A Case for Open Borders

[fluffybiscuits]

BTW Congrats to the twats who commented on my blog but didnt bother to give a full explanation on open borders...

[fluffybiscuits]

1. That controlled borders encourage responsible policies in relation to population and birth rates for countries by preventing high population and high birth rate countries from disgorging their people onto other low population and low birth rate countries. This is critical in an over populated world that is struggling to feed itself. Open borders essentially punishes those groups of people who are exercising birth/population control to reduce their impact on their local environment and potentially rewards high population growth by allowing people to move from over populated areas to less stressed areas where people may be protecting their environment by controlling their population.

The worlds resources are not there for any particular nation or statelet to hoard amongst themselves. This just points back to the flaws human beings have in terms of their materialistic attitude to life and lack of thought for others. Humanity are above the animalistic tendencies and being ascensioned beings should be clever enough to know pooling our resources together makes for an easier life. Many hands make light work if you will

2. That open borders can be a threat to security and public safety. Open borders assumes that people will have the best of intentions towards an areas existing people and will continue to have the best of intentions. The threats to security and public safety can sometimes manifest themselves many decades after the initial immigration.

People by their nature can be malevolent. Borders assume that everyone is a threat and out to “get them” thereby ensuring a chain reaction is happening. As is happening in Kenya at the moment near the Somali border, if you push people into an area with limited resources and they encroach on your territory you are boxing them in and forcing them to become a security threat.

3. That open borders encourage poor and unskilled immigration that is good in the short term for businesses as a source of cheap labor but bad in the medium & longer term for the taxpayer as these people require costly government services and require expensive infrastructure to be built to sustain them, neither of which the new immigrants can afford to pay for. If this infrastructure is not built, which is increasingly the case due to its expense, then it can result in the creation of slums and ghettos which consists of much of the illegal immigration and also people displaced from the society by the new immigrants.

Business is only concerned with one thing and that is business. As can be seen from the recent American pressure on the Haitian govt not to up the minimum wage as it would pass the cost on to American consumers and lower profits for corporate greed.

4. That controlled borders are likely to encourage good management of the environment and more sustainable use of resources. If a countries people are allowed to trash their own country by destroying their own environment, perhaps through over population, then are free to move unhindered onto another country to trash the new country, then this hardly encouraging good environmental management nor is it encouraging sustainable use of resources.

Look at Brazil, they have a border yet the rainforest is still being cut down at a rate of a football field an hour or a minute or something like that. Look at the BP Oil disaster, environmental factors transcend borders either way and are more down to human stupidity and mismanagement .

5. That conditionally open borders based on environmental conditions, i.e environmental refugee, will discourage a country from conservatively assessing environmental risks and will also discourage a country from taking the necessary steps to ensure that their population and resource usage are within the constraints of those environmental risks. An example of this is climate change, science is clearly showing what conditions have previously been present on different parts of the planet due to natural variations in climate and it is reasonable to expect governments to assess these past conditions for population carrying capacity and make changes to their population policies to ensure that they can manage these changes without creating a large number of environmental refugees for other countries to absorb. For example, Bangladesh has already requested that other countries be prepared to accept Bangladeshi environmental refugees, despite a rapidly growing population.

America is one of the highest polluters in the world and has one of the tightest immigration policies in the world. This is and can be linked to materialism and capitalistic systems in place.

http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/SeriesDe...srid=749&crid=

6. That conditionally open borders for people fleeing conflict, i.e asylum seekers, based on the rights afford by different UN conventions and international laws has created a route for people to flow from low income developing countries to higher income developed countries, bypassing the usual border controls. This has created many problems associated with people smuggling, such as debt bondage and many other forms of personnel abuse as people move across the globe to select countries which offer the greatest benefits. In fact people have often moved in such numbers to the developing world that structured assessment processes have broken down and that the conditionally open border that was intended has come to resemble more of an unconditional open border.

The reason people are smuggled is that they need documentation to cross borders from once place to another. The issue of people smuggling is itself a sympthom of the issue and not a cause. No paperwork required would mean we would see a vast distribution of people around the globe , people wouldnt need to pay others to smuggle them

7. That controlled borders can be used to protect the domestic culture(s) and encourage the integration of new people to the domestic culture. For example as a condition of crossing a border people may be required to learn to speak a new language, to learn new values, to learn new customs and to participate in the existing domestic cultures.

That is why I advocated a bilcultural model as can be seen from Singapore which I have posted on numerous times. They allow for education in English and the language of the childs parents and have also built mixed housing.

8. That controlled borders help to prevent criminals from smuggling drugs, guns and other illegal items in quantities across the border.

This is a whole different argument for the decriminalisation of drugs (certain ones) and prostitution. As for guns people will still deal in arms

9. That controlled borders make it more difficult to smuggle people across a country's border for the purpose of slavery, prostitution and similar criminal activities.

See above for people smuggling

[/quote]10. That controlled borders can be used to protect a country from problems outside its border and it can be used to limit the number of people who require government welfare, government services, government provided health care, government provided housing and/or charity that move across the border. In this way a government can limit the impact on its budgets of the cost of people moving across a border and it can also ensure that most government welfare and charity is directed towards a countries existing poor people. [/quote]

A world govt with local systems in place all paying the same welfare and the same wages will ensure similar prices around the world. There is going to have to be a transition period and no doubt some aggro of sorts but we would all be singing from the same hymn sheet.

11. That open borders are unnecessary in countries with legal avenues for immigration.

Capitalism,. Read above – its all about the $$$

12. That large scale migration across open borders can result in demographic changes that can result in demographic shifts that change a countries political power structures in favor of the new demographic and against the existing people of a region or country. It is common place for an ethnic and cultural group to lobby politically for further immigration from its particular ethnic and cultural group. Further it is well known that they are likely to assist any irregular migrants from their particular ethnic and cultural group to maintain themselves within the community and avoid detection from immigration officials. A bad start/experience to immigration for a particular ethnic and cultural group once established can be difficult to redeem. A key factor in the successful integration of a particular ethnic and cultural groups is careful selection of candidates for immigration and a numerically limit on numbers of immigrants both of which are facilitated by controlled border.

Humans by their very nature are worried about sharing culture with what they may seem as an alien culture. Look at Canada and its rich variety of culture and its very open immigration policy.We have open borders we don’t need immigration officials, we can leave people to become themselves and live their life without the worry of a knock on the door that is going to separate families. Why should we pick and choose who we live with? This creates a two tiered society.

13. That open borders can lead to infrastructure deficit in a country. This occurs when large scale migration occurs but the infrastructure to support that migration does not get built.

Open borders means we share the worlds resources,we can use that to build infrastructure/

14. That controlled borders can be used to ensure that new immigrants can afford suitable housing without disadvantaging the existing local population, that they can afford to significantly contribute to the additional infrastructure they will require and that they will be unlikely to become a burden on the taxpayer.

Again we have a lot of housing lying idle going to rack and ruin (albeit they are match boxes), why not give someone else a leg up in life ?

[fluffybiscuits]

http://www.indymedia.ie/article/100392

Does anyone know much about these lot? Just caught it on Indymedia..

[C. Flower]

I'm tempted to make a case that we should close the borders and not let anyone out.

[fluffybiscuits]

I'm tempted to make a case that we should close the borders and not let anyone out.

Please send Sean O Brian off the irish rugger team my way

[fluffybiscuits]

An open world would mean the debt of one country would become a debt of the world and we all share the burden equally.

[jmcc]

An open world would mean the debt of one country would become a debt of the world and we all share the burden equally.

It isn't their debt either.

It is the debt of a bunch of traitors and speculators - not that of the Irish people. Your solution would be hammering people who are barely existing on a few Euro a day with an unsustainable debt.

Regards...jmcc

[fluffybiscuits]

It isn't their debt either.

It is the debt of a bunch of traitors and speculators - not that of the Irish people. Your solution would be hammering people who are barely existing on a few Euro a day with an unsustainable debt.

Regards...jmcc

We raise the living standard and write off all the worlds dent then. Lets tear apart the borders and smash frontiers and create a united world....

[jmcc]

We raise the living standard and write off all the worlds dent then. Lets tear apart the borders and smash frontiers and create a united world....

Sounds a bit Communistic. I suppose it would be great if everyone was equal economically but there will still be people trying to acquire more. Then of course you have the educational and health issues. But the big problem with a one-world view is that humans are biologically encoded to form groups and territoriality is also deeply encoded.

Regards...jmcc

[fluffybiscuits]

Sounds a bit Communistic. I suppose it would be great if everyone was equal economically but there will still be people trying to acquire more. Then of course you have the educational and health issues. But the big problem with a one-world view is that humans are biologically encoded to form groups and territoriality is also deeply encoded.

Regards...jmcc

The acquisition of wealth will always be something that drives humans in their pursuit of building up a status so that they can show themselves to top dog. In the Robbers Cover experiment in the sixties it was shown that people who work together and shared the rewards of their work enjoyed better relations than those whose sole aim was to acquire the rewards for themselves. It was a psychological experiment in the sixties. Man should not be a slave to biological instinct, we are to a certain degree but we are ascencioned beings capable of thinking more outside the frame, the bigger picture than what our instincts tell us. Humans do form groups biologically but lets appeal to the instinct then to belong to one common group, humanity...

[fluffybiscuits]

http://www.redpepper.org.uk/essay-europes-hard-borders/

Borders destroy lives. Estimates are that there is 15000 victims of 'illegal immigrants' dying trying to cross into Europe.

[fluffybiscuits]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-dev...overshadow-aid

There is a case here for opening up our borders to migrants new research has shown. Remittances sent home are a lot more effective than the aid given to countries. If money used to give aid was used to create jobs to encourage people to move here it might just be a way of creating a more tolerant society.

[jmcc]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-dev...overshadow-aid

There is a case here for opening up our borders to migrants new research has shown. Remittances sent home are a lot more effective than the aid given to countries. If money used to give aid was used to create jobs to encourage people to move here it might just be a way of creating a more tolerant society.

Flawed logic because it effectively creates a brain drain effect on their migrants' source countries and it economically depletes the countries. Merely relocating migrants from one country to another really isn't good for either country. It drives down wages in the richer country and adds more professionals while at the same time destroying the societies and economies of the poorer countries by taking away the most entrepreneurial and most educated.

Regards...jmcc

[fluffybiscuits]

Flawed logic because it effectively creates a brain drain effect on their migrants' source countries and it economically depletes the countries. Merely relocating migrants from one country to another really isn't good for either country. It drives down wages in the richer country and adds more professionals while at the same time destroying the societies and economies of the poorer countries by taking away the most entrepreneurial and most educated.

Regards...jmcc

Not necessarily, migrants from one country could learn another language and be educated in the new country they are in thereby enabling them to have better jobs and send money back home which could in turn pay for the education of those in the countries they come from. It perpetuates a positive cycle enabling people to go back to education . Remember how much in remittances did the Irish diaspora send home from the US and the UK to pay for the education of the poor Irish in the sixties and seventies and before and after?

[jmcc]

Not necessarily, migrants from one country could learn another language and be educated in the new country they are in thereby enabling them to have better jobs and send money back home which could in turn pay for the education of those in the countries they come from.

Creating a production line for emigration.

It perpetuates a positive cycle enabling people to go back to education . Remember how much in remittances did the Irish diaspora send home from the US and the UK to pay for the education of the poor Irish in the sixties and seventies and before and after?

And in those decades, hundreds of thousands of Irish people emigrated because there was no work here in Ireland.

Regards...jmcc