones (e.g. North Korea).
Yes, ideally, this world would be a peaceful place, with no military, no terrorists, no dangers, no security risks, no blackhats, no drug addicts, no gangs, no children military or selling drugs, (screw all that just no crime/violence flowerpower & peace sign) etc etc. But in the real world, all of this exists, and a whole lot more. That's why not everyone's allowed. Then there's the economic difference between countries, and power differences. The rich countries want to stay ahead of the curve, and the poor countries want to step up. Any propaganda to reach the goal is warranted. China uses different techniques than USA or EU. Much more authoritarian, for starters. Remember what I said about diplomats/spies? Your proposal would open the floodgates.
Even from an egoistic perspective, Western countries, especially those whose pension system is an unreformable Ponzi scheme (say Italy) and those with a limited welfare state (eg UK and USA), should stop pretending immigration is a problem.
Here's a before/after review from someone who travelled to Dubrovnik, Croatia before it became part of the EU.
> Our impression from that trip was mildly disappointing, because the distinctive culture of the country seemed to be fading into European Union standardization and blandness. The local high cuisine in particular was already long forgotten.
[1] https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2021/09/26/re-visiting-dubrovnik...
The same can be said for Germany's reunification. So many people moved from the former GDR to the West where the jobs were and as it's been a few years now the population is aging and dying.
That is a fact. My opinion now is that I don't think that this would've been a good reason to not reunite Germany. And the same is true for your EU example.
Also wow, that link you quoted. I would not cite that as a useful reference, that was a little painful to read.
> Their biggest hope is to grow as equals within the European Union which is today just another word for NATO, meaning vassals of the United States. Croatia is thus willy-nilly aligned against Russia and surely soon to be aligned against China.
From someone who describes 80s Yugoslavia as:
> The Yugoslavia of my memory was to a great extent a fun-loving place where the business people with whom I associated had a well developed a sense of humor, cultivated witticisms, enjoyed immensely good food and good drink.
Weird, all I personally know from 80s Yugoslavia is from people who came to Germany to work on construction sites for not-exactly-great money, they didn't really look the fun-loving kind to me. Maybe the author was mingling mostly with upper-class people who seem to not have gotten the short end of the stick so much. (JFTR, the first time I went to Croatia at all was a couple years ago and I was not old enough in the 80s/90s to have formed a good political opinion, BUT my viewpoint is simply what I heard from only non-rich people who emigrated to Germany, and from their kids).
Selection bias. Emigrants tend to be the least happy people - there's a reason they left. Emigrants are not a good sample of the "real" native people.
> My opinion now is that I don't think that this would've been a good reason to not reunite Germany
Sure, borders change and sometimes countries get unified. But the OP was asking about unifying the entire world, not two sides of a neighbouring country with the same language. That is a painful thought, we should be fighting to protect cultures like we fight to protect endangered species.
You have countries ranging from Croatia, Poland to Germany and Norway under one common passport.
Then you can ask specific questions like whether Germany and Norway has deteriorated by its influx of people from poor EU countries speaking destroying its way of life.
It seems to me that the EU experiment shows it’s possible to have passport equality without some downward slide to chaos.
One interesting side effect of the EU experiment is how quickly public views EU as a homogeneous block. While in reality the cultural differences between Netherlands and Croatia is probably larger than the difference between France and Morocco.
The problem is that neoliberals and capitalists don’t want this because then they can’t have as cheap of a slave class that they currently do. HN is full of these types and why you’re not seeing this recognized further up.
Wage inequality is the biggest barrier to a universal passport. You need to get this part done first - and then universal passport and removal of boarders will be good. Then we can just have the United earth federation or whatever BS.
But that’s all like 1,000 years from now. By then - I presume we’ll have killed most of our species off and regress back to 1,000 AD.
Who is going to impose what is to be valued by society? You basically just want to deprive countries from having any kind of political freedom, choices, their own personal destiny, success and failures. What a sad world to live in.
I'm 100% for immigration, but realistically if you just allow everyone to move overnight, it's just going to make a big mess unless we first focus on financial inequality.
And for example, in the US, if you don't speak English or Spanish it is going to be difficult to get unskilled work (understood that there are some places where other languages would work, I'm characterizing the overall situation).