Money can cross borders pretty easily these days, but the rules and their application are inconsistent or misguided and so we get uneven or suboptimal results. Think differing tax outcomes, or ownership or difficulties in monitoring.
Goods can cross borders pretty easily these days too, notwithstanding what’s going on in the US recently, or the economic coercion other countries wield for their own purposes. My observations of various international trade agreements and disputes suggest to me that there’s a lot of politics and quid pro quo involved, rather than the agreement of common rules and effective methods to resolve disputes.
If we want free movement of people then we need global rules to keep it fair. Preferably rules that put the folks’ needs first. Otherwise it becomes a “I’m stronger than you, so I win” situation, which is pretty much how things work now. Rules are needed to settle who gets what rights and obligations so that we have a common framework to live together. And we need a decent system for determining those rules. And a just method of enforcing those rights and obligations. And an effective method for settling disputes. And an effective method for identifying when the rules don’t work and changing them. I don’t think that exists anywhere right now.
So, I’m not hopeful that removal of barriers to people crossing borders would be successful any time soon. There’s just so much societal glue that needs to be in place first. We’re just not very good at getting that agreed, set up and sustainable.
I like the idea but you have to have very homogeneous laws and cultures to make it work. The EU despite all the differences between the people and cultures, have similar levels of law and law enforcement. The US and Canada had that similar level until Agent Orange 2: spray tan boogaloo. But it becomes more disparate when you do borders like the US and Mexico or Russia and Norway or Japan and China.
I’m not familiar enough with each of these borders to dive into nuance, but that’d be my impression for a us-mexico analog.
continuous, uninterrupted land
Also this guy: “What the fuck is a river?”
Short bit of very damp land.
“Good fences make good neighbors”. Let’s look at it another way. Does that freedom of movement include encroaching on your home and setting up a tent in your yard? (Or other analogous situation depending on your living arrangement).
If you said “no”, then you believe in the ability to have a secure and defined space. A country is just a pooled space of a larger community that have collectively decided to have a secure and defined space.
I think the bigger issue stems from the inequality and access within reason.
Good fences make good neighbors
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/150774/robert-frost-mending-wall :
Because the neighbor gets the last word, it’s possible to read “Good fences make good neighbors” as the poem’s straightforward message. A more complex reading, alert to Frost’s ironic style, would side firmly with the speaker. In this view, the speaker nurses a healthy suspicion of barriers that serve no clear purpose; he is open to communication and new ideas, wary of anything that arbitrarily divides people
I didn’t realize there were some people out there saying, “Good fences make good neighbors” unironically until today. Like the whole poem is the narrator talking about how he isn’t so sure if it’s true and his neighbor just repeating it. I mean, damn, it’s not even a subtext. Like this excerpt pretty heavy handedly says that maybe you shouldn’t build an arbitrary wall:
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Some countries you can do that on someone’s property
I’m very pro-immigration in the broad scheme of things, but I recognize that we need at least something to stop, say, Russia sending over a few million soldiers who spend a month getting all settled in before carrying out the rest of their orders.
Borders did not save Afghanistan from NATO sending over a million soliders who got all settled in before carrying out the rest of their orders. Nevertheless, 20 years later, NATO left with their tail between their legs because Afghans just wouldn’t stop fighting a guerilla against the occupation.
Borders did not save German Jews from Nazis radicalizing over a million people who got all settled in before carrying ot the rest of their orders. Unfortunately, they had trusted their state’s monopoly on violence and without the ability to defend themselves most did not survive.
Borders did not save Ukraine from Russia invading with over a million soldiers who, despite not getting to settle in, occupied a large amount of land and killed tens of thousands. However, those borders do prevent Ukraine sympathizers from retaliating against Russia with their full might, because despite Russia just flat out sending in an army to subjugate random people without justification, that border means they supposedly didn’t attack the likes of us.
Without borders, the Russian state is an organization. You can only be part of the organization or not. If you are not part of the organization, it doesn’t matter whether you’re in Melitopol or New York City, inexcusable violence against one is inexcusable violence against all. So if Russia were to attack, you only have two choices: sign up to be part of the Russian state or be one of their potential targets.
Now, it’s a valid choice to let yourself be subjugated and hope they don’t kill you to save on integration paperwork. It’s a valid choice to put your head in the sand and wait for another Russia to pop up closer to you to subjugate you with nobody to help you. But if you like being a free person, the only option is to defend anyone who comes under attack as you would want them to defend you.
I, personally, live under the aegis of nuclear-powered mutually assured destruction. A foreign state attacking me likely isn’t possible without a volley of nuclear weapons laying waste to that state. It seems fair if Ukrainians had the same, though perhaps guerilla or conventional military action would be better from a geopolitical de-escalation standpoint. Either way, anyone who doesn’t want to be the victim of genocide would have to treat a Russian invasion of Ukraine as an attack on their neighbor, and retaliate proportionally. The combined might of everyone in Europe and North America and everywhere else that respects human rights would be comparable to that of NATO and would come to the defense of the ones attacked.
So the Russian state and its leadership would likely not survive, and they would know this for a fact when deciding whether to attack anyone. So what would be stopping Russian leadership from committing any acts of violence? Basic self-preservation.
And sure, those soldiers getting a nice beach head might make destroying the Russian state a bit more costly. But that doesn’t make Putin any less dead by the end of it.
Extremely high risk of defection?
In theory, of course. Love that.
However, there are people who exist that should be kept out. Known terrorists and criminals should be denied entry, there are severe punishments that if we can’t enact we at the very least should prohibit their return. A modern day exile. You can only confirm who a bad person is by confirming who they aren’t. You need an ID to let Joshua Hamton, candy store owner, into the country but to also keep out Jeffery Epstein, kid diddler, from returning should he escape. A filter must exist but not one this strict. The only way to remove the filter would be to assimilate under a global legal system which we are centuries from obtaining.
The problem with exile, is that it doesn’t actually solve the problem, it’s just putting the problem somewhere else.
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As someone who lives next door to Russia, fuck that with a rusty fork! open borders are great between Britain and Ireland or between Schengen countries because there’s a level of shared values and goals and no aspirations to expand. But if Estonia for example opened it’s border to Russia, the entire country would be annexed within the year. And they’d all be shitting in buckets too.
There’s a fairly secure high standard of living throughout Europe, which is largely because Russia isn’t part of it. Yeah geography Russia is parry of Europe, but no-one considers them to be. Similarly we don’t necessarily need china sending a few million people into Mongolia or open borders between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
It’s a lovely sentiment, but grow up.
open borders are great between Britain and Ireland
Not something you would’ve heard in the 1970s!
Yeah, my parents actually met when they were stationed in northern Ireland in the 70s.
No lie! Even the chicks had to pick up a rifle and fight.
That brings up some interesting questions. Morality aside (a big aside. I know), does border security actually give citizens an economic or physical security advantage? Is it even possible for another country to send over so many people that they could take over? Some of this is predicated on an “us vs them” mentality, which I agree is part of the problem. I also know there are people with values incompatible with mine and who might not be willing to coexist peacefully with me. I agree on the goal. I don’t have the solution. Thoughts?
It probably does give an advantage. The reality is, every single country has a finite capacity and a finite amount of resources. Those are managed and procured by the taxes paid by its citizens. In the modern age when travel is easy, fast, and cheap, it does make sense to have some sort of control mechanism to limit how many “non-contributors” may come in to use the country’s resources, otherwise you risk getting your systems overburdened because they’re being utilized by a lot more people than they are meant to.
This is not an easy problem to solve at all. An idealistic “let’s get rid of the borders” will have very real consequences in the real world, and probably won’t work very well as long as some countries are significantly and objectively better places to live than others.
The reality is, every single country has a finite capacity and a finite amount of resources.
Sort of but not really? It’s a talking point that tends to get used by xenophobes and nationalists a lot, that sounds obviously true on the surface, but never stands up to much scrutiny whenever you examine it on a case-by-case basis.
Like what kind of scrutiny?
Basic scrutiny? Like it usually turns out that “capacity” is measured by a self-serving and short-sighted metric, and you could easily find space and resources for more if there were the political will to do so.
“finite” stands up to that scrutiny, but it also doesn’t mean a lot. The volume of space within 1m of any photon ever emitted from the Sun is finite, but it’s not small on many scales.
If you have an additional 3% of the population come in as new immigrants, no one would even notice resources were spread more thin, just like they don’t notice a 3% inflation most years. I don’t think most countries are experiencing that level of immigration, including extra-legal immigration.
What does not stand up to scrutiny is a general “immigration is bad” thing. Immigration is great if you allow people who are willing and able to contribute to your country in, and implement some measures to help them integrate into your country so they can make a life for themselves and start being productive members as quickly and efficiently as possible. Then it works, and when it works it can work very well.
But that itself, choosing who can and cannot get in, who can/will be a productive new member of your society is border control. Basically you have to control the entry so that you can give your systems and infrastructure and society the time and opportunity to gradually develop along.
That’s literally Kant opinion on the matter and one of the inspiring principles of the European Union.
Borders are important for settling disputes.
He’s not thinking about why we need them in the first place. We are inherently a mistrustful and violent species that has to be civilized to not use violence as the first means of solving problems.
And we still end up killing each other over which imaginary friend you believe is secretly real.
Solve that and you can start talking about erasing those lines in the sand.
This is patently false. The concept of material- and land ownership is the main cause of violence. Plenty of examples of egalitarian societies in history that shared their resources and lived in peace.
And how large were those societies and how long did they last?
Disputes between who? Frontiers, nations and states killed far more people than any religion. And their all imaginary.
“A government is a body of people - usually, notably, ungoverned.”
The point being that, when you say soemthing like “this religion killed those people” or “that nation killed those people” what you mean is “these people killed those people”.
So when you ask “Disputes between who?” the answer is “Disputes between people.”
The fiction being that these people represent others. Frontiers are just a way to divide influence zone of governments; none have any actual legitimacy.
Um, how would you define legitimacy in this context?
Culture is such an ethereal thing. It seems like there are three cultural scenarios: immigrants assimilate, cultures mix, and immigrant culture takes over. This is obviously a spectrum and not rigidly defined categories, but I wonder what the major factors are determining how cultures interact. You have to assume the population proportion is a main contributor. I assume language must be also.
If you make completely porous borders does that encourage new cultures to grow through mixing, or does it allow a single culture to dominate?
Just some musings barely related to the topic.
It would allow new cultures to emerge, same as happen now, although maybe faster because of the mixing of ideas. Culture is never static and any attempts by borders to keep it so will always fail.
All three have historical examples. Almost too many times to count groups that invaded China assimilated to the Han culture. When’s the slavs moved into the baltics their culture remained mostly unaffected. Then there are all the fun cultural mixing examples that provide definitely the best cuisines and music in my opinion. The Americas are ripe with them.
I don’t think you can definitely say mixing would be the dominant outcome, but it’s the one I would hope for.
Imagine ten million people pouring into Canada. We have enough of a housing crisis
I think we’ll eventually get to that stage - where everything is one big EU-like superstate. It would, of course, require that we don’t annihilate ourselves before then, but it seems to be the general trend at least. I doubt we’d ever get rid of borders entirely, though. Human beings are the same the world over, and should be treated as such, but the world itself is not the same everywhere. Life brings different challenges depending on where you find yourself. So there will always be a greener side of the fence for the vast majority of the population. That ‘temperature difference’ will always bring a certain conflict, and that conflict will always bring a certain siege mentality for those who are on the aforementioned greener side of the fence.
On the bright side, as climate change devastates the planet, we’ll all be living on the same 100-square-mile patch of land eventually, so this debate will be moot.
This is impossible without also abolishing the concept of land ownership. Which I’m all for, but that ship sailed like 10 000 years ago.
I think this is the core problem, but you could allow freedom of movement without completely eliminating real estate.
On land you don’t own, you could be restricted to “leave only footprints, take only memories” and we could still mostly eliminate administrative borders.
Maybe not the best links, but here’s something:
https://www.visitfinland.com/en/articles/finnish-everyman-rights-the-right-to-roam/
https://finland.fi/life-society/how-every-persons-right-in-finland-evolved-over-more-than-a-century/
I’d love a free roaming world. Those that want to roam into a different area better know the local rules and cultures.
