All of that already happens without open borders, it just costs us more money to maintain.

The rates are vastly different though,no? If I have a leaky faucet, it seems strange to say "This faucet is useless: the water is getting through anyway, and this way I'm having to pay for new gaskets!"

I don't think your example is valid because we're not talking about water, we're talking about humans who are choosing to leave their country for a better place. Pursuit of happiness and all that jazz. I guess my opinion is being born in a place like the US shouldn't be some kind of privilege, and instead we should strive for the US to be a bastion for human dignity.

> we're talking about humans who are choosing to leave their country for a better place.

What makes the US a better place? What keeps other countries from being a better place?

The constitution and bill of rights and the effective government the founding fathers created that ensures the continuation of those law bodies.

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.

> The lack of those blessings from the past is what prevents others.

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.

It’s true, but the platform and framework of that fight is what has kept it stable over time. That is what we inherited. It’s also very fragile, and that’s where the contemporary fight happens to preserve it. But without the framework, the fight is a unstable and degenerates quickly into a pretty gnarly state. That’s why the founders struggled so hard - their writings at the time on these very subjects are profound and helpful in framing how lucky we are, but also how typical our problems are in history.

So then work on making other countries as good as the US, not by cramming every person into the US.

I don't think your points hold up against the example of state borders.

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. Maybe 1 of 30 of those are incapable of living in society. Keeping out fugitives makes sense but I totally disagree with keeping out criminals, particularly when in much of the world criminal often just means you did something the government didn't like.

  > Consider something like 1/3 of Americans have a criminal history.

really? not as in traffic tickets, but actual conviction of a crime?

No. Not sure sure exactly where it started, but it gets attributed to Andrew Cuomo often enough, citing the 1 in 3 number. That comes from FBI statistics, which define a criminal record to include arrests.

Here is a discussion: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/aug/18/andrew-cuo...

That includes arrest records, not just convictions. About 3% of the population has served any time in prison, and about 8% of the population have been convicted of a felony.

https://news.uga.edu/total-us-population-with-felony-convict...

Are you familiar with the US immigration system? That is exactly what they consider in criminal history. What they examine includes arrests, not just convictions, so it's precisely the stat we want.

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)?

I'm not sure what we're talking about if you're excluding non-convicted arrests, but it aint immigration.

Immigration is generally a civil offense (I.e., misdemeanor). Generally, deportation is not an offense that prohibits you from entering again legally.

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.

>"Humans stopped being migratory about 12,000 years ago"

Up until recently ( relatively ) a person could pretty much move to other country without much fuzz.

Because this was so rare that the destination countries didn't see it as a problem. And when it did happen en masse, it was usually war.

That’s not true at all, there were often famines and other natural disasters that made it impossible to live in a region and people just migrated. It happened constantly.

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?

Ethiopia is an interesting example, but not of scarcity. While my country's population grew by a mere 40% since 1950 (and has been stagnant the last few decades), Ethiopia's grew by 534%, and shows no signs of slowing: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ethiopia-popu...

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.

At the time I’m talking about the cause of the famine was an extreme drought, and all sorts of other problems as you allude to. More than population growth was war and instability - all great reasons to migrate if you could, but the lack of food is an even more common and compelling reason to migrate throughout human history regardless of the reason.

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.

You still can in Argentina and Paraguay.

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.

That is ahistorical. Rome, Greece and so on generally required you to file paperwork, pay money and usually join the military if you wanted to be able to move in their borders and have rights.

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.

In the last 70 years alone we've added over 5 billion people. In the 1800s there were vast swaths of temperate, fertile land that were basically unclaimed. Moving around was no big deal at that scale.

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.

What is the end result? Something like you are to reside in this town an we'll let you out twice a year for vacation and XMas? Want to move to other city - there is a waiting list 10 years long.

Controlled migration for the foreseeable future.

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.

>"Controlled migration for the foreseeable future."

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".

> Every time there has been mass unorganized migration it has been a humanitarian disaster

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.

Lots of countries maintain open borders. The entire Schengen zone is an open borders agreement.

Also, you're incorrectly conflating mass migration with open borders. You can have open borders without causing a mass migration and vice versa.

Countries are equivalent to prisons in your example? I agree, they act that way now.

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.

It's possible for any adjacent nation/country/region to join the US or EU... so it's perfectly possible for free travel, if you agree to the rules of the higher federation. You can only impact jurisdictions you have jurisdictional control over.

I for one welcome our one world order overlords!