We know this will happen. Bangladesh was in fact a grand experiment in this regard. After independence in the 1970s, an intellectual elite gave the country a western style constitution, with principles of secularity and freedom. What did the Bangladeshis do with it? They quickly repealed those provisions, made Islam the official religion, etc.
It is a popular mental dysfunction in the west to deny that culture matters. To believe that the west’s material wealth is the result of random chance, rather than what people believe, how they act, and what they do.
We had that for a couple centuries where the test was birth right. Somewhere down the line, we decided to cut their heads off.
Democracy in theory gives ordinary people power to choose their country's destiny. As someone who has a loved one in sg, I think their situation is peculiar but part of it is that their "aristocracy" actually does a decent job of providing for most of the people, so they don't feel the need to revolt against the PAP. In the US, we too have an aristocracy (although people might not want to admit to it) but they have not done a good job of taking care of people and so they is currently a lot of unrest that is flaring up here and there. It has a different flavor, but there is certainly political strife. So, imo, aristocracy is not a stable system because that aristocracy, being unaccountable, can turn against the people that hold it up, and thus be vulnerable to deposition.
I don't see a massive distinction between Singaporean elite-driven one party "democracy" and American elite driven two party "democracy". Both fail in certain ways but they function up to a certain point.
For example the United States constitution didn't happen quickly - there was a long period of people writing and discussing about such things, the age of enlightenment (I'm still grasping to understand how it happened, it seems so unlikely). There were also only under three million people living in USA when it became independent.
Ditto on Chinese immigrants in the later 1800s, Germans, etc. The point is that immigrants are always a minority in their host country, so they naturally have less of a base and thus power.
> And if their cultures clash with each other, you have a recipe for enduring intra-national strife.
Feels logical but also feels unproven.
So it is widely accepted that there is no/negligible genetic difference, but there are cultural differences at least when it comes to prosperity.
However it is also the case that cultures are extremely slow to change - multiple generations - almost to the actual speed of evolution. Essentially conceding the point that even if it isn't genetic there is some kind of heritable negative/missing positive traits which can last multiple generations.
Moreover, it sounds like there's a jump in logic in your post. Immigrants don't export their culture usually, they mostly adopt the new country's culture for the most part. Certain things are retained but people who've never immigrated before don't realize how much moving to another place changes you.
It's one thing to caution against removing all barriers literally overnight. I don't know that it would be a disaster, but I don't know for sure that it wouldn't, and it's reasonable to exercise some caution. But, at the risk of making an inflammatory analogy, it would have been morally defensible to ask if there was a way to end chattel slavery in the US without a civil war that killed ~3% of the population. It was not morally defensible to oppose ending it. Global apartheid is an evil of a similar scale, and first world governments its active cause, not innocent bystanders. It is our duty to figure out how, not whether, to end it.
[1]https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/03/29/world/asia/bangladesh-...
[2]https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/bangladesh-isl...
People would have to arrive, in numbers for a long time, have kids, retain the culture perfectly in that regards as it blends into US cultures and then override the existing culture to do so. That's like 100 years in a vacuum. That's like imagining you'd see to eye with your ancestors from 1918. Ya think?
If 1 person of culture A arrives to a territory inhabited by 1M people of culture B, which culture will prevail? With a high confidence, B.
If we assume more or less continuous, non-chaotic behavior of this function, the range of A/B ratios where the change is hard to predict must be somehow narrower than [1/1M .. 1M], likely closer to [0.5 .. 2].
This is not a mathematical proof, of course, just an illustration. Mathematics is only possible where axioms hold; in human world, very-very few, if any, axioms ever hold.
> we would be tearing down the statue of liberty
> It is a popular mental dysfunction
This characterization of people who disagree with the parent, along with the comments above, does not seem to invite discussion, but rather a flame war.
> it doesn’t work like that.
In fact it has. People have been making the same predictions as you about immigrants to the U.S. since the first immigrants arrived. Can't trace your family to the Mayflower? You shouldn't be running the country. (I'll save redundancy by citing my other comment):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17437962
And yet the evidence is that the wealthiest country in the world and its leading advocate of democracy (over a longer timescale) is run by those very immigrants and their decedents.
Freedom and democracy are universal values; they are embraced in "cultures" all over the world (U.S., almost all of South America, Japan, Taiwan, S. Korea, India, Europe, etc. ...) and provide the most stable governments, the most freedom, and the wealthiest economies. Bangladesh might have had a bad experience - there are no guarantees - but of course we don't know how much that depends on poor execution nor do we know if other forms of government would have been better or worse. Maybe democracy was actually the best option.
Universal values are closer to, don't have sex with your mother or don't eat people and we still have notable exceptions for those
Certainly there is plenty of writing throughout recorded history in many cultures about freedom and oppression, and democracy as a form of government at least goes back to ancient Greece and Rome (a republic).
We have no idea how often it was implemented on a small scale (a village, etc.), but I find it hard to believe that nobody thought of taking a vote until 1776.
Implementing those things in government might have been difficult, but so was developing physics, literacy and the Internet. That doesn't mean people didn't want those things throughout history.
> Universal values are closer to ...
I don't think it's worth debating the meaning of 'universal'.
Based on the responses I've had to this post I think people might believe I am against democracy. My point was that it's not a universal value of humanity and so if we want democracy it needs to be supported. It will not be supported by base human instinct
TIL that the Greeks were nei bother. Rome was also originally a Republic.
Why is this entire thread full of bollocks history and bollocks sociology?
Id go as far as to say that someone thinking that Rome and Greece are early cultures might be the person with "bollocks history"
Additionally you are using Alexander the Great as your earliest marker? How was he democratic at all. He was a literal military dictator as were the Hellenic kingdoms that's descended from his empire
> If freedom and democracy were universal values then they would have shown up in some of the earliest cultures, which they did not.
We have a ton of resource from the Greeks because they wrote shit down. By invoking "the earliest" civilizations you're hiding behind a greater unknown because we lack an equivalent level of written resource until ~3500 BC. So written resource becomes available 5,500 years ago and democracy has written examples available 2,000 years ago, 3,500 years after written record. Ergo, according to your bullshit if something occurs 3,500 years after writing is established even though that was 2,000 years ago that means _nothing_ toward "universal values".
I can't believe you'd twist history like this to much such bollocks points. What the fuck does "universal values" even mean? We can barely trust the tablets we have and we have limited to no written record of societies beyond 3,500 years ago. But because of this window of 3,500 years between writing and democracy not appearing you classify it as "non-universal". You're full of shit by basing your entire argument on this window that conveniently fulfils it. Humans have existed for hundreds of thousands of years yet this 3,500 year window is all that matters to you. Dwell on that.
For reference, I am not arguing that democracy IS a universal value but just against that you can prove what is or isn't a universal value by cherry picking our patchy written record like you do.
Alex is a shit marker to be fair but gives a general gist for the rise of the Hellenic world. Examples of democracy within city states existed prior to 6 BC Athens but 6 BC Athens is the best known one.
In HN comments, it's more important not to turn this site into a flaming pit than it is to be right about Hellenic antiquity.
As to your points. We have written history from thousands of years before the Greeks. The code of Hammurabi predates them significantly. We also have scattered historical records from other ancient cultures and it's not like their government system was a mystery. They had Kings and emperor's, not elected leaders.
Even with the Greeks, how many of the city states had any sort of democratic system and weren't a monarchy or oligopoly? Youre accusing me of cherry picking but all you can point to is a single geographic area in a relatively small span of time and even then, only a few of the population centers had any sort of democracy.
It's ironic that people in the US who have such great fear of immigrants worry about being overrun by criminals, when the US itself already has by far the highest amount of criminals locked in prison in the world.
>Instead, we would be tearing down the statue of liberty
Quite silly to point to mere symbolism (whether or not a statue exists) while ignoring the physical reality of human suffering behind bars.
Some of these are bad things, some of these are good, and the last one is ugly.
Well, unless you also propose the dissolvement of the world's countries as sovereign states, having a country means protecting its culture, way of life, and assets for its inhabitants.
How would the freedom for "everyone in the world" to move there, for example, would work for Switzerland, for example, a cosy country of 8 million people?
Would it be totally find if e.g. 9 million people from another culture come in, change the cultural climate in the place, and vote their politicians into power?
"If people could migrate freely around the world" what would stop that from happening?
Or why not just bring in 350 million Chinese into the US (they'd have more than a billion more to spare), and have them rule the place?
How about within Europe? The Schengen area alone is 400M+, the EU is 500M+ and Europe is 750M+. The amount of complaining about freedom of movement is really quite limited in reality given the scope of the free movement area. They've even developed a program to smooth out bringing in new countries; read up on the accession process.
Why is it that going from 5M (free movement within, say, New Zealand) to 35M (free movement within Canada) to 325M (free movement within the US) to 500M (free movement within the EU) all work -- over 2 whole orders of magnitude -- but expanding it any further would turn the world into a post-apocalyptic hellscape? Why would 1 more order of magnitude cause apocalypse when that hasn't happened yet?
Moreover, why doesn't everyone in the free movement area in Europe pile into Switzerland? Plenty of people move from eastern Europe, but there's still last I counted 38M people in Poland. They're not all in the UK, Germany or France. Local language, local culture, local jobs, economy, opportunities, family -- these all tie you to a place.
If offered a permanent life in Switzerland, would you drop everything and go? Why not? Probably all those things I listed above. I'm an EU citizen. Through EFTA, I absolutely could, forever, without restriction live in Switzerland, and yet here I am, somehow not in Switzerland. Fascinating.
This sounds like tribalism to me.
There are 650,000 NZ citizens in Australia, which is about 15% of the population of NZ. New Zealand has the second highest proportion of natural born citizens living abroad in the world, after Ireland [1].
The only reason that this arrangement works well is that New Zealand has a small population compared to Australia (5 million vs 25 million). If Australia had a lower income than New Zealand and 15% of Australians came to New Zealand, it would be chaos.
New Zealand also has a large Polynesian population (but not freedom of movement). Once again, this arrangement works because the Pacific Island nations have a much smaller population than New Zealand.
If you opened up immigration from India to the USA, you wouldn't see such a beneficial relationship, as there are 3 times as many people in India than the USA.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2016/01/15/the-co...
I would imagine that countries within the EU don’t have the same Standards of living/earnings gap between them as say a developing country & a western one. Hence, their is not the same incentive to mass migrate.
The color coded map on this article is a good example of this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PP...
[NOTE: I didn't adjust for PPP so the discrepancy is not as high as I implied it to be although it is still high; I couldn't find sufficient data in time].
Probably those Samoans don't assume that they would be welcomed and be making $58K in California. More likely they'd join the millions of piss poor latinos, just without their families and old communities.
And still, with a Samoa population of 200K, there are 100K Samoan immigrants in the US and 150K in New Zealand. Most of the Samoan population (400K) live outside the country.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_South_Korea
“Following the Korean War, South Korea remained one of the poorest countries in the world for over a decade. In 1960 its gross domestic product per capita was $79,[57] lower than that of some sub-Saharan countries.[58] The growth of the industrial sector was the principal stimulus to economic development. In 1986, manufacturing industries accounted for approximately 30 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) and 25 percent of the work force. Benefiting from strong domestic encouragement and foreign aid, Seoul's industrialists introduced modern technologies into outmoded or newly built facilities at a rapid pace, increased the production of commodities—especially those for sale in foreign markets—and plowed the proceeds back into further industrial expansion. As a result, industry altered the country's landscape, drawing millions of laborers to urban manufacturing centers.”
A good book that talks about this economic transformation and how it was achieved is bad Samaritan’s:
https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capital...
The books author is a Korean economist who grew up during this period. One point that he makes which is very interesting is that South Korea had very strict laws preventing its academics from migrating to other countries. Those that did travel abroad to study were forced to return and participate in the economic development of the country. He attributes this as part of the reason for South Korea’s turn around.
China is another economic success story that restricts its citizens movements. Not saying that I agree with either of these policies. Just bringing them up as eastern counterpoints to the notion that unlimited free trade and free movement are the optimal states for economic development.
For one, who said it was successful? As you say, those US states lost their sovereignty in the process - which is exactly what I maintained nation states would probably want to maintain.
Second, unlike existing nations, those states were "tabula rasa" from a cultural perspective, huge empty areas to be filled with people (although even in this case, things didn't ended very well for the actual natives, the native Americans).
Third, it's not like those states have much of a meaningful local culture, or much on taxation and other such policies. Thank's to gerrymandering and a broken party people they can even get a president most of their people voted against. And the coasts have to suffer the politics and politicians voted by the mainland states, and vice versa.
Surely they are not the best example to make the case for "open borders while maintaining one's sovereignity".
But I guess your question is not predicated on that, but on the migration patterns to those states. As in, people didn't just jump in there from all areas -- e.g. to all end up living in California or New York and so.
But that's also a broken analogy. If NY had a much better standard of living than the other states, so much so that people were willing to leave their own states, local communities and connections, people would immigrate there in droves.
Lots did actually - e.g. millions have immigrated internally into California during the Dust Bowl crisis, creating shanty towns and lots of turmoil in the process. But while there is still work to be found around most of the 50 states, there's no much reason to predominantly prefer one over the other. And the US has been relatively stable and prosperous economy, in fact the #1 economy in the world for a century or so.
Here we're talking a billion (or more) people from developing countries that wouldn't mind to make the jump to another western country.
>Moreover, why doesn't everyone in the free movement area in Europe pile into Switzerland?
For one, because the difference in quality of life is not enough to leave e.g. Sweden or Spain, or France, or even Hungary, and go to live in very expensive country, without a job waiting for you.
You are right that "Plenty of people move from eastern Europe, but there's still last I counted 38M people in Poland. They're not all in the UK, Germany or France. Local language, local culture, local jobs, economy, opportunities, family -- these all tie you to a place." -- but we're not talking about people with "local jobs, economy, and opportunities", but about hundreds of millions in much poorer regions, that start from much lower conditions.
Second, because you need to obtain a residency permit, and prove that you can sustain yourself while in Switzerland for any stay over a few months. So willy nilly migrating there without money in the bank, being accepted into a university, or a job waiting for you is not an option. And not just that, but the Swiss have voted to restore immigration quotas for EU citizens (and already have special stricter quotas for specific countries in EU, namely the poorer ones).
-Carl Sagan
My guess? Interplanetary travel will do this. Unification is intrinsically linked to transportation and communications breakthroughs.
That's optimistic. Do you mean when the first person steps on Mars (or orbits Venus!) or large scale travel?
Interplanetary capabilities will rapidly collapse the list of releveant societies. Reducing then number of parties in the room facilitates agreement.
With the free market in the EU why has the whole population of Greece not yet moved to Germany or France for the opportunity? Even with freedom of movement many won't want to, or have financial and family ties. The biggest surge came when the poorer Eastern European nations joined the EU and we had noticeable Polish and other communities forming - but were far from being swamped. The UK didn't become less the UK because of it. London, Manchester, Liverpool and the other major cities have had big immigrant communities since the early 1800's, long before passports and border controls. Border controls only really started in WW1.
America is more interesting. It was built on immigration and looks back to origins far more than many other nation's immigrants do - as seen by so many self identifying as Italian American, Irish American etc, and visiting their roots in Europe or wherever. With that identity so commonly given, it _is_ a big part of the culture already. That melting pot became America. It is America.
Why did it stop being a source of pride and development and become something to discourage? They don't lack space or opportunity.
Those who could (spoke German or English, had degrees, had no prospects in Greece, had connections abroad, etc), that is, around 500000, have already immigrated in the last 10 years.
That would be like 16 million Americans leaving the US in a decade, including most 20-40 with a degree. That's on top of two millions or so that immigrated out of Greece in the 20th century.
Not everybody left, because there are benefits (cultural and otherwise, like the climate), that they don't want to miss, they have strong family ties (including a strong culture of taking care of their parents), they have houses and property here (and would have to start from nothing abroad, and they have no degrees. Last, but not least, the civil servants (close to 20% of the population with their nuclear families) still have jobs, while 2 million others (out of 10) are too old to go anywhere and start any career abroad (50+, pensioners, etc).
After the war the whole British Empire had the right to live and work in the UK - all 1bn of them. Even with adverts encouraging them to come they only came in tens of thousands a year. The economic differential was even higher then. I think the French Empire gave the right of residence in France around WW1.
The significant mass migrations have come from wars and disasters. Such as Syria most recently. Economic migrations have always been far lower.
Other countries would be "well within the scope" to manage 70m Chinese coming in in a decade?
(Other countries being the 5-10 more preferable immigration destinations -- the US, UK, France, Germany and co -- it's not like the Chinese will go en masse to Chile or Romania).
Even with open borders Chinese would not migrate at that rate when they are in a very different economic state to Greece. China is a place to migrate to rather than from as it grows in world status. It's inconceivable they would leave at that rate without first being a basket case (difficult without a Euro-comparable situation), or war and the traditional causes of significant migration.
Has EU freedom of movement resulted in dissolution of sovereign states? Did the absolute and total freedom to migrate by the two major empires result in the dissolution of UK and France?
I prefer other forms of governance to democracy, such as Futarchy and certian forms of meritocracy in which standardized testing and sortiton are combined. One thing radical open borders would do is bring in an era of competition in governance, as for the first time there would be significant competition for citizens. Overall it is a good idea, but those who believe in the welfare state have little choice but to shun it.
The world's leading democracy, the U.S., is populated almost entirely by immigrants from non-democratic parts of the world and their decedents. With every wave of immigration, the claims are the same: They don't share our values, they won't assimilate, etc. It goes back to German immigrants around the time of the American Revolution (Ben Franklin had some particularly harsh words for them), and then Irish, Italian, Chinese, Eastern European, Latino, Catholic (Papists!), Muslim, Jewish, etc. etc.
The results never seem to match the theory; the current democracy and institutions of the U.S. are built by those people. Democracy means faith in governance by the people, and the very good news is that it works out very well relative to other forms of government.
Franklin on Germans: “A Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them and will never adopt our Language or Customs any more than they can acquire our Complexion.” [1] Boy was he right, Freunde.
[1] https://immigrantarchiveproject.org/brief-history-anti-immig...
[0] https://qz.com/904933/a-history-of-american-anti-immigrant-b...
Most people wouldn't want to move. The EU has freedom of movement, and there's plenty of migration, but it's not like everyone from Romania up and moves to Germany.
You can not have both free social services and totally open borders without ruining your economy. Pick one or another.
(2) The accession process is meant to smooth the transition, nobody is suggesting opening up the floodgates tomorrow and seeing what happens, that's hyperbolic. Any abolition of movement restrictions would have to be gradual to be successful, and you could use EU accession as a model.
(3) EU member states are required to meet certain very high standards on social services and welfare. The whole bloc has socialized medicine. Member states have reciprocity agreements ensuring migrants have access to the same level of care they'd get back home (look up EHIC cards for instance). This is not much different from how Canada administers social programs between provinces.
Europe absolutely has free social services, democracy and freedom of movement -- and a very successful economy. The GDP of the EU is 21T PPP adjusted in 2017. The US is 18T.
Switzerland is a classic model of controlled borders and mandatory visa regime, which in some cases and for some purposes can be waived.
(2) What happened in Germany and some other EU countries in 2015, is antithesis to gradual opening of the border.
(3) That's only for the citizens of EU; not for citizens of third countries, i.e. not exactly what proponents of open borders fight for.
For people, who do not have a good visualisation skills for numbers, there's this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPjzfGChGlE
The point is, if you want to help the people in the rest of the world, you have to help them in their countries, which I wholeheartedly agree.
I think that might be an exaggeration and not likely what would happen. People would move to where there is demand for what whatever work they are able and wanting to provide and then approaching a stable equalibrium would hopefully occur.
Would cultures change? Yeah but that's what they do.
Edit: eh, fuck this site, instant downvote for disagreement is just as bad as Reddit. Thanks.
I don't think 350 million humans can just "come in" anywhere. I don't think it is logistically possible.
BTW, this isn't just an observation for observation sake. The magnitude of actual immigration that occurs is FAR lower than the current existing population because there are just physical limits to how many people can fit into a single plot of land. It makes arguments like the one you make far too abstract to be relevant to real life.
For a country like the US, with no ethnic cohesion, and even less cohesive culture, where everybody is an immigrant of at best 10 generations anyway, this might not be a problem.
For other countries this can have a significant impact in everyday life -- especially when it's not Indians IT scientists with H1B visas coming in, but immigrants lacking skills or coming from widely different cultures.
There are places that have now received (in the span of a few decades) millions of immigrants, despite the countries themselves originally being in the order or 5-15 millions to begin with.
That's the equivalent of 32 million Chinese (or whatever else) coming into the US in 2 decades.
And some of these countries regularly receive hundreds of thousands of people a year still.
It might be nonsense for rural Idaho to conceive that, but it's something that goes on elsewhere.
Which nations of 5-15M have gotten "millions of immigrants"?
In view of history including colonialism this statement sounds very naive indeed.
It is completely possible to provide services without integration in insular communities, which tend to appear when newcomers come faster than they can integrate.
Only as long as one doesn't have a sizeable presence in the host country.
Under the present monetary policy of an inflationary treadmill, wages are generally consumed by rent rather than able to be saved into distributed wealth. This undermines the natural feedback whereby workers would build individual bargaining power. Increasing the competition would (of course) immediately benefit the poorest labor, but would further undermine labor's overall bargaining position thus exacerbating the modern winner-take-all trend.
We at least need to figure out how we can get developed societies' equilibrium for "full time employment" down to around where it should be from technological progress and women having entered the workforce (say 15 hours per week) before we go stoking the pyre with even more workers, lest we all end up as forced labor.
If you want a more rigorous extrapolation, which tries to account for confounding factors and isn't limited to one pair of countries... you are going to have to look at the research (of economists).
You'll have to do better than that, because the majority of economic literature does not attempt to forecast movements, it attempts to model them and understand them. The "track record" you speak of is not actually the track record of economics, it's just a meme armchair economists like to repeat (generally without a non-snarky defense of their point).
Third world's elites fear it because it will render most of them irrelevant (and it will). Third world's nationalists and leftists fear it because it will change the local culture to look like the fat bourgeois western culture (and it will).
The previous foray into this was tried at the times of colonialism; the results are ... mixed even by the most favorable account.
Perhaps the parent is trying to be even-handed, but I don't see the left opposing immigration; they seem to support it. It also matches the philosophy of the center - the Clinton democrats and internationalist business people of the GOP. Here are some surveys I quickly found; both say immigration is supported by the left:
https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/americans-views-immig...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/01/22/a...
Frankly though, many do to "import the proletarians" and use them as a permanent underclass to point at, and to further their political agenda. That's not necessarily "right" either.
How can you possibly recognize this and still decide that your proposal makes sense, in light of events like the presidency of Donald Trump and Brexit? What we have now is a drop in the bucket compared to unrestricted migration, and it's already quite possibly indirectly causing massive political upheaval that threatens to destabilize the first world.
Wouldn't free economic migration lower the standard of living in the wealthiest of countries?
First off, I'm an economic migrant. I also had the privilege of being able to move without a skilled work visa.
I'm all for freedom of movement, I think that borders are an artificial construct that cause more harm than good.
But we need to balance that with the fact that unchecked migration can cause excessive strain on infrastructure, cause cultural clashes, and potentially cause lowered quality of life for residents of the country being emigrated to, caused by residents being priced out of the market by workers willing to work for near-nothing because it's still better than the wages back at home.
New Zealand has suffered a lot of these problems.
Auckland in particular suffering from the strain of high levels of immigration on its infrastructure. There simply isn't enough housing for all the people. You end up with people sharing rooms and packing out apartments like a slum. I've heard of people fitting 4 people to a room using bunk beds. So you've got 12 people in a 3 bedroom apartment. The apartments aren't designed for this kind of population density, and it pushes out people who want a decent quality of life and a room to themselves, as they're priced out by people willing to share 4 to a room.
High immigration with a low barrier has also caused deflation of wages. Some Indian workers come to NZ and work for under minimum wage, either by employers requiring repayment of wages or underpaying wages (which is illegal), or by working for gig-economy services like Uber (which is legal).
For a lot of immigrants, working for $5 an hour and sharing an apartment with 10 other people is still a better quality of life than back home, but it drags down the quality of life for other Kiwis.
I think part of the problem is that it's possible for people to move anywhere in the world within 30 hours. Instead of migrating to a neighbouring country that has a slightly better economy to yours, if the world had total freedom of movement, everyone would flock to the most prosperous nations, causing the middle nations to miss out completely. How many undocumented migrants to Europe want to stay in Italy or Greece? They all want to get to Germany, France, or the UK.
I think that maybe the best solution for the world would be freedom of movement between bordering nations. Most bordering nations will have similar economies, running as a continuum across the globe, and will also have similar cultures (as I said, borders are an artificial construct that cut through ethnic and cultural lines). The USA-Mexico border is an exception here, with a massive economic disparity between the two countries. I think that it's wrong that just because you were born on one side of a line you're condemned to a lower quality of life than your neighbours, earning a fraction of the same income for the same work.
"If people could migrate freely around the world to seek work, economists crudely estimate that world GDP would roughly double, and that most of this enormous windfall would go to the poorest people on Earth. There is literally a hundred trillion dollar bill on the sidewalk for bringing together third-world labor and first-world legal systems, capital, and service demand."
You realize that many, if not most third world countries are third world countries because of the mentality, religion (won't mention it, no worries) and tribal thinking? This is exactly the problem we have in Europe. I don't mind immigrants, not at all. But they come here and bring their beliefs, values (about women, violence etc.) and tribal thinking and create here exactly the problems they have in their home country. They see our apples and they want to have apples too. But they don't get the idea that the apples could have anything to do with the tree they are growing on.
Also, your first sentence is a nasty personal attack. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do it again.
What does that contribute? That could apply to your idea too, or mine.
> they come here and bring their beliefs, values (about women, violence etc.) and tribal thinking and create here exactly the problems they have in their home country. They see our apples and they want to have apples too. But they don't get the idea that the apples could have anything to do with the tree they are growing on.
This is really an incredibly broad stereotype to paint on hundreds of millions of individuals. Perhaps like you, they should be judged on their individual actions and have the right to believe what they like.
And who is the parent to judge others and take away their rights? I don't like the parent's beliefs (which I find especially based on "tribal" ideas)' should they be ejected from my country if they are my neighbor? (No, absolutely not.)
It is intellectual over-engineering of cultures. It looks tremendously good on paper.
> This is really an incredibly broad stereotype to paint on hundreds of millions of individuals. No, it really isn't since Europe is not flooded with Chinese, Americans or Australians but with people with a very low skill set, very different attitude towards violence and women, from tribal societies and with a religion they feel is far superior.
> And who is the parent to judge others and take away their rights? I am not judging them. I don't even say that their culture is inferior. If an industrialized society breaks down (think Mad Max if you want) they are in a far superior position. The question is: If women should have no rights, if you have the best religion, if you want to bury gay people alive, why not stay in your home country?
By the way, I am just visiting Romania. Romania is willing to take refuges but refuges are not willing to take Romania. Why? No living on welfare...
[0] now-Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=728SW65tlU0
I'm not trying to draw a moral equivalence. But I think the barriers to immigration raised over the last century and more everywhere in the first world are something that can't be blamed on any single party or political movement.
Telling them oh all those benefits they aren't for polish workers - not quite slavery but not far off.
The right and the left (as quoted) are not wrong.
Though this doesn't mean countries should isolate themselves, but there seems to be an intrinsic human limitation on how many people it can trust and relate at one time.
Instead the first world does its best to wall itself off from economic migrants, because the right fears that migration will threaten their culture and the left fears that migration will threaten the welfare state.
As with any prohibition, the economic opportunity gets colonized by criminals. People seeking a better life will be taken advantage of and some of them will even wind up worse off than they started. But the root problem isn't the criminals, and it isn't customers who want cheap electronics. It's the prohibition of migration.