Border control prior to it was more focused on customs taxes, and in some countries, keeping undesirable races/religions out.
We have decided the latter is wrong, so instead of directly banning, say, Chinese or Jewish immigration, we replaced it with quotas on country of birth/origin.
Before WW2 the state only helped those who couldn’t help themselves. Now the state just fucks everyone.
Not...really? Unless by "state" you are broadly including the church and other philanthropy.
Through much of human history, the state largely 'helped' the aristocracy maintain a monopoly on wealth and power, through frequent applications of violence against their political enemies. In fact, in ~all non-democratic, and in many democratic societies, the state and the aristocracy - and thus, their interests, are often indistinguishable.
But either way, what does any of that have to do with passport controls?
I wonder if the same will happen to online travel pre-entry-authorizations.
During Covid many countries implemented pre-entry-authorizations, similar to US ESTA or Canadian ETA.
Even if the Covid emergency state has been over, some countries that didn't have this forms before, still require them for travel.
And Canada, who's planning to give amnesty and permanent residency to half a million illegal migrants in the coming year. [0]
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/immigration-ministry...
I don’t understand how Supply side wage competition would be alleviated by allowing workers to move freely between countries. It seems like it could potentially make it worse for higher wage regions of the world?
This dual system protects the upper class from wage competition while allowing it for the lower classes, ensuring that the upper class benefits both from this protection and also the lowered living expenses provided by cheap labor from the lower classes. All arguments that somehow economic laws don't apply and immigration doesn't lower wages come from members of the upper class who want to preserve this system that benefits them.
You probably don't want criminals to freely move into your country. You probably want a country that gets funded by taxes (both short term and long term).
No country in the world maintains open borders. Everytime there has been mass unorganized migration it has been a humanitarian disaster.
Platitudes only work on paper.
What makes the US a better place? What keeps other countries from being a better place?
The lack of those blessings from the past is what prevents others. It’s no fault of the people who live here or there today for the situation we are in. If George Washington had accepted a crown when offered we would be just as screwed up.
I think this strongly discounts the agency of individuals. In our time these are certainly blessings, but they had to be fought for by their contemporaries.
Criminals move between states, but it's not a huge problem. The states can share information and allow joint action. It may require more effort to set up between nations, but it's a common thing today.
Taxes work fine. If you're a resident of a state, you pay income tax to that state. So we obviously know how to find out residency.
>Everytime there has been mass unorganized migration it has been a humanitarian disaster.
If borders were to become easily crossable (not necessarily non-existent, but just a checkpoint to count incoming/outgoing and stop smugglers) in a day, then the next day would see mass migration in so many directions. But after that first wave calmed, I wouldn't expect mass migrations except those following humanitarian disasters. Three had migrations we see today are caused by disasters. Even when the emigrants experience terrible conditions in the receiving country, I imagine it's because their previous life was shattered and they had to quickly flee. It's not a fair comparison to people who would migrate if immigration controls were removed.
> Consider something like 1/3 of Americans have a criminal history.
Here is a discussion: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/aug/18/andrew-cuo...
https://news.uga.edu/total-us-population-with-felony-convict...
See form I-485 for PR:
24. Have you EVER been arrested, cited, charged, or detained for any reason by any law enforcement officer (including but not limited to any U.S. immigration official or any official of the U.S. armed forces or U.S. Coast Guard)?
What programs like Operation Streamline do is take advantage of the fact that immigrants dont understand the legal system and, under the guise of a speedier procedure, effectively coerce immigrants to acquiesce to a criminal conviction. This actually does prevent them from coming legally at a later date once deported.
Up until recently ( relatively ) a person could pretty much move to other country without much fuzz.
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.
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".
Are all of these unorganized, mass migrations disasters? Or are they in response to disasters?
Most organized mass migrations have been disasters. Forced relocations aren’t fun.
But unorganized mass migrations, where people say “let’s get out of this place and go somewhere better” tend to mitigate pre-existing disasters.
Also, you're incorrectly conflating mass migration with open borders. You can have open borders without causing a mass migration and vice versa.
But what about states in the United States? They were explicitly formed as a set of states - nations - that cooperate under a federation. Free migration wasn’t always the case in the original states but was required in the constitution.
What about the EU? People can move about freely today when in the past they weren’t able to.
Or are you saying there’s something superior about Americans and Europeans and we need to keep everyone else in their prisons?
You quote 12,000 years ago as some sort of transition. Realistically migration was relatively unimpeded until the 1900’s. Citizenship isn’t the same as migration, and in many cultures citizens and denizens were two classes with the denizens migrating relatively unimpeded. Some cultures like ancient China had travel papers but that was reserved for nobles or elites - normal people were too beneath notice to require documentation to travel.
How would you prevent the erosion of rights or culture by a group with a bigger population?
For instance, have a few hundred thousand Americans move to Cuba and vote to have Cuba secede to the US? Or a few hundred thousand mainland Chinese citizens move to Taiwan and do the same?
While it's definitely nice to keep migration smooth and easy, it seems like there are lots of issues wherein free and unlimited migration could cause relatively predictable problems.
That would be a great thing for Cuba. Cubans have been fleeing their failed state by the thousands, risking their lives and dying to get a shot at reaching America.
Starvation, medicine shortage, brutal LGBT purges are sadly common place under the Castro regime. Pretty sure these Americans would be welcomed with open arms!
Not really. Cuba is free to trade with any country that's not the USA (and is even free to trade with the USA except for certain entities or commodities).
Decades of corruption, incompetence, brain drain and failed government made the local economy unable to compete.
A country of 11m people loses an estimated $3+ billion per year from various UN condemned restrictions.
Are you saying that causes no shortages? That's not a trivial sum of money (~$300 per capita).
I’d use the US as an example. In a real sense the US is a collection of small countries with a federal system and free right of migration. For this discussion the federal system is irrelevant. How does California or New York or other high populace states ensure erosion of rights? I’d posit part of the very reason they’re so attractive is they tend to hold rights very high on their list of priorities. More oppressive states, likewise lose populace to migration because unless you’re in the in group you don’t belong there.
Cultural erosion is IMO nativism and bias. Time is change, no culture is static, and even our oldest cultures are young compared to humanity and look nothing like they did 100 years ago. Changing populace doesn’t change a culture any more than time does, it’s just easier to blame someone that doesn’t look or talk like you for it.
Your examples of mainland Chinese citizens or Americans moving around are only relevant because the issue of borders to begin with. If there were permeable borders we would be in a steady state and you wouldn’t see behaviors like that. Maybe in the beginning you would see artifacts of history manifest weird transient behaviors, as you do in any suddenly changed dynamical system. But in steady state your scenarios would be as likely as all democrats moving to Georgia to change the election. It sounds good but in practice didn’t happen.
Are you implying that non natives are inherently better than natives?
One of the hallmarks of declining empires is importing people - not to say those people are better or worse, but mixing diverse peoples together is extremely hard. It has to be done slowly and carefully.
> Changing populace doesn’t change a culture any more than time does
I don’t see how you can look at the history of anyone anywhere and believe this.
While I don’t disagree mixing of diverse people can be hard, I would simply point to American history as an example of how the empire you seem to laud was built by mixing peoples relentlessly. In fact immigrants tend to be the drivers of American growth, while the native born… not so much.
I find it fascinating you think culture doesn’t change with time, but with the mixing of different people into a culture only. What culture has been unchanged with time? Language itself mutates constantly, how can a culture be static with time? How does it stay static? The people in the culture change with every birth and every death, the memory of the culture is wiped out every 100 years. Written histories are a poor tool of continuity for something as complex as a culture. Human beings themselves change radically over the course of their lives. All things are impermanent, but human culture isn’t just impermanent, it’s an illusion.
> What makes a person better than another is how they live their life, not the circumstances of their birth.
Their genetics dictate how they live their life. Environment can have an affect, but genes dictate how you react to your environment (unless you believe in God etc).
> I would simply point to American history as an example of how the empire you seem to laud was built by mixing peoples relentlessly.
Compared to the last 50 years or so these immigrants were all very similar both in history and genetics. And even then it’s been a rough ride! I agree immigrants can be great as long as they are carefully selected for.
> I find it fascinating you think culture doesn’t change with time, but with the mixing of different people into a culture only.
Cultures absolutely change over time but the rate of change is much slower than if you introduce a new people from vastly different cultures. It’s the shearing force applied by the differences that’s the issue. If it’s too powerful something has to give.
> However the magic of the plasticity of the human brain is that it can, with effort, overcome virtually any impediment
That’s quite the claim depending on how you define impediment, but as is this statement is too vague to argue with.
> I’d also point out that the more homogeneous the genetic population the worse overall outcomes tend to be.
Again this is a very vague statement where the degree of variation matters. Hybrid vigor is poorly understood and when the differences are too great result in genetically worse offspring on some axis (mules are a perfect example of this).
> So, yes, I think science is total against the idea of racial superiority not just out of its repugnant but just false and furthermore given the homogeneity issue impossible.
I’ve made no claims of superiority and you’re taking a holier than though stance against the straw man you made up. Please leave the emotional appeals out.
> I guess it’s safe to assume you think genetics has no impact on life outcomes and/or there aren’t significant genetic differences between geographically (by ancestor) populations?
This idea that genetics impacts life out comes at a population level is racial superiority, assuming you give some outcome as being qualitatively better. I don’t know how you can cut it any differently.
I definitely don’t think that genetics has any influence though on cultural adaptation. That’s entirely environmental. See adopted children from international cultures raised in a foreign culture from birth. They culturally identical while racially different.
On plasticity, I mean even granting some genetic difference that impacts some degree of adaption to some cultural normal, the brains ability to adapt even given such major structural issues like brain damage make small things like cultural adaption simple. In fact I expect given how much migration happened throughout history it’s an evolutionary necessity to be able to adapt culturally.
Before that comparison works, you have to eliminate the Constitution and all of the protections that come with it.
This is backwards, and I'm having trouble understanding how a more diverse, more transient population would find it easier to find common interests and unite. Suppose a factory unionizes - without borders, the owner will find it easier to import non-union workers. While moving a factory is challenging regardless of borders - it's a big, heavy thing, tied into local infrastructure and supply chains. It's even reflected in the rhetoric - "immigrants will do the jobs Americans won't".
It's also reflected empirically: Whole Foods' heat map says lower rates of racial diversity increase unionization risks - https://www.businessinsider.com/whole-foods-tracks-unionizat... (unpaywalled: http://archive.is/1khJw)
And in the strong Danish unions as far back as 1981 (https://mattbruenig.com/2021/09/20/when-mcdonalds-came-to-de...) when Denmark had only 3.02% of immigrants and their descendants (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Denmark#Modern...)
I think the idea is that there are common interests to be found, but borders artificially keep people apart, by segmenting up legal jurisdictions. For example, why Starbucks employees in Jersey City aren't all that different from Starbucks employees in New York City right across the river.
> Whole Foods' heat map says lower rates of racial diversity increase unionization risks
To what extent is this correlated with the economic security of their employees? Employees in wealthier areas (statistically correlated with whiter) might be more educated on average (which could be correlated with desire to unionize) and/or more likely to have a higher-income partner or family member (which means lower financial risk due to failure or being fired).
GPS data shows how wolf packs carve out territory - https://bigthink.com/hard-science/wolf-gps/
Such paranoia between coworkers is a serious impediment to labor organization. The more diverse the workplace, the better this works.
Yes, of course they are. As explained by Chomsky's model of propaganda, corporations hire true believers for these roles because they are the most effective and reliable.
> most managers and employers are not so crafty
Amazon being so crafty is a documented fact; it's naive to think they're the only ones.
Amazon is a great example of a company where I absolutely would not put it past them to use DEI initiatives to try to defeat labor organizing. But in many other cases these initiatives are actually demanded and sought after by employees.
I think in this case the actions of well-meaning people were only appropriated as an oppression tactic after they've caught on in popularity.
History and my own anecdotal experience are not consistent with your implied theory that CRT-driven DEI became popular specifically as an anti-labor capitalist conspiracy.
I think it would make it far easier. The problem is every jurisdiction attacking unions and workers in their own unique legal frameworks, and the forcing of unions/workforces to compete with each other across the borders between these jurisdictions. Capital gets to play Mexican against Indonesian workers, even down to workers in Cook County against workers in DuPage county.
If an Indonesian can easily work in Mexico and a Mexican can easily work in Indonesia, their interests aren't just theoretically similar, they're almost the same.
Yes people can and do move from Mexico to the Midwest all the time.
Why do you think Mexican laborers should get paid less for building your car then someone in Detroit? Part of the goal of NAFTA is to help stabilize the economy of Mexico and help longterm reduce the severe violence in parts of the country.
I am not Mexican but it toke my family 14 years to be able to move to the US from Palestine, although my grandparents and uncles have been here since the 80s. It really isn't hard.
A company doesn't need to move everything, they can just literally build a new factory or rent one else where, not only that they would even get tax breaks as incentives for moving.
Borders enforce the huge discrimination in pay between TJ and San Diego. Even though the same companies work on both sides of the border.
> The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) created special economic and trade relationships for the United States, Canada and Mexico. The TN nonimmigrant classification permits qualified Canadian and Mexican citizens to seek temporary entry into the United States to engage in business activities at a professional level.
> Among the types of professionals who are eligible to seek admission as TN nonimmigrants are accountants, engineers, lawyers, pharmacists, scientists, and teachers.
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
I have never heard this explanation. Where is it coming from? It sounds not only wrong but inverted to me. Governments enforce borders to effectively secure their territory and people, and thus its own power. Is the idea that, without the “legal fiction” of borders, we’d have some kind of global autoworkers Union or something?
We live in a democracy.
The idea that we vote to screw ourselves over completely is strange.
Some people forget that everything isn't a zero sum game. Something can be good for companies and not bad for you. And something can be good for you and not bad for companies.
One word: Brexit
It should not be a surprise that social services are taken advantage by a large population of rural/republican voters who vote in candidates who’s explicit platform is removing or diminishing the very social services they depend on.
If they're a single-issue voter then - by definition - they are not voting against their interests. They just have different interests than you.
Maybe you care about a million things, mostly revolving around taxes.
Maybe all they care about is whether or not someone else can get an abortion.
That's THEIR interest.
It's in everyone's interest to get a good deal for their money. For example, we should all be for an efficient government, and efficient markets. However folks vote against those all the time without thinking about it, because their focus is elsewhere.
If you don't care about money, and only care about telling other people what to do - money isn't your interest. Telling other people what they can and can't do is your interest.
You seem to be incapable of grasping that other people care about other things than money.
The single issue of that voter maybe be the most overriding important issue for them, but it doesn’t mean that the consequences aren’t still a net negative for them (Or especially society as a whole).
To my previous point, they may be doing so with full knowledge or with partial knowledge. They may knows Candidate X supports Issue Y and that is their top line issue. They may not know Candidate X’s position on Issue A, B, or C.
Those positions may have an impact on what they would actually prefer to vote on.
Candidates are not single issue, even if voters are, but they often advertise them that way to limit single issue voters from knowing or caring about anything else they represent.
You can also vote for someone who says the thing you like or prefer but the reality of their plan is contradictory to the stated goal. (Preventing Medicare from negotiating drug costs will somehow make them less expensive, according to some candidates)
To be clear my point isn't to blame voters specifically. My point is that due to imperfect knowledge (Anywhere from willful ignorance to not learning enough about a candidate to the particular candidate straight up lying about things) people make choices in voting that can and do contradict their own interests.
Unions have a very specific set of rules to play by, and these rules are different for each country.
I was listening to an interviewer with a labor organizer on the US Mexican border who worked with new arrivals. He said the workers were used to unions from back in Mexico, but he had to spend lots of time educating folks about how things work in America.
Mexican unions have a level of corruption unheard of in even the most corrupt US unions.
The rules unions have to play by were put in place to reduce their power to effectively organize.
Only if by "secure" you mean prevent your population from leaving [1]. The whole origin of border control was to prevent people from leaving. The easy way to think about it is you can't leave a country without a passport but you can enter a country without a visa (exceptions apply).
Did you think about this statement for even 1 second?
It should be clearly and immediately obvious that it is easier to leave places like the US than it is to enter it.
This is obviously the case.
You cannot with a straight face claim that actually it is easier to enter the US than leave.
Clearly, leaving is easier.
It is in fact, 4x easier to enter the US than to leave. Passports are actually rare for a US citizen to have, you just live in a bubble.
[1]: https://www.trade.gov/sites/default/files/2021-03/Fact%20She... [2]: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/about-us/reports-...
Thats not how that works, lol.
If it took a lot of effort, PER person to enter the US, there could still be a lot of people who enter the US.
> Passports are actually rare for a US citizen to have
Its not difficult to get a passport, regardless.
Pointing to how many people choose to leave the US, or get a passport, says very little about how easy it is to do that.
The amount of visitors would be limited by the size of the tourism industry and regulations around entry visas. This is an unrelated metric.
[1]
> Dispersed as it was, the village abroad was a curiously intimate place, where people knew each other, or of each other, or at least where one another came from. It has its own networks of information that paralleled the new colonial posts and telegraph. Rumour flew vast distances. It was into these byways that the story of Nguyen Tat Thanh [Ho Chi Minh] became interwoven, as he made his way through, and as the French attempted to trace his movements. The new regime in Indochina emerged out of a blizzard of papers for personal identification and restrictions on exit and entry.
[2]
> Migrants everywhere lived under the constant fear of sudden displacement or banishment. This practice of medieval rules was condemned in England by the Magna Carta of 1215, if never wholly discontinued. It was routine in the repertoire of colonial states. It was visited on Asian kings - the last Mughal emperor in 1958 and the deposed rulers of Burma in 1885, Vietnam in 1888 and 1907 and Korea in 1910 - as well as coolies. People of long residence could be suddenly expelled to some distant 'home', a point of imagined origin to which they might have few ties. This was a visceral exercise in power to cow and to shame: the life histories of the banished were recorded, their faces photographed, and the scars and other marks on their bodies mapped to guard against their return. In the Straights Settlements alone in 1914, 416 people were banished for life, and another 801 'vagrants' detained in prison, the great majority to be repatriated. Ministers denied in parliament that they used banishment to expel trade unionists from the colony.
[3]
> In no small part, modern empires were created in an effort to realize what the British Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, Winston Churchill, in 1908 called 'a harmonious disposition of the world among its peoples'. At the cold heart of liberal visions of free trade and progress was a ruthless global and racial division of labour. Europeans monitored movement obsessively, enumerating and marshaling people towards their mines, plantations and households. Colonial regimes' ability to control subjects beyond their own borders, often in the name of exercising 'protection' over them, became a yardstick of their authority and a challenge to their prestige. Who were all these people, and to whom did they belong? Who was what they said they were, and who was not, and how could it be proven?
[1] - Underground Asia, pp. 56
[2] - Ibid, pp. 61
[3] - Ibid, pp. 62-63
They're also products of both the information-state (being able to know who's in the country through identity document systems) and the jet age. Before the steamship the only real border enforcement was on trade at ports.
The British Empire had "freedom of movement" that effectively lasted only as long as people weren't using it in significant numbers. People could move from the colonies to the centre, and indeed after WW2 the government actively solicited Jamaicans to do so (Empire Windrush), but resistance from the public has increased since then.
To exclude them from what? That's the question. You give one of the answers here: sometimes people would want to exclude them because they lower wages. But in reality, people who are alarmed by lower wages are rarely in the position to say anything about what happens at the border. The people who get a say about that are the people who are alarmed by higher wages.
The only significant group in the region which some might identify as a distinct "race" are the Roma. That minority lives in all of the countries and they didn't cause countries to split up.
> you can't have open borders and social welfare programs
i guess the assumption is those people wouldnt be working?
At least in Europe, a sizeable amount of illegal migrants has only very rudimentary education, and the # of job openings for unqualified people is very limited. Some literally cannot read even in their own language.
As a result, immigrants from Africa and the Middle East are, on average, significantly overrepresented among welfare collectors and significantly underrepresented among taxpayers.
Of course, as long as the numbers involved are tiny, you can try to educate at least their kids, but once a fairly low threshold is crossed, parallel societies develop in full. Having classrooms where 90 per cent of the kids don't even speak the official language of the country is quite an intractable problem. And that threshold beyond which the schooling system basically gives up has been crossed in many regions of many countries such as Sweden or France.
TL;DR: You cannot maintain a modern welfare state with premodern population.
You’re going to have to show up with some evidence for this claim. You’re not asserting that the outcome is a byproduct of borders, a happy accident useful to businesses. You’re asserting that the driving reason for the concept of a border is for businesses to disrupt organized labor.
A major sticking point with Brexit - the UK wanted to be in the market without worker free movement (because immigrants)
Every deceased Emperor, Chief, King, Earl, Duke, Lord and other ruler of lands and holder of fiefdoms would disagree with this.
Large companies are able to navigate the border issues because they are able to make deals with a government and can (at least promise) to bring in a lot of investment and wealth that the government might be able to realize in taxes, either directly from the company's revenues, or indirectly through other businesses and property that grows along with the company's investment.
That company's can do this more effectively than individuals is less a function of some kind of cynical conspiracy to cut out of the worker (though that might be a side benefit that both sides appreciate), than it is a simple pragmatic response to the fact that it is much easier to deal with a small number of people about a large sum of money than it is with a large number of people about small sums of money.
This is similar to why the U.S. government is so amenable to working so often with dictatorships to secure it's international interests. They can work with (or influence or bribe) a single person or small group to make large deals quickly and without having to worry about the messy politics and oversight associated with a democratic government that has to approve major policy decisions.
Congestion charge is a rather modern invention as well, because the amount of cars in some city centers exceeded the tolerance of the locals and the capacity of the roads.
Borders can be soft/open as long as a modest amount of people crosses them. In a world of 8 billion people and relatively cheap travel, open borders would result in massive flows of people into several desirable locations - whose citizens aren't happy about such prospects.
Would you be kind and provide some scholarly proof for the rather modern invention? It might not have been called "border" and have the gate with digital IDs to pass by but well defined (for their time) territories existed for thousands of years as evidenced by territory disputes between bordering sovereign groups in all lived-on continents.
> Migration was generally speaking, unhindered and each emigrant could decide on the time of his departure, his arrival or his return, to suit his own convenience. But World War I brought harsh restrictions on freedom of movement. [0]
> The concept of a worldwide passport standard is relatively new, created in the aftermath of the First World War. ...the United States at the turn of the last century emerges: a near constant rush of immigrants, most destined to pass through Ellis Island. There they were given a cursory disease check, questioned, and in most cases, allowed to proceed on their journeys inward. This was easy enough to do without a global standard for identifying documents. [1]
> On the outbreak of the First World War, countries imposed border controls to block the entry of subversives and the exit of men with skills useful to the war effort. Passports were issued to allow travellers access through these restrictions. When peace came in 1918 most countries retained both border controls and passports. [2]
There used to be more restrictions on commerce than on people. Now it is the opposite. Money can move freely across international borders, and labor has become something to arbitrage.
[0] https://fee.org/articles/passports-were-a-temporary-war-meas...
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/a-history-...
[2] https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/when-passports-...
A few things you would have to consider before immigrating in the pre-modern world:
- Where are you going? There's no internet, books are rare, and maps are inaccurate (and often plain wrong)
- How will you get there? Transportation is expensive and unreliable
- How will you preserve wealth? A global financial system accessible to normal folks does not exist yet
- What will you do to support yourself? Pre-modern communication infrastructure makes scoping out foreign labor markets difficult
- How will you learn the language? You'll have to find someone to teach it to you, instructional material will be limited
- Who will you leave behind? Any family members that don't come with you will likely never be seen or heard from again
- What if people decide you're not welcome? Well-enforced protections against discrimination do not exist yet
People did immigrate, so obviously immigration was not impossible. Not all of these questions apply to every situation (people migrating to an adjacent country would not have to deal with many of these concerns). But immigration was far harder than it is today, and fraught with risk. Pre-modern borders were, by virtue of being pre-modern, effectively closed.
Wouldn't this mean that eventually the world will be more integrated in every dimension, regardless of the desires of those controlling borders, that lower barriers to communication and transportation will continue to make the world a smaller place? Will it be possible to stop this as the decades and centuries go by?
There's already millions of people crossing borders every year, like the southern U.S. border, refugees from Africa and the Middle East into Europe, migrants leaving Russia and Ukraine, migrants between countries in Africa, Asia, and South America, etc. One might expect those numbers to increase over time, as it gets easier to travel.
Perhaps it is inevitable that the world will continue to integrate.
That said, passports have been around near as long as borders, just did not have the smart chip embedded in them. Letters of recommendations or safe passage to pass a port have been around nearly as long as the notion of sovereign boundaries. It might have been a parchment with a wax seal, a ring, or a stick with a burn-mark, maybe even clay tablet, but the purpose of the "passport" is the same - passage into and across a territory controlled by another group other than the person holding the "passport" - i.e. safe passage.
Your reference last states King Henry the 5th of England had "pass porte" in the early 15th century. The Greek city states had safe-passage documents between each other way before the English. There is a bilingual "letters of recommendation" in Chinese and Tibetan from the 10th century to allow safe passage for a pilgrimage. A thing that allows a non-local to pass safely into and out of a territory. (British Library IOL Tib J 754) https://www.princeton.edu/news/2014/11/17/bringing-ancient-b...
I wonder about borders, also. I wonder when they started guarding borders like they do today. I know there were places with minimal border control, like the U.S. before the world wars. Were there places a hundred years ago and earlier where boarders were guarded like they are today? Did they want to keep the serfs in place? Did rulers care about peasants moving back and forth? Or are modern borders, imperfect as they are, only possible at this time due to modern governments and the military resources they can dedicate to such things?
My guess is that modern borders and modern passports came about around the same time. There's no sense in requiring documentation for every person crossing a border unless a country has the wherewithal to enforce that rule.
The most common example for the Americans reading this is NAFTA, which makes workers in Detroit compete with workers in Mexico (suppressing wages in both location) while allowing the auto manufacturing companies to treat all of North America as one market. Toyota can move their plants around the region somewhat freely; can someone in Mexico freely move to the midwest?