At a minimum I demand we all be as free to move around the world as the products, money and material that our labor creates.
I lived in Germany for a couple years, about 30 minutes from the French border. Every once in a while, my wife and I would cross the border to buy some French wines.
The border didn’t even stop us. There were buildings off to one side, but the highway was wide open, no barriers or checkpoints or anything. Didn’t even need to slow down. It was like crossing state lines in the US.
America is so used to being isolated from the rest of the world, with oceans on either side, that we make a big deal about the two countries that actually touch our border. I feel it just exacerbates our fear of foreign threats, because we’re not 100% secure on all sides.
And of course, a lot of Canadians mostly look and sound like white Americans, so we don’t think twice about them, but Mexicans look and sound different, so it’s easy to rile people up about the “invading foreign culture” that will “destroy America.” It’s dumb racist gaslighting, but it’s sadly effective against Americans who have never left the country or lived anywhere near either of our borders. Which is most of the population.
And of course, a lot of Canadians mostly look and sound like white Americans, so we don’t think twice about them, but Mexicans look and sound different, so it’s easy to rile people up about the “invading foreign culture” that will “destroy America.”
The echo of America’s original sin still dwells in the heart of every American. Deep down, there’s some primal fear that what we did to others will be done to us.
Identity is difficult. Clinging to an identity that describes half a continent will be the end of the United States of America.
two countries
If we count all the bases, USA has more countries bordering its land, than any other.
As a former US military member, I’d like to point out that we consider our foreign bases to be American soil, so anyone born on base is considered a legal US citizen. However, the bases themselves are loaned to us by the host country through legal agreements. Depending on the country, we could have unrestricted use of the space, or we could just be visitors on the host country’s local military base with limited space allocated to us.
I remember in Germany, they have such strict laws against tearing down natural forests that most of our bases had to remain mostly forested. We had very little space to construct buildings on base.
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The EU trade/travel model was a good one, even if the ECB is a moral abomination.
Easiest way to get rid of undocumented immigrants is to grant them all citizenship. Problem solved.
Bada bing bada boom
Rather than the “Easiest way”, how about a good way…
How about we make a nice world to bring folks to. Y’know… end manufactured scarcity, stop using people as pawns on the grand chessboard, stop conjuring precarity to cull and terrorise people by, and so on. Y’know? How about have a neat world for kids to come to? … no more economic migrants under duress… Everybody happy.
“Let’s figure out this food/air deal, OK? 'K. I’m just weird, you know? How about have a neat world for kids to come to?” ~Bill Hicks
Exactly. Being a migrant isn’t exactly a picnic. I think it’s reasonable to assume most people would like to live near their families and homes if that’s a viable option. I still think people should be able to go anywhere in the world if they want to, but they shouldn’t have to. A lot of the “problems” of immigration are just the point at which other people’s problems become inconvenient for me. If we can make the whole world a nice place to live, we’ll be well on our way to making borders not matter so much.
it’s baffling to me how the idea that “being born here does not make me entitled to services more than someone who wasn’t born here” is controversial among “leftists”
we all need food, we all need housing… why should it matter that my birth coordinates happen to be within an arbitrary drawing on the map ffs
is controversial among “leftists”
I haven’t noticed any leftists who consider that idea controversial. Mostly just Liberals/Democrats
Many state communists oppose open borders. The USSR, China, and Cuba all had/have citizenship privileges and controlled migration, and generally people that support those governments are also called “leftist”.
The same goes for many social democrats and socialist reformists. Even unionists often oppose migration because migrants are imported by the capitalist order to use as scabs (see “guest workers” in 1970s West Germany).
All basically want a walled garden in which leftist ways of living can flourish, usually with the idea to export them later.
But especially in activist and discourse spaces, people tend to be in a pretty narrow band from pop liberalism to anarchocommunism. Socialists, socdems, and unionists tend to be busy with their job, because that is what their praxis calls for. And state communists tend to walk away exasperated when people condemn genocide.
But anarchocommunist praxis is for a large part prefigurative sharing of information, ideas, and tentative structures. So we’re relatively loud and as unemployed as we can get away with.
Basically no one believes in open borders, only some weird fringe anarchists who posts memes like the one above that are largely irrelevant in the real world. It’s always just been a straw man from the right or just weird online fringe anarchists who hold the position.
The reason communists are critical of the US/European hostility towards immigrants is not because we want open borders but because western countries bomb, sanction, coup these countries and cause a refugee crisis then turn around and cry about those immigrants coming to their country.
Many state communists oppose open borders. The USSR, China, and Cuba all had/have citizenship privileges and controlled migration,
Fair enough, the USSR restricted movement within their territory more than many other countries restricted their borders.
I think what you’re seeing is that there are two groups of people interpreting it in two different ways:
- Change this one thing and everyone will be better off for it.
- An ideal world would have this feature.
“Services”
Haha! (In the bully laugh from Bart Simpson’s bully’s laugh.)
The convenient thing is that “Abolish ICE” is valid whether you want closed borders, open borders, or no borders.
The main predecessor to ICE was Immigration and Naturalization Service. Notice the difference in tone between Service and Enforcement? But even if you don’t don’t support immigration, ICE has morphed into a paramilitary secret police to do Trump’s bidding and has been attacking and deporting natural born citizens. If you only oppose “illegal” immigration, ICE has been targeting and deporting deporting people with all their paperwork in order.
Literally the only two reasons to support keeping ICE is that you support fascism and/or White Supremacy
Morphed? It was established to be a redundant paramilitary organization with less oversight and more jingoist blind loyalty than its predecessor or law enforcement in general. That it could be turned directly against Americans was an original design specification.
There’s a difference between serving the oligarchy at large and personal loyalty in a cult of the personality.
It’s valid to the majority but to those in power it’s a non starter.
We should have open borders. The only thing needed to get in should be a background check. But anyone who hasn’t committed violent crimes should be able to live and work in the country.
No. I’m not worried about being swamped by a flood of people from poorer countries. Why? Because no one wants to leave their family and entire home behind just to move to a wealthy country to live on the street as a homeless person. We will only ever attract as many immigrants as there are jobs to support them.
Of course, I would want reciprocity. I would support signing mutual open border agreements with poorer countries. They can send workers in need of work here. We can send retirees in need of low cost of living places there. The flow in both directions is kept in check by market forces, the same way we regulate the production of every good and service in our economies.
Because no one wants to leave their family and entire home behind just to move to a wealthy country to live on the street as a homeless person
Life as a homeless person can be better than life in a war torn country.
The flow in both directions is kept in check by market forces, the same way we regulate the production of every good and service in our economies.
Libertarian ah take
Life as a homeless person can be better than life in a war torn country.
Immigrants however are extremely unlikely to be homeless. People who take the initiative to flee across a continent tend to be self-starters and highly motivated. There’s a reason immigrants start businesses at far higher rates than native born citizens. By accepting immigrants, you are selecting for a population of the most motivated and driven people in the regions you’re drawing from.
Libertarian ah take
So? This is how we regulated immigration for the vast, vast majority of the history of human civilization. People move to areas with more opportunities. If too many people move to those areas, the opportunities available to immigrants decrease, and the flow of people slows. It’s a self-regulating system. It only ever becomes a thing to worry about if you’re concerned about the skin color of your neighbors.
Watch this video. Market inefficiency will have people freezing to death in the streets, unable to afford travelling to a place with work, unable even to afford accurate information on where to find work. Many turned to crime to survive.
In Tudor England’s case, they “solved” this by kidnapping people ICE-style and deporting them to the colonies as indentured servants or putting them in for-profit prisons.
Open borders are good, but you need to be anarchocommunist about it. People need to base their migration patterns on accurate information, which means information given as mutual aid rather than for profit or for manipulation (e.g. if people constantly say “we have no space” when they have space, people learn that “we have no space” means “we probably have space”, so if there is no space you get disaster).
It also needs to be mutual aid when people are there. Expecting people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps to slot into the economy of a foreign culture is “leaving money on the table”. It’s much more economically productive to get people everything they need to be comfortable so they can instead spend their labor on efficient tasks they are specialized in (which then help other get what they need faster in the positive sum game we call society).
I understand what you’re saying about immigration, but that holds less true with respect to war forcing people to move.
So?
I was more pointing towards the suggestion that market forces kept everything in check, which, no, they don’t. The market does not magically stay afloat without intervention. Production is not just regulated by market forces.
But most importantly, countries have capacities. America, for example, can hold many more people than it is, comfortably. But if you have a place that’s smaller, like Britain or sweden, free border immigration will result in strains in both the cultural and infrastructure situation in the countries at hand as they rapidly grow beyond present capacity, which they will if free immigration is allowed.
Excess workers willing to work for lower pay can also drive wages down, and allow companies to exploit workers more easily(often regardless of the actual law).
I’m generally in favor of reasonably lax immigration policies, but free border immigration is not a good idea. People need time to adjust to the culture of where they’re going, and you don’t want to overload that
There is less war today that at any point of human history.
I know. It’s also easier to ever than flee, and that’s also meaningless to this point
I believe that everyone in the country should have free medical care, free or deeply subsidized minimal housing, and free or deeply subsidized food. (I believe this for everyone, but it has to happen somewhere before it can happen everywhere.)
This is not possible if we allow unlimited access to absolutely anyone (and their families) regardless of whether there is employment to sustain them.
We should have work visas sufficiently available for all the jobs that we need filled, and we should have harsh enforcement against employers who hire undocumented workers. (Treat them like slavers because that’s what they are). Deportations should be done compassionately and should not treat immigrants as criminals or national security threats.
Open borders are a naive notion, but we should be a lot closer to open borders than to what we have now.
If you have any requirement for entry then it’s not really an open border and you need some kind of enforcement to enforce those requirements.
Because no one wants to leave their family and entire home behind just to move to a wealthy country to live on the street as a homeless person. We will only ever attract as many immigrants as there are jobs to support them.
At least up here in northern Europe that is sadly not true. I’m not claiming immigrants come here seeking free welfare (some probably do but there’s always people like that everywhere); but there’s plenty of people being actively lied to in their own countries, and sold this idea that you can just go up north and get a job and send money to your family etc. get a better life! So they gather all the money they have and give it to these liars, who then traffic them into EU and up here.
There’s barely any jobs in my country you can get without speaking the native language (which is difficult to learn and useless outside our 5mil population), and at this moment we even have massive unemployment crisis so there’s no jobs even for the natives. Still people are sold lies and come here, then get stuck trying to scrap any money they can, and get taken advantage of and have to live in poverty. Some even have big loans on them, they took to just get here. All in vain
Not sure needing any sort of check would be “open borders”, but let’s assume it’s open to anyone who doesn’t have a violent criminal record. Now all the non-violent people with criminal records are fleeing to your country to avoid prosecution. Do you allow them to be extradited?
Do you still have a military to protect your country from others? How do you prevent a foreign nation from just sending enough people over to instigate a coup? Way cheaper than going to war, and they wouldn’t even need to be sneaky or underhanded; just overwhelm the local population and overthrow their government.
Universal healthcare would completely collapse if people can move to a country, get treatment, then go back home. Are you doing a health screening and making sure they have a job and live in the country for a minimum amount of time?
Because no one wants to leave their family and entire home behind just to move to a wealthy country to live on the street as a homeless person
You can bring your family too so that’s a non-issue, and many people would be better off homeless in a wealthy country than making do in a poor one. People will travel within a country to be homeless in the more desirable places, if there’s essentially no boundary imagine how many people that would attract. Especially if the wealthy country continues to have outreach and support programs for the homeless and still enforces laws in the inevitable camps that spring up.
Now you’re arresting loads and people and it’s straining your resources to imprison them all. Do you start deporting people who break certain laws?
Seems like we’re starting to invent all the immigration rules that never used to exist but sprang up out of necessity.
You’re taking things way too literally. The US had open borders for most of its history, and it didn’t get invaded or fall to pieces. When people say “open boarder” they mean no restrictions on immigration other than criminal records.
Your speculation on vast camps is hogwash. Immigrants maintain much lower unemployment levels than native-born citizens. And you can have all your social welfare benefits tied to citizenship. These are problems the EU solved a long time ago. Look more into history and real world examples, less vague speculation.
sprang up out of necessity.
You mean out of racism?
I’m not American, but won’t say every immigration law is right; just that going full-open is an over-correction.
This “overcorrection” was the case for the vast majority of human history. It only stopped being the case due to racism and nationalism. I’m not sure what you think you’re appealing to here but this is just not reflected in reality.
Open borders are a great idea if you want to average out the standard of living across the world.
Personally, as an American, I don’t want that to be a fast process. I am interested in helping the rest of the world to raise their standard of living, especially in the long term. That’s in everyone’s interest.
I’m not interested in making huge sacrifices in the American standard of living in order to accomplish that.
I wasn’t saying open borders before, but I am now. Picking primary candidates who support it too. We need the EU model. Fuck whatever broken system we have now.
European here. You do realize that the EU is still quite picky about who gets in, right?
Within the EU itself it’s very easy to move around, I can drive through several countries without seeing a single border checkpoint. Actually getting into the EU if you’re from a “less desirable” nation? I hear it’s not all that easy.
It’s much harder to get citizenship in most EU countries than it is to get citizenship in the USA. Until Trump, it was also easier to get into the US on a visa than to get into Europe on a visa.
I think I’ve seen border checkpoints while driving between EU countries, but it was hard to tell because they hadn’t been in operation for decades. But, there’s still a vague sense of a border. It seems like the countries maintain that area enough so that if ever they had to put the border control points back into operation it could be done. So, you can sort of tell that you crossed a border, even if you don’t have to slow down at all.
I seem to remember that the USA was part of the model when the EU was being designed. That doing business between EU member states was supposed to be as easy as doing business state-to-state in the USA. It isn’t quite there yet. But, the USA has been working at reducing state-to-state friction for nearly 2 centuries, whereas the EU has only had decades.
I’ve seen them too. There’s a booze store in one lol. I meant I haven’t seen an operational one.
Have you ever crossed the Swiss border? That was an interesting one. Switzerland isn’t in the EU but they’re in a lot of bilateral agreements which means they mostly have an open border. But, that agreement is a lot less solid than the rest of the EU agreements.
It seems like the France / Belgium border could be turned back into a proper border control post within a few months. But, the Swiss / France border seems like it could be back in full force within a few days. Currently you can drive past it at nearly full highway speeds, but all the border control buildings are there, and the roads leading up to them are just ready for them to start diverting traffic again. I also seem to remember that it offered a last second chance to turn around and not cross the border, something you didn’t get at say France / Germany. Probably because there actually is a meaningful difference in laws between the two sides, so there’s a chance someone might decide not to do it.
I haven’t been into any of the EEA countries yet, but there’s a non-zero chance of crossing the Swiss border later this year. I’m looking to import a cheap old used car from western Europe and prices for the particular model are a tiny bit higher in Switzerland than Germany, but the Swiss ones tend to have lower mileage (and my friend who used to work at AutoDNA when it was still competitive against CarVertical (or maybe before CarVertical was a thing even) says German cars are the worst to get background checks on since there’s so little info available and Swiss cars are significantly better in that regard)
Cool, just be careful on the rules. Switzerland is technically not part of the EEA. They’re part of the EFTA, and have a bunch of bilateral agreements with the rest of the EU, but there are still quirks to the deals. Even if you’re charged only minimal fees or duties, that could add up if you’re buying a car. At a minimum, you’ll probably have to do paperwork to export the car from Switzerland to another country. And the Swiss love their paperwork.
There’s paperwork to do regardless of country of origin I believe, since you generally need to de-register it and get the temporary plates. This seems to incur some minor fees of usually double digits euros in pretty much every country, as some clerk has to fill out a few forms and whatever. And on the Estonian side I’ll have to show it to some officials who will verify that it exists, is a car, has the correct VIN, the doors open, and that it has seatbelts. More or less. It’s not a proper TÜV, as the TÜV from country of origin still applies. Also we now have a registration fee so that’s nice. Since already registered cars also incur the fee (one time retroactive reg fee for the first change of ownership after the law came into effect a year ago), it doesn’t really make imports any less competitive yet.
Mostly I’m still leaning towards Germany, as I could just fly into Stuttgart or Frankfurt and have several examples in my price range to check out as long as I’m willing to bus/train around or hail whatever the German equivalent of Bolt is (because fuck Uber). Average of 100k extra kilometers on the clock compared to the Swiss examples isn’t a big deal on an OM642 anyway if it’s been maintained and having more choices is better, because I don’t want to go fly out to see one particular car, discover it has a glaring flaw not described by the seller, and have no other options nearby lol
The EU is notorious for its brutal and heavy-handed immigration enforcement. This is one rare case where the answer is in the past; America didn’t even have laws restricting immigration for about a hundred years.
We do have the EU model. Travel all you want across US state borders. Europe and America both enforce outer borders.
The system in the US is indeed broken, as is Europe in slightly different ways.
Sounds like a bit of an opposame risk, walking problem-reaction-solutioned straight into NAU. Great grandest father mason would be proud.
I vote for no borders.
Trump agrees. That’s why he “arrested” Maduro for breaking a US law
Monkey’s Paw.
Conservatives need an enemy to rally against. That is all they have.
They have many other enemies. But having an enemy is required for the ideology.
Any ideology that is enemy based, eventually leads to genocide.
and once they’ve eliminated that enemy they need a new enemy to eliminate
Don’t let perfection be the enemy of progress. We can move toward inevitable or destructive. I choose logically-forward, personally. Doesn’t matter my personal opinions
The moderate position is stop giving money to the gestapo. The people who want to give them money do not represent progress.
#Incrementalism #DoNotSplit
Having a sub class of folks who are not citizens is definitely a problem. We need immigration reform. Having illegal immigrants who are willing to work for less than minimum wage is definitely a problem.
Even Bernie has said as much.
With immigration reform we can set the path for these folks to get citizenship which will raise wages for everyone.
I have zero faith in congress’ ability to do this though.
ICE definitely needs to be abolished. Open borders is probably a bad starting point though… but I like that idea more than having ICE.
I have zero faith in congress’ ability to do this though.
This is the crux of the problem. Nobody has faith in Congress’ ability to do anything.
They are getting so old they can barely wipe their own asses.
I don’t give a rats ass who comes over the border. But we do need customs enforcement if for no other reason then to staunch the flow of illegal firearms into Mexico and Canada. Having said that I trust no one in ICE right now to do that (also they aren’t).
Firearms are a human right. The problem is not firearms heading into Mexico, it’s Gate Keeping firearms out of the hands of the common man.
WORLDWIDE SCHENGEN 🥺👉👈
I don’t want open borders, I want abolished borders, big difference.
Yes. Open borders means more citizens, which means more tax revenue, which means more social services. It’s kinda how that whole “government” thing works
It’s true. Before March 3rd 2003, the day ICE was created, humanity did not know borders. They weren’t a thing. Borders have only been a concept for 23 years, the same amount of time ICE has existed.
I really wish I could just know this is sarcasm.
I’ve heard crazier things on lemmy, but I think it’s sarcasm in this case.
If Occam’s razor says so, who am I to argue.
No that’s my more thoughtful cousin. I think the simplest solution is to burn it down.
Yes, my fault for neglecting the /s
