I agree with your general premise, that restricting freedom of movement has not historically been a good thing, but I do also think it's a tragic when a beautiful and interesting place gets absolutely overrun by tourists and as a result gets less beautiful and less interesting, and far less livable for the people who stay there year round and don't leave after a couple days.

I think tourism can be seen as a problem of negative externalities, much the same way as pollution can: for a few businesses in the community, it's a huge net positive. Hotels and restaurants, for example, make big profits off of tourists in popular destinations, but everyone else has to deal with more litter, crowded streets and higher prices, but doesn't see any of the benefit. Just like we regulate pollution, I think it's possible to find ways to regulate tourism to maximize the collective good.

I also think there are ways to regulate tourism without beckoning the "slippery slope" you worry about. For instance, I have been on an island in Thailand which can only be accessed between 8AM and 8PM, does not allow outside plastics of any kind, and charges a modest fee to enter. Measures like that, or increased taxes on accommodation for example, can make it just a little bit harder to visit a popular destination and will probably result in less visitors on average without imposing a quota.

I live in a part of Oslo with a vibrant restaurant scene, and one of the reasons is the extra business tourists drum up

I’m thankful that one of my favourite French dishes (aligot), while looking like a pile of whipped vomit, is presented in an entertaining manner.

There's definitive trends on making food 'instagrammable', but the overall quality and competition between all the restaurants is undeniably good.

Although now that I think about it, you take somewhere like Lygon street famous for its Italian, and the local advice would be to never eat there if you want good Italian (with maybe one or two notable exceptions).

The worst thing about overtourism is it makes travel boring. Everything tries to repackage itself as something accessible for 30-something middle class people who don’t want to go to Disney Land but also don’t want to worry about a stomachache or a weird smell.

Not necessarily. For example, a hotel tax could be redistributive: you can take some of the excess value which would only be enjoyed by the business owner and use it to increase the standard of living for the rest of the population in any number of ways (better schools, better roads etc). Also you're making it a bit more expensive to operate that business, so you're putting a thumb on the scale in favor of non-touristic businesses.

This is kind of an interesting comment if you overthink it, as I enjoy doing.

By my reading, "then the natural next step is being hard on immigration" is a rather boldly axiomatic statement, as if being hard on immigration is _Wrong_, full stop. If others hold the opinion that ~open borders are a Good Thing, that's fine with me because it's an opinion, and everyone is entitled to their own. But when reading forums and the news I constantly get a strong sense that in the last 5 years this subject has rapidly progressed from "matter of opinion" status and deeply into "matter of fact".

> The ability to control who goes in and who goes out usually falls on the hand of those that shouldn't have that kind of power.

Like democratically elected politicians? Or is there someone else who should decide who gets to hold what power?

I think that weird feeling OP is talking about is the cognitive dissonance from recognizing in person the need to keep from being overrun by outsiders, yet having a blind spot over the solution because its negation has already been accepted as a given due to social conformity.

I agree, it seems to have become a fundamental axiomatic belief. My impression is that this change in thinking has spread very broadly (at least among vocal social media users) in a very short period of time, and it seems to be held in a very non-negotiable way, not subject to logical discussion.

If we're going to start stack-ranking people based on how much harm they do where they live, quite a lot of locals in any particular area ought to be shown the boot.

This is why anti-immigration rhetoric tends to explicitly avoid trying to quantify the harm caused by immigrants. Much of the time, such a utilitarian calculus doesn't look great for the locals. Most immigrants tend to work harder, be more educated, do less crime, etc, etc...

(PS. If you tell me that it is morally wrong to let newcomers displace existing residents, I will point out that our society thinks it's perfectly reasonable for internal migrants to displace locals, when it comes to things like housing... Odd, that.)

> without recognizing the harm caused by the existence of problematic current residents

To be fair, this is a presumption though isn't it, whereas the matter of the harm caused by immigrants/visitors already exists within the context of this discussion.

> quite a lot of locals in any particular area ought to be shown the boot

If you have the option of booting people out, but how might that be done in the real world? It would be a violation of UN conventions would it not?

> This is why anti-immigration rhetoric tends to explicitly avoid trying to quantify the harm caused by immigrants

This seems a bit presumptuous as well. Speaking for myself, I hold the exact opposite view, what bothers me is a lack of quantification of the full effects of immigration. In my experience, anything that is quantified by governments or advocates is heavily slanted towards a pro-immigration conclusion.

> Most immigrants tend to work harder, be more educated, do less crime, etc, etc...

Indeed they do. As a result, if you live in a laid back country where people typically have a certain balance between leisure and work, and you have high immigration from cultures that optimize more towards the work end of the spectrum, it could have significant negative impacts on your quality of life and ability to afford your prior standard of living.

> If you tell me that it is morally wrong to let newcomers displace existing residents, I will point out that our society thinks it's perfectly reasonable for internal migrants to displace locals, when it comes to things like housing... Odd, that.

Again, it's presumptuous to assume that an individual holds the same belief as overall society, if overall society even holds that belief (how would we even know such a thing with any certainty?). There is certainly widespread negative sentiment of internal migrants displacing locals throughout the world, and I'd wager the people who hold this belief would also tend to be the ones who are most opposed to immigration, if so it would actually be logically consistent, so not really that odd after all. But once again, we have no way of knowing that with any certainty, as long as we continue to refuse to seriously study such things. If one looks closely, you might notice that all such arguments, on both sides, are largely based on people's imaginations, not facts.

Is that what it "boils down to"? Nothing more and nothing less than "borders are artificially constructed"? It happens to be a technically true statement, but are you saying something along the lines of because borders are artificially constructed then therefore it logically follows that they should be removed? If not, what are you saying, exactly?

That's a wonderful thought, but do you truly believe that's how most people think? I see few signs of it even on relatively intelligent forums.

> Why must I be given access and others excluded merely because of an accident of birth?

Framing it as "must" is a big part of my complaint. Immigration and similar issues are extremely complex, the idea that there is a knowable "correct" answer seems absurd to me. Taking your theoretical approach for example, to where shall we export the domestic people who fail the test? We can't even remotely agree on how to handle the existing system that has essentially been in place for generations, getting other countries to agree to accept people from other countries who've failed a test is just one of many complications in that approach.

I think if we go all the way into dystopian solutions, a fair one would be to run a lottery for every baby and send them to a random family in a random part of the world.

Wait...

(that's an honest "wait...", I set out to write a fair but very dystopian example and got to where we are now :))

But maybe I am a bit biased because I like to visit obscure places anyway.

Travel imposes heavy costs on the world, in its current carbon based form. It's only affordable because we pass these costs on to the future.

I think if you want to experience what a country is really like you need to learn the local language, or find a guide who understands that you want a "real" experience and that you are OK with going out of your comfort zone. Otherwise you are going to end up in one of the tourist containment zones around the world where every local speaks sales-oriented English, is hawking some trinket with the country's name on it, and the available food is pizza, fries, McDonalds, KFC, Starbucks and if you're lucky, an inoffensive variation of a local dish.

At least for me, I feel a difference between tourism, and over-tourism.

One doubts that the restaurant staff are tourists? You seem to be saying that they aren't Icelandic, however.

I don't see this as a wholly bad thing, but the negative impact is that the people you interact with in the service industry, are not able to converse with you easily.

Imagine living in mexico, walking into a mexican restaraunt, and having to order in english because the wait staff and kitchen can't understand spanish.

It's not the worst thing that's ever happened, but I do miss being able to speak my native language outside of close circles.

It all comes down to the question "who do you think you are to block my path?" It's not a straightforward answer, though. We've been struggling to answer this as human beings since forever.

Hugh: Ah, yes well now you see, I have campaigned for years now to have tourists banned from Venice.

Stephen: Have you? Have you?

Hugh: I have, I have. It sounds very harsh, very cruel, very ...

Stephen: Deglante?

Hugh: Very deglante, thank you. But I'm sure it's the only way.

Leslie: Who was it, who was it, who said "He is a tourist, you are a holidaymaker, but I am a traveller?"

Hugh: Oh, was it Humbert Wolfe?

Stephen: It was Cocteau, surely?

... etc., etc...

Where before you had to hire your home travel agent to hire a local guide overseas (and know who), you can now do it all yourself via SM.

That massively improves accessibility.

Not everything needs to be a matter of race, especially outside the US.

I have seen plenty of "too many tourists" complaints that were blatant xenophobia like complaining about hearing too many foreign languages or "feeling like a foreigner in their own country".

I guess it depends on how it was said, but this isn't a "white people" issue, mainly because this isn't white-people-specific. I'm sure Nairobi would feel the same way about being overrun by tourists.

>especially outside the US

Funny of you to assume US is somehow more racist than the rest of the world.

As it is everywhere. If two people don't pay taxes, society functions just normally. If everybody doesn't pay taxes, there is no funding for even the most basic programs. When the argument is "a bit is fine, just not too much", the second part of the argument should always be "and here's how we determine who gets to enjoy it and who is forbidden from enjoying it".

That said, some steps are taken to provide for more visitors - but the work takes time.

It feels like a slippery slope argument.

Many relationships naturally follow along a curve so pointing out this relationship should be remarkable for being wrong if you pass along some other info like maybe you think this rarely occurs, or is not logical.

We do have quite a lovely but challenging nature here. We have lots of tourists who come here unprepared and some would likely been severely hurt or even died had it not been for volunteers from red cross etc helping them.

As the number of tourists increase, we're likely to see more of these unprepared tourists. So it's not just about the numbers, but what they do when they're here.

A recent news article (in Norwegian, Google Translate does a decent enough job): https://www.dagbladet.no/nyheter/gar-hardt-ut-mot-uvitende-t...

Norway does a decent job of informing people at least on the hike. When you start walking there are signs that say something like “if you are at this point and it’s after 2 pm, turn back around”

It’s definitely one of those “Instagram destinations” that attract this sort of behavior. At the actual rock there were a few people flying drones around to get pictures, blatantly disregarding “No drones” signs.

That doesn't help.

My criticism is that this problem is hard. Should we do nothing instead? No. Just think harder.

  Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Please don't comment about your own comment ('unpopular opinion here', etc). It's noise and it's boring.

Normal chattiness in comments is totally fine. What's tedious is "I, the noble freethinker against the hideous masses" posturing. It's also common, because of the biases in how people perceive the community; basically, anything you dislike shapes that perception 10x more than anything you like, so most people's image of the community becomes an inverse image of themselves. This leads to a lot of noise and pre-emptive defensiveness, a sense of being surrounded by enemies in a hostile place, when the reality is we're all just wandering in a big statistical cloud.

It's such a fundamental dynamic at work here, that I'd love a way to distill it into a new guideline.

How about something like:

Don't try to preempt reactions by starting "At the risk of being downvoted..." or "Unpopular opinion here..." State your case clearly and let your ideas stand or fall on their own.

It's natural to guideline out people (1) working the metaphorical refs with asides about voting and (2) posturing and, at the same time, implicitly disrespecting even the notion that some people might disagree with them. The former invites horrible meta conversations, the latter is uncivil and toxic.

But you don't want to go so far that people have to alter totally normal speech patterns in order to avoid some conversation tripwire that the guidelines set. If you do that, you get more pointless meta threads.

What I think you want is a guideline that says "no matter what, don't talk about how your comments are being voted, and if you must mention the feeling you have that what you're about to say is probably unpopular, do it in a nice way, and quickly". I don't know how to say that with any kind of concision.

(A lot of things would work as guidelines if they could capture the nuance of "this way of writing is fine if you assume the burden of being extra gracious about it, but not fine to do casually and thoughtlessly". But it's super hard to distill that sentiment into a guideline!)

It's a weird issue.

Every country makes a distinction between temporary and permanent entry.

Are you one of those people that claims eating a candybar leads to intravenous heroin use?