Up until recently ( relatively ) a person could pretty much move to other country without much fuzz.
Up until recently ( relatively ) a person could pretty much move to other country without much fuzz.
Paraguay up until recently required a ~5k deposit but they dropped even that. In Argentina "technically" you're supposed to follow a bunch of rather restrictive resident visa pathways but few do that and you can file for citizenship immediately upon landing and until your case is finished cannot be deported. The requirements are basically live there for 2 years and show you had some income, but by judge shopping some allow black market income lol.
Others of note: Bolivia and Somaliland only require a token payment for a 1 year resident visa (think in Bolivia you only need do that 2 or 3 times to become PR or citizen). If you have a bit more cash several places like honduras / nicoragua / ecuador only require ~30k "investment" which is basically accessible (eventually) to anyone middle class+ with enough determination. When I went to Rojava they also accept basically anyone as they are a "people without a nation" who happen to have sort of a nation.
And then there's weev, who posts here on occasion. I think he got a Transnistria passport, which is obtainable after only a year of residence. It's my understanding residency is as easy as going to a hotel and asking to talk to the right people about getting a resident permit, and paying some moderate fees.
If you're not too discriminating pretty much anyone can emigrate from the US forever with very little capital.
Even moving to a new tribe in Native peoples in North America required proving a blood relation, having someone vouch for you, or being skilled enough they would accept you in.
Now we have people everywhere (that doesn't suck; and even some places that do). We have social programs and expensive infrastructure. The world is very different now than even 100 years ago.
Maybe if the entire world reaches a broadly similar level of human development, including comparable levels of infrastructure and social support, migration can be opened up quite a bit.
But right now it would simply mean that developed nations would see a flood of people immigrating just to get those great services, and it would crush their system. So we need controls to keep the change manageable and ensure that the tax base scales appropriately to maintain the expected levels of service.
Never mind migration. Even travel gets worse. We've had relatively frictionless travel between first world countries. Now it it only 3 month instead of 6 and online visas like ESTA. So it does not seem to get any better and does not correlate so "comparable levels".
Watching the children in Ethiopia starving to death, I couldn’t help but wonder how we felt forcing people to live in an emergent desert to death by starvation was better if we just wrote a song about it - “We are the world.” If that were true, why couldn’t they just leave?
Had we grown at their pace, we'd also be experiencing famines.
As for why they couldn't leave - you can ask their neighbors. The West is not the only destination.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983–1985_famine_in_Ethiopia
I didn’t assert the west should unilaterally open their borders. I stated that borders are inhuman - as humans are naturally migratory. Taking that to the real world, that would mean their neighbors should open borders as well - not just to Ethiopians, but to everyone.