arguments for open borders
There is a new web site, Open Borders, that collects arguments for the view that people should freely move across borders in most cases. It just got started, but it has both empirical and philosophical arguments, as well as arguments from different political perspectives. One stop shopping for people who want to hear, or disagree with, the argument that freedom of movement is a basic human right.
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orgtheory.net 
Reblogged this on Things I grab, motley collection .
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plerudulier
March 18, 2012 at 6:08 am
I love this one.
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josh
March 18, 2012 at 5:10 pm
The idea of controlled borders is relatively new, going back perhaps only to World War I. If you read about Shelly and Keats or Oscar Wilde or Mark Twain or even the Lost Generation of the 1920s, what is singularly lacking is any mention of getting passports. But by the 1920s, the situation was changing rapidly and exiting and entering was not so simple any longer.
Pictures of Earth from space do not show borders. Even rivers that form borders – the Rio Grande famously – can be hard to locate.
Every argument that comes from travel across nations applies to travel within them. In America we had great migrations to the northern cities from the south. Chicago blues was not invented by people whose grandparents rebuilt the town after Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow. Tap dance was created when the Irish hop was melded to the African brush at Five Points, perhaps the roughest neighborhood of its time. In high school German class we learned regional ribbings about Berliners and Bavarians. Then there came this: Mb>What is the difference between a Turk and an Ossie (East German)? The Turk speaks good German and has a job! We would have to reduce our nations to a few square miles to achieve conformity … and even then, in New York City, the nations would be block sized. “When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way…”
The other way to look at this is the cross-national continuance of ethnicity. Ex-patriot communities of all kinds maintain their cultural ties to the homeland and each other. How is that different from colonization?
When the English went to India, they did not absorb themselves into the native cultures, leaving the old country behind? So, why should the Pakistanis in London? It might seem odd. However, just consider that the Genizah Documents of Cairo show the Jewish community there settling its own disputes within its own laws. Again, if that seems odd, then why was the US soldier accused of killings in Afghanistan returned to the USA for trial, rather than being tried in a local court? Obviously, some borders are more porous than others, depending on who you are.
In order to sort out any “oughts” we must first parse the many complicated “ises.”
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Michael E. Marotta
March 19, 2012 at 4:13 am
[…] has graciously asked me to contribute to the Open Borders website. As an enthusiastic advocate of free immigration, I immediately agreed. There has been some discussion on this site about why open borders are […]
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» Open borders: what to do about it (part 1) Open Borders: The Case
November 4, 2012 at 4:27 am