Humans are animals, all animals have territories. We decided on mutually agreed upon borders and territories to prevent the animal response.
I like the idea of bringing in as many people as possible and treating them all as humans, but I also would like exceptions for militants and espionage. Fuck Russia, Fuck China, Fuck NK, and Fuck Iran. Make all those fuckers jump through a billion hoops, make them choose between here and there.
That brings up some interesting questions. Morality aside (a big aside. I know), does border security actually give citizens an economic or physical security advantage? Is it even possible for another country to send over so many people that they could take over? Some of this is predicated on an “us vs them” mentality, which I agree is part of the problem. I also know there are people with values incompatible with mine and who might not be willing to coexist peacefully with me. I agree on the goal. I don’t have the solution. Thoughts?
It probably does give an advantage. The reality is, every single country has a finite capacity and a finite amount of resources. Those are managed and procured by the taxes paid by its citizens. In the modern age when travel is easy, fast, and cheap, it does make sense to have some sort of control mechanism to limit how many “non-contributors” may come in to use the country’s resources, otherwise you risk getting your systems overburdened because they’re being utilized by a lot more people than they are meant to.
This is not an easy problem to solve at all. An idealistic “let’s get rid of the borders” will have very real consequences in the real world, and probably won’t work very well as long as some countries are significantly and objectively better places to live than others.
The reality is, every single country has a finite capacity and a finite amount of resources.
Sort of but not really? It’s a talking point that tends to get used by xenophobes and nationalists a lot, that sounds obviously true on the surface, but never stands up to much scrutiny whenever you examine it on a case-by-case basis.
Like what kind of scrutiny?
Basic scrutiny? Like it usually turns out that “capacity” is measured by a self-serving and short-sighted metric, and you could easily find space and resources for more if there were the political will to do so.
“finite” stands up to that scrutiny, but it also doesn’t mean a lot. The volume of space within 1m of any photon ever emitted from the Sun is finite, but it’s not small on many scales.
If you have an additional 3% of the population come in as new immigrants, no one would even notice resources were spread more thin, just like they don’t notice a 3% inflation most years. I don’t think most countries are experiencing that level of immigration, including extra-legal immigration.
What does not stand up to scrutiny is a general “immigration is bad” thing. Immigration is great if you allow people who are willing and able to contribute to your country in, and implement some measures to help them integrate into your country so they can make a life for themselves and start being productive members as quickly and efficiently as possible. Then it works, and when it works it can work very well.
But that itself, choosing who can and cannot get in, who can/will be a productive new member of your society is border control. Basically you have to control the entry so that you can give your systems and infrastructure and society the time and opportunity to gradually develop along.
Bonus. Do you believe that the global north would fuck up the environment so much if they weren’t able to keep people from the global south out with violence?
Open borders would lead to the greatest move toward global ecological sustainability and world peace possible in a capitalist world.
China is basically exporting environmental damage to other countries right now in order to continue inflating their own economy. It’s why they have ocean-going sand dredging boats.
The free movement of people is a human right.
Borders are important for settling disputes.
He’s not thinking about why we need them in the first place. We are inherently a mistrustful and violent species that has to be civilized to not use violence as the first means of solving problems.
And we still end up killing each other over which imaginary friend you believe is secretly real.
Solve that and you can start talking about erasing those lines in the sand.
This is patently false. The concept of material- and land ownership is the main cause of violence. Plenty of examples of egalitarian societies in history that shared their resources and lived in peace.
And how large were those societies and how long did they last?
Disputes between who? Frontiers, nations and states killed far more people than any religion. And their all imaginary.
“A government is a body of people - usually, notably, ungoverned.”
The point being that, when you say soemthing like “this religion killed those people” or “that nation killed those people” what you mean is “these people killed those people”.
So when you ask “Disputes between who?” the answer is “Disputes between people.”
The fiction being that these people represent others. Frontiers are just a way to divide influence zone of governments; none have any actual legitimacy.
Um, how would you define legitimacy in this context?
“Good fences make good neighbors”. Let’s look at it another way. Does that freedom of movement include encroaching on your home and setting up a tent in your yard? (Or other analogous situation depending on your living arrangement).
If you said “no”, then you believe in the ability to have a secure and defined space. A country is just a pooled space of a larger community that have collectively decided to have a secure and defined space.
I think the bigger issue stems from the inequality and access within reason.
Good fences make good neighbors
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/150774/robert-frost-mending-wall :
Because the neighbor gets the last word, it’s possible to read “Good fences make good neighbors” as the poem’s straightforward message. A more complex reading, alert to Frost’s ironic style, would side firmly with the speaker. In this view, the speaker nurses a healthy suspicion of barriers that serve no clear purpose; he is open to communication and new ideas, wary of anything that arbitrarily divides people
I didn’t realize there were some people out there saying, “Good fences make good neighbors” unironically until today. Like the whole poem is the narrator talking about how he isn’t so sure if it’s true and his neighbor just repeating it. I mean, damn, it’s not even a subtext. Like this excerpt pretty heavy handedly says that maybe you shouldn’t build an arbitrary wall:
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Some countries you can do that on someone’s property
Money can cross borders pretty easily these days, but the rules and their application are inconsistent or misguided and so we get uneven or suboptimal results. Think differing tax outcomes, or ownership or difficulties in monitoring.
Goods can cross borders pretty easily these days too, notwithstanding what’s going on in the US recently, or the economic coercion other countries wield for their own purposes. My observations of various international trade agreements and disputes suggest to me that there’s a lot of politics and quid pro quo involved, rather than the agreement of common rules and effective methods to resolve disputes.
If we want free movement of people then we need global rules to keep it fair. Preferably rules that put the folks’ needs first. Otherwise it becomes a “I’m stronger than you, so I win” situation, which is pretty much how things work now. Rules are needed to settle who gets what rights and obligations so that we have a common framework to live together. And we need a decent system for determining those rules. And a just method of enforcing those rights and obligations. And an effective method for settling disputes. And an effective method for identifying when the rules don’t work and changing them. I don’t think that exists anywhere right now.
So, I’m not hopeful that removal of barriers to people crossing borders would be successful any time soon. There’s just so much societal glue that needs to be in place first. We’re just not very good at getting that agreed, set up and sustainable.
continuous, uninterrupted land
Also this guy: “What the fuck is a river?”
Short bit of very damp land.
Imagine ten million people pouring into Canada. We have enough of a housing crisis
I like the idea but you have to have very homogeneous laws and cultures to make it work. The EU despite all the differences between the people and cultures, have similar levels of law and law enforcement. The US and Canada had that similar level until Agent Orange 2: spray tan boogaloo. But it becomes more disparate when you do borders like the US and Mexico or Russia and Norway or Japan and China.
I’m not familiar enough with each of these borders to dive into nuance, but that’d be my impression for a us-mexico analog.
This is impossible without also abolishing the concept of land ownership. Which I’m all for, but that ship sailed like 10 000 years ago.
I think this is the core problem, but you could allow freedom of movement without completely eliminating real estate.
On land you don’t own, you could be restricted to “leave only footprints, take only memories” and we could still mostly eliminate administrative borders.
Maybe not the best links, but here’s something:
https://www.visitfinland.com/en/articles/finnish-everyman-rights-the-right-to-roam/
https://finland.fi/life-society/how-every-persons-right-in-finland-evolved-over-more-than-a-century/
That’s literally Kant opinion on the matter and one of the inspiring principles of the European Union.
Closed borders do seem to cause a lot more problems than open ones.
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I’d love a free roaming world. Those that want to roam into a different area better know the local rules and cultures.
