Comment by Razengan
9 hours ago
Not just immigration, seems like travel in general is becoming difficult too.
It's a real shame that just when we have the tech and infrastructure to allow people to travel anywhere in the world within a day, for a single person to be able to explore the entirety of this awesome planet for the first time in human history,
that the worst among us have to enforce artificial borders and deny everyone this basic freedom.
Travel should be codified as a human right.
If someone can support themselves and doesn't harm anybody, what ethical justification does anybody have for denying a person from living where they want?
People aren't simply interchangeable units of economic output, and when they live together for long periods of time they develop unique and distinct cultures that are dear to them. Letting the entirety of the world into your country without stops is cultural suicide. If you put any a value in preserving culture you will find it ethical to put some limit on immigration. Assimilation is possible but there is a limit to the rate and amount of foreigners a place can absorb before changing significantly.
There's no real Us culture to preserve.
>There's no real Us culture to preserve.
Fish Fails to Detect Water
The easiest way to see it is look at Japanese portrayals (outsider perspective). Cowboys, horses, guns, pride in our military and our free speech, fireworks and BBQs.
Just because you look down on the culture doesn't mean there isn't one.
The US is too large to have one monolithic culture but it certainly contains many subcultures on the regional level. I won't dispute they're on the decline though.
> Letting the entirety of the world into your country without stops is cultural suicide.
The natives of the Americas, Australia, and the many nations previously colonized by European countries, know that better than any descendants of the colonizers.
Did they get to have any say?
Yes that is a great example. You certainly don't want what happened to them happening to you.
3 replies →
> to enforce artificial borders and deny everyone this basic freedom.
a very postnational view, humanist in a way, lipsius or erasmus would recognize it.
that sort of individuated cosmopolitanism only works for educated men and women with means, who have or have the capacity to self-actualize.
not for the masses. the nation is still a cradle to protect and nurture the commonwealth, and given that they took hundreds to sometimes thousands of years to form, i don't think borders are artificial in the least.
> that sort of individuated cosmopolitanism only works for educated men and women with means, who have or have the capacity to self-actualize.
So because not everyone can afford to travel freely we shouldn't let anyone do that?
There's no reason why we should worship borders, or the state.
> and given that they took hundreds to sometimes thousands of years to form, i don't think borders are artificial in the least.
"Borders" as they are treated today began barely 200 years ago, and only started being enforced so strictly since WW1 and then even worse after WW2.
For the vast >95% of human history, if you could walk to somewhere and survive there, you could live there.
The real ironic shit is that most of the travel and immigration restrictions of today are instituted by the descendants of people that invaded and occupied the lands of other people :')
> For the vast >95% of human history, if you could walk to somewhere and survive there, you could live there
For 95% of human history we were hunter gatherers living in extremely sparsely populated areas.