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Open Borders

argumate:

socialjusticemunchkin:

argumate:

(@voximperatoris, @neoliberalism-nightly, @socialjusticemunchkin)

Most people agree that open borders is a desirable end state for humanity, as being able to maintain it is strong evidence of an absence of war and famine and reduced global inequality.

Most people also agree that throwing open the borders overnight would have catastrophic consequences, following which the borders would immediately be closed again.

(The best example of open borders we have in the world today is the EU, and even moderate refugee flows have been sufficient to destabilise this project).

However there are plenty of obvious compromises that could be made, such as increasing immigration quotas by 50% each year, greatly increasing migration while giving plenty of time for societies to adjust and absorb the flow. Or going for easy wins, like opening the border between the US and Canada.

That said, I still can’t help feeling that proponents of open borders are downplaying the changes involved, and the possible consequences.

I mean, @voximperatoris is referencing the Jim Crow south in what appears to be a positive example of a society with a racial underclass employed as servants with lynchings “on a very small scale in the grand scheme of things”. Like, I’m not trying to be snarky but that sounds like something someone might write if they were attempting to satirise the open borders position.

And @socialjusticemunchkin talking approvingly of the improved aesthetics of local inequality compared with global inequality; again, not everyone is going to share that particular aesthetic.

There are also questions of whether increased inequality within a particular society ends up causing more problems (for that society) than increased inequality globally; eg. North Sentinelese appear happier living their current lives than as servants in Silicon Valley, despite the latter being “less unequal”.

Many proponents of open borders have suggested introducing a dual track concept of citizenship, where immigrants would not gain access to the full range of social services available to current citizens. I think this also needs to be taken into account when considering what open borders would do to inequality.

So, to take a slightly different position: if seeking to move towards the abolition (as much as possible) of borders as soon as possible (leaving the obviously superior option of the Archipelago untouched as an even less realistic option: I have a marvellous plan for such an utopia this margin is too narrow to contain) is not desirable, why stop at national borders?

After all, the national borders are highly suspiciously sized. If a peaceful person with no ill intent may not migrate from Morocco to Spain, why should one be allowed to migrate from West Virginia to San Francisco?

The United States is larger than most combinations of two to numerous neighboring countries, and the differences inside the nation are staggering. The borderer regions in the Appalachia are practically third world compared to the city-state opulence of the Bay Area; and the values of the populations could hardly be more different. If poor people with backwards values being theoretically able to immigrate to the places where rich people with modern values live, shouldn’t we be more worried about the fact that any West Virginian who can purchase a plane ticket and find themselves housing and work is allowed to come to San Francisco and even vote in elections, with no border controls and centralized planning and immigration quotas to prevent the undesirable masses from flowing in without restraint? Surely Californian values and the riches and job markets of California are the fruits of the Californians’ labor, not something an Appalachian borderer may come to feast on whenever they feel like?

But furthermore, even within California we see stark differences! One does not need to venture too far inland to find different cultures and economies. Even if we build a wall around California, the problem persists; the Six Californias plan would have created both the richest and the poorest state of the Union, right next to each other! And indeed we are seeing the phenomenon of Central Californians flocking in to the Bay Area in search of work, the inevitable shantytowns kept away only by regulations that make it illegal for outsiders to ever have affordable housing. Surely it would be better to constrain this perversion and inequality machine, and establish a national border between the regions so that Silicon Valley may use 0.7% of is GDP in foreign aid to its impoverished neighbor and the shantytowns stay in Central California where they belong!

Yet even this is not enough! The neighborhood of Bayview-Hunters Point is notorious for being a honest-to-azathoth shantytown, with a racial distinction as sharp as it can ever be, right next to San Francisco itself. And indeed the denizens ever seek opportunities in the city proper, bringing their shantytownness and cheap labor downtown, driving down the wages of the hard-working residents of SoMa who, without this artificial mobility benefiting only the tech elite, could otherwise be making $50k a year even from burger-flipping! Not to mention all the services that fall under the general category of “servants to software developers” which would not be worth the genuine fair living wage of $30 an hour; the existence of this underpaid underclass allows the software developers to avoid doing their own shopping and driving and cooking and such things and instead use their time for the thing that is their comparative advantage, further driving up inequality when the equalizing effect of inefficient non-division of labor is reduced!

Indeed I say; let us restore all the borders! Back before this “enlightenment” and “emancipation” and such things, people knew their place and they would die on the same plot of land they were born onto. Let each family be bound to their own turf, never even imposing on their neighbor! Let us be truly honest in what we seek and end this charade; bring back serfdom! For only with the complete immobility of the populace, can a truly stable and equal and peaceful society be established. In our village, everyone is equal, looks the same and shares the same customs; and while we know that not every village is as prosperous as ours, we dutifully kind of pay our 0.7% of indulgences I mean aid to the Catholic Church which surely distributes it fairly to the poorest of the world instead of building a golden toilet for the pope; we have not verified this for only the Baron may ever leave this territory, but surely the virtous Church has the interests of all of us in mind!

Yes this is amusing, but it would be more amusing if China didn’t already have controls over household registration limiting internal migration and leading to a situation of illegal migrant workers within the country moving from one province to another.

Most nations aspire to free movement of people within the national borders by having an economy resilient enough to handle such movement and consider it a flaw if it cannot be achieved.

Similarly, the lack of open borders in the world is clearly a flaw that would be rectified if conditions were better.

So, to make a more sincere argument; the whole issue would seem to basically boil down to “will assholes stop us from having the utopia we deserve, and if so, how to manipulate the assholes to stop stopping it?”

Morally I support drastic increases in mobility immediately simply because I’m viscerally offended that someone’s birth should determine their fate (and as someone who was born in Shitholeston, FI, EU, I consider it an extremely natural entitlement that I personally can “just leave” and go wherever the fuck I please because I’ve had a lot of reason to “just leave” everywhere; I can’t stand the idea that I would not be allowed to do it, I can’t stand the idea that unlike me, others wouldn’t be allowed to do it, thus there is only one option left) and there is a certain inhuman brutality inherent in policing borders. Just like the drug war boils down to kidnapping poor people, closed borders boils down to shooting at poor people for the crime of not wanting to be where The Powers That Be have determined is their Proper Place, and any and all subversive activities to undermine this structure are emotionally laudable and a triumph of the human spirit against attempts to shackle it to the mob’s oppressive whims. (Aaand I noticed that “illegal” immigrants are Formidable in the “Formidable-Pitiful; Good-Evil” alignment system my brain apparently operates on)

And China is basically The failure mode; as an evil authoritarian superpower of a billion people it’s the epitome of treating people as product, and it’s optimizing for the State, not for the people. (insert comment about “future society: thought control” instead of “future society: eudaimonic”) It is a Violation! Of! Liberty! (and fairness, and my brain believes that in aggregate of harm too; screw the dark moral foundations) to tell anyone that they may not go where they want because the State has decided they are, via the guilt of association, Undesirable.

Obviously, I’d like to be a Fnargl who can just be so absolutely unchallengedly sovereign that what the xenophobic assholes think doesn’t matter a single bit, but since I’m not a Fnargl (YGM) the need for pragmatism is obvious. And pragmatically I’d support a diversity of approaches to see which one of them works the best; we should implement a more liberal approach in some places and a more conservative approach in others. For the immigration experiment the US is an obvious location for erring on the side of openness while the EU is a more natural candidate for a more restrictive approach (mostly because this goddamn continent is built on the values of shameless xenophobia and parochialism).

1 month ago · tagged #this goddamn continent #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 73 notes · source: argumate · .permalink

  1. almostcoralchaos reblogged this from xhxhxhx
  2. socialjusticemunchkin reblogged this from osberend and added:
    That’s quite an extreme opinion. Obviously, people who wish to live in dunbar-communities should be able to live in...
  3. alexanderrm reblogged this from osberend and added:
    This actually seems quite reasonable in terms of how communities beyond dunbar’s number create problems (although I’d...
  4. osberend reblogged this from argumate and added:
    I’d prefer a more gradualist approach, but hey, I’ll take what I can get. ;)
  5. argumate reblogged this from osberend
  6. ozylikes reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin
  7. boozer-pitt reblogged this from voximperatoris and added:
    It’s not just politics, though. It’s markets, too. People are willing to put their money where their mouths are here,...
  8. voximperatoris reblogged this from boozer-pitt and added:
    Whether they are, in fact, defending themselves or harming themselves is the point in question.
  9. neoliberalism-nightly reblogged this from voximperatoris
  10. xhxhxhx reblogged this from neoliberalism-nightly
  11. lewtuff reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin
  12. atumitum reblogged this from argumate and added:
    “aspiring to the free movement of people by having a resilient economy” seems backwards to me. The free movement of...
  13. bookchins-revenge reblogged this from argumate and added:
    Well the thing is, if California were to start walling off the state to immigrants from Nevada, wouldn’t the very first...
  14. conductivemithril reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:
    Oh my god how in all my worrying about this issue did I not throw the reversal test at it yet.
  15. obiternihili reblogged this from argumate and added:
    >(The best example of open borders we have in the world today is the EU, and even moderate refugee flows have been...