And there you have it. "Some people are just better than others" used to be a polite fiction maintained outside of the public eye; acknowledged but not overtly flaunted. Now it's the latest in how societies are restructured and a somewhat-expected consequence of what happens when information and money can be freely moved but people cannot.

Or maybe I missed your point?

I didn’t say boundaries should be completely non-porous (as your comment implies), but rather that we don’t want to eliminate human ethnic/cultural diversity and that requires boundaries which enforce rate limited exchange. To borrow an analogy, there’s a reason cells have membranes.

Intermingling at a rate which allows each tribe to maintain its integrity is natural, and has evidence going back longer than writing. As does outbreaks of violence at exceeding that rate.

For example, Brexit was an act of political violence because the UK immigration exceeded the rate at which the society could naturalize immigrants leading to horrific events like “grooming gangs” of immigrants raping native children. Typically at the point gangs of migrants are raping natives, we drop the word “immigration” and talk about “invasion” or “colonization”.

Similarly, other lurches towards nationalism in Europe and the US.

Homogenizing everyone into a single global culture, which would be required to have a single government without boundaries that rate limit migration, would be verging on genocide.

Your comment assumes a very negative interpretation of what I said.

Perhaps we'll eventually be in a future where surplus and government and security improvements makes this much easier to manage, and then maybe more countries will start moving to a more open-borders / global union model, but that future is probably at least a century away (probably several centuries). I think we should strive for that future, but that we should also accept pragmatic reality until it happens.

And I do think we should probably increase the amount of families we currently accept every year. Especially war refugees. Totally eliminating national boundaries is very different from that, though.

The drugs trade is the flow of narcotics from source to sink. Stopping them at a national border is one approach; stopping them elsewhere in transit (as it leaves the source, on the open sea, at the destination by local police, etc) is another. And then you have one more: tackling the existence of a source and a sink. In other words, you look at supply (i.e. creation/generation of stock) and demand. I believe that this is perhaps the best approach, and it is definitely one to which borders are irrelevant. So I don't really accept that as a counterpoint to what I was saying. In some ways, the fact you thought it was illustrates my point: our focus on borders is simplistic and maybe distracting us from finding more effective approaches that might be inspired by a thorough analysis of the system dynamics.

People trafficking is to some extent the same thing: source, sink, and a flow over many miles from one to the other (maybe across a border, maybe not).

As for illegal immigration, you have a flow that exists because of inequality (i.e. it's a flow down a gradient) - a difference in living standards, job opportunities, safety, etc. This inequality makes the recipient country a sink and the donor country a source. But of course, once again we shouldn't be talking about countries. Some regions are more attractive than others, and people have always moved between them, generally to the gain of one region and the detriment of another. Population flows can be cross-border, or not, despite the similarity in causes. Once again; should borders really be the focal point at which destabilising migrations are addressed by modern, globalised societies?

You realize that's the result of controlled migration, not uncontrolled migration.

But your proposal sounds like a paradox. On the one hand you have no borders but on the other hand someone is enforcing "state actor" laws. Without borders corporations become the de facto government.

Why pay Japanese auto workers 1800 yen an hour when I can just put a factory in the middle of the Indian countryside and pay 120 rupees? But instead of just autos, do that for everything!

A great many political theses are advanced from all over the political spectrum in the format of 'You wouldn't tolerate X - so why does the government? We the people demand an end to X!' However, 'we the people', when taken as a whole, have a demonstrable tendency to disagree amongst ourselves, and almost never act in concert. There are all sorts of thing which we should find surprising or unacceptable within our own homes but whose existence we accept or at least tolerate within our county, state, or country because either a majority of our neighbors hold views which differ from ours or because constitutional or legislative power takes precedence over our own preferences.

A better analogy might be to consider the country as something similar to an apartment building or even a small town.You can exert a degree of security insofar as it serves the common good, but an absolutist approach of the kind you describe rapidly becomes self-defeating and unsustainable over the longer term. I might add that absolutism in this context refers to the idea of abolishing borders as much as to the idea of sealing them. After all, we have controls in between the borders of US states with limited powers to enforce prohibitions or requirements unique to that state, from carrying certain produce to wearing a motorcycle helmet, and these are not considered especially onerous.

Rather than abolition of borders, I see a trend away from a presumption of exclusion as the default and towards a policy of neutral vigilance - in other words, personal migration will come to be seen in the same light as other trade flows, subject to inspection and monitoring but requiring specific grounds for interference.

So, suppose you have a business importing silk from China, and the hacky part is that it's woven in conformity with 6502 assembler code or something. It comes into the US in a cargo container, and we all accept that DHS/CBP want to assure themselves that it doesn't include radioactive materials, smallpox, or marauding silkworm colonies. That done, we expect them to be indifferent to the question of whether 8-bit silken handkerchief designs will affect the US economy in positive or negative fashion - that's for the market to discover, not the customs inspectors, as long as there's no ongoing trade dispute between China and the US justifying their exclusion in accordance with treaty.

We already have such a policy in place for visiting tourists and businesspersons from other developed countries, and which is mostly reciprocal - you can grab your passport and fly to Japan on a whim for up to 90 days, and vice versa. Within both the US and the EU, the benefits of allowing migration between the individual member states seems to considerably outweigh the various costs; economics suggests that rational policymaking on international migration will go the same way sooner or later.

Of course, this isn't foolproof and the downside of such a policy is that criminals can exploit such openness to further their wicked ends. But insofar the number of such people/incidents is low - not least because more people appreciate the freedoms of the open model, and have a stake in its preservation - that risk is tolerable.

At the same time, I'm not sure that truly unfettered freedom of movement would create a world which we actually want. For instance, if all border enforcement disappeared tomorrow, I don't see how there wouldn't be a mass immigration from regions at the bottom of the development index toward those at the top. And I would imagine the result of that would be to torpedo the cost of labour, and put stress on the social systems in those developed countries. I would imagine the wealthy would be just fine, but the middle class would be all but erased globally. So while I don't necessarily like the idea of boarders and exclusion, at some level I don't see how healthy and prosperous communities/cultures/societies can preserve their health and prosperity without having some filtering mechanism.

And as far as the options you give, I would agree with you in broad terms that we should strive to allow people to preserve what's unique and interesting about their cultures when they move into our communities (option 4), but the truth is there are a lot of gray areas and there will probably always have to be some of #1 as well.

For example, lets say that there is a population which moves into your neighborhood in Seattle which doesn't believe in vaccinating their kids, and now your kids who go to the same school are at risk of getting the measles. Is that enforcing your cultural superiority to insist that they get vaccinations against their belief system?

Or say there are people moving into your neighborhood who strongly reject homosexuality in their culture, and now your gay friends have to deal with dirty looks when they walk down the street holding hands in their own neighborhood. Should you just accept this as a form of cultural diversity?

So I think what I'm trying to say is that it's a nice idea to say we should open the borders and live and let live, but it's not as simple as that. A lot of us would probably agree that we're happy if people who share mostly the same values as us, and are of a similar socioeconomic strata come and bring their food, music, maybe even their language. But when it comes to real-world migrations I think there are a lot of grey areas, and we all have to draw the line somewhere as far as what should be accept as far as changes in our communities, but there's a lot of disagreement and negotiation involved in exactly where that line should be.

Anyway, like I say I don't know the answers, and it's a topic I struggle with philosophically.

Borders are either to stop people from leaving or to stop people from arriving. In the first case it is dictators creating a captive audience they can fleece and manipulate. In the second it's the haves that desperately want to avoid being confronted with haves-not.

Take away the borders and you'll reach a natural state of equilibrium in a very short time. A lot of holy apple-carts will be upset by such a move.

I know there are practical issues in the way that prevent abolishing borders. I know this won’t happen quickly, probably not during my lifetime, probably not in a couple centuries, but working towards a world where this is possible seems like a worthwhile goal to me. Why should people be arbitrarily bound to the place they were born? It’s insanity and highly unethical.

So the way I see it is that you can hardly close your borders, it's a myth. Countries are gigantic, if you want to migrate bad enough, you migrate. Building giant walls isn't effective or even realistic. You can make it harder and reduce the flow, but people will come. And if you close borders, that means you need to act accordingly. i.e., if someone does get through, you can't accommodate him, after all that would imply the rules are only valid for those who don't break them, but once you do break the rules and get in illegally, you can stay. That makes no sense, so now you've got closed borders, people still get in, but they can't start a life. Can't get a home, a job, can't become self-sufficient. Now you've got a problem of a large group of dependents, who face homelessness and desperation which leads to other issues, too (e.g. crime). And because they have an ethnic profile, that'll lead to a backlash of racism. Migration studies have shown time and time again, those whose place in society is facilitated tend to do well and become a part of society relatively quickly and become 'decent tax paying folk' with positive socioeconomic mobility outlooks, whereas making normal life difficult left and right for new migrants leads to the opposite, a new group of dependents that everyone hates on.

So closing the borders makes little sense. Further, tons of countries, particularly a number of Western European ones, are bound by various treaties and laws they entered in to themselves. Take WW1, more than 1 million Belgian refugees fled north to the Netherlands which was unaffected at the time, a country of just 6 million people back then. Can you imagine one in 7 in your country is a recent refugee from just one particular country? Not just that, but most of them came to the south. There were villages of just 15 thousand people which saw 100 thousand Belgians arrive, completely changing into essentially Belgian cities. Experiences like that and many other with refugees, shaped all kinds of laws, policies and treaties, which can't just simply be broken. So you need an alternative.

But then open borders is tricky, too. For one because there need to be two things. 1) some form of a check on whether the person is a refugee or not, and 2) some, quite small, level of friction, so as to discourage new migrants from coming unless it's absolutely necessary, and 3) some level of friction to slow down the influx and spread it out over a longer time period, so as to be able to properly accommodate everyone. That means decent housing, social programmes, employment or at least a level of occupation (whether it's voluntary work or education) to keep people busy, etc. Complete open borders means you'll get a bunch of non-refugee migrants coming along, and a large influx into a small number of popular cities that aren't adequately prepared.

So I understand the schizophrenic dance in between, with sorta-open borders. What I don't get is that the overal policy just feels hugely ineffective, that everything is moving much slower than need be, and that alarm bells are going off left and right with a society that's going crazy over a problem that's relatively minute in the history of European crises. Europe has the resources to handle this, but somehow it's failing.