From an ethical / fairness perspective, I think that the idea that someone should be prevented from visiting or settling in my country by virtue of their birth situation is utterly ridiculous, abhorrent, and awful.
From a logistical perspective, I think that if my country accepted anyone from anywhere around the world, I think that the lovely little picket-fence green England I live in would turn into an absolute hellscape of poverty even faster than it already is.
I think most people probably hold those two views simultaneously and try to reconcile them.
Passport control is kind of just like a larger-scale way of keeping the supermarket checkout worker out of your Michelin-starred restaurant society Facebook group. They'd just fuck it up and make it awkward for everyone. Is it fair? No.
I think borders are stupid and should disappear. But I also know that there are too many reasons it's not that easy in the real world.
In a way, passport inequality is a result of economic inequality. Rich countries have no problem opening their borders to each other. And although I have no experience with it, it sounds like it's not that hard to cross borders between some poor countries either. Rich people are welcome everywhere. But allow poor people into rich countries, and everybody is upset.
Opening more borders would be easier if there weren't any refugees, economic or otherwise. If everybody was free to settle wherever they liked, I think most people would still prefer to stay near their place of birth if they could afford to. The problem is that extreme poverty in one place and extreme wealth in another, naturally draws people to the rich place. It's always been like that. In the middle ages, people moved from the countryside to the cities (and still do). Now people also want to move from poor countries to rich countries. It's natural, but the rich countries want to protect their rich-people ghettos. So we create ever stricter and stricter borders and visa requirements.
To create a more free world, we probably first need to create a more equal world. Freedom and equality need to go hand in hand. But too many established interests prefer the world the way it is.
It doesn't have to be extreme poverty to trigger economic migration. How many here relocated to a different country because they were paid a ridiculously high (compared to their home country standard) salary vs. a comfortable salary at home?
“Lovely little picket-fence green England”, assuming it’s even a thing, won’t be destroyed by foreigners, but it is destroying itself because it hasn’t been governed since the 2008 crisis. It’s probably the only place in Western Europe where salaries haven’t increased since 2008.
Should I expand on this? Do I really have to show that countries with a larger foreign born population (such as Sweden or Germany or Switzerland) are doing better than the UK?
You have made an exceptional claim, that is immigration will make England poorer. You should come up with some historical examples and maybe a description of how it would happen, because it would the first time it happened in the history of humanity.
You keep arguing against points the GP didn't make. There is a huge difference between "immigration will make England poorer," which is a strawman that nobody is suggesting, and "completely unrestricted immigration with zero checks and balances would be bad," which is about the closest thing to an empirical fact you can get to with regard to immigration. This is what the GP actually said, emphasis mine:
> > > I think that if my country accepted anyone from anywhere around the world, I think that...England...would turn into an absolute hellscape of poverty even faster than it already is.
Your point about 2008 is irrelevant, whether true or not. It's already taken into account. They're not saying anything about "foreigners" but about unrestricted, unregulated, open boarders style immigration.
I think in fairness probably the above poster saw my mentioning "lovely little picket-fence green England", took it to be some sort of nationalistic race-baity slogan, and didn't really read the rest of the post.
I'm generally pretty direct in my speech and I'm not really ashamed of it; I'm proud of my country for all of its' political faults and refuse to let a bunch of racist wankers ruin that.
The only straw argument here is that passport equality implies such a thing as:
> completely unrestricted immigration with zero checks and balance
EU citizens, whose passports are equal at least within the EU, can’t move to another EU country without the economic means to leave there. So one would expect this to be the most likely outcome of passport equality.
Said that, even if we assume that passport equality implies totally unrestricted immigration, the notion that it will result in foreigners migrating en mass to the English countryside to found horrid shantytowns and make everybody poorer is extremely bizarre, for such an event would be unique in the entire history of mankind.
I don't believe that immigration will make England poorer.
I think that immigration is generally a good thing.
I think that unrestricted immigration would make any country worse off in a number of ways, not only the economic axis but social cohesion, physical space, etc.
None of those countries have unrestricted immigration.
It seems like you view my opinion as being in opposition to yours, but it's not, we feel the same way, I think. :)
The point where we disagree is that I don't think passport equality implies unrestricted immigration.
Also it seems to me that your comment implies that unrestricted immigration will result in millions of “undesirables” moving to the West. I don’t agree with that.
From a logistical perspective, I think that if my country accepted anyone from anywhere around the world, I think that the lovely little picket-fence green England I live in would turn into an absolute hellscape of poverty even faster than it already is.
I think most people probably hold those two views simultaneously and try to reconcile them.
Passport control is kind of just like a larger-scale way of keeping the supermarket checkout worker out of your Michelin-starred restaurant society Facebook group. They'd just fuck it up and make it awkward for everyone. Is it fair? No.