As a Libertarian/Humanitarian who believes in open borders, I fundamentally disagree. The 'brain drain' argument ignores how skilled migrants create international networks that benefit their home countries through investment, knowledge transfer, and trade links. The data is clear: immigration increases innovation and economic growth in both origin and destination countries.

The real issue isn't immigration vs. domestic welfare - it's ensuring fair policy for everyone. Free movement of people, like free trade, creates more opportunities than it removes. Restricting human mobility causes measurable economic damage through reduced innovation and productivity, while harming international cooperation and solving none of the problems it claims to address.

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Free trade and immigration restriction are perfectly compatible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GT1YDMTgHMQ

Migration is vital to prosperous economies, however open borders is insane. The lunatic left in America have created a complete mess that is going to cause so many problems now for legal / illegal status. Same in Europe. The Globalist agenda is one of controlled destruction for more ultimate control. It will push localisation which will be good though.

Open borders is natural - no human controls the earth. The chaos we see isn't from migration itself, but from artificial barriers trying to control what's fundamentally a human right: movement. No one was divinely ordained to decide where others can live or seek opportunity. The current 'immigration crisis' is actually a policy crisis - created by trying to restrict what should be managed, not prevented.

I get your point but it’s being used against us by a Globalist agenda to push for more control not less. The Left open borders is a mess deliberately to push for more overarching centralisation of power.

Yes its definitely being exploited.

But also, I feel like saying "no borders, total freedom of movement" is basically the same as saying "no private property". Should everyone be free to walk into your garden or bedroom?

No borders always comes down to whether you can have a fence around your property. The people pushing for open borders typically have no property. But the threat of theft is always real because we are dealing with human beings.

#Bitcoin fixes this ..

the whole point is not to STOP people from immigrating .. it is to enable them stay wherever they are !

No one wants to live away from their motherland unless it is not for the economic incentives ..

The Sanskrit saying is

जननी जन्म भूमिश्च , स्वर्गात अपी गरीयसी।।

Mother and mother land is better than heaven !

Very good point 🤙

Yes, and not PREVENT people if they choose to migrate.

वसुधैव कुटुम्बकम्

Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam: “The earth is indeed a family” or “The world is indeed a single household."

Once we remove financial incentive of migration, the only reason of travel becomes tourism .. always welcome just like migratory birds are always welcome ..

That makes Vasudha a Kutumb :-) ..

#Krishna fixed this five thousand years back with #Gold .. #Satoshi is doing right now :-)

💯

I left the US where I was born years ago and it had nothing to do with economic reasons. For me it's all about culture. The way the people act and treat each other is what's most important to me.

You could not pay me enough to live in the west again.

So you're wrong if you think people only move because of economics. This may be true of people in a shithole like India where there is feces in the streets, but San Francisco is the same thing, a shit filled hell hole.

There are better places in the world and it has nothing to do with economics.

Awesome - really respect your point of view .. but most people are not like you. ..

Did you give up your US citizenship ? I think it costs a lot to actually quit :-)

No I did not renounce my US citizenship. You are required to pay all unrealized capital gains taxes to do that.

Oh. ... so you are a legal alien somewhere :-) ..

btw ..that also means you have not immigrated in true sense. .. may be a long term - stay in tourist !

.. and that explains why there is no economic motive in your case. ..

What makes you think I do not have dual citizenship? You make a lot of assumptions.

If one of my ancestors arrived where I live right now 300 years ago, without invitation, he would probably have gotten speared.

And my indigenous ancestors lived only 100km away, and spoke a related language.

Lol OK, go into another wolf's territory and tell me open borders are "natural"

Migrating is natural, but so is tribalism. A group's ability to signal that these resources are already spoken for is why force exists. Bring a stronger force or move on.

You say you're a libertarian, which implies you u derstand economics, which is the study of allocating scarce resources where they are demanded most. But you can't have an efficient system of resource allocation, if you can't reliably predict and manage who you let into the economy.

Or maybe you just meant anarchist.

Oi! :D I'm an Anarchist, but that doesn't mean I choose to ignore obvious lessons from every long-lived human society ever...

Migration is NOT natural .. if it was , western world would want to migrate to east in equal numbers .. in fact more becaus East has much better weather .. no one would ever want to go to Canada :-)

It is primarily because the dollar and euro fetches lot more than rest of the places .. #bitcoin fixes it

Migration is natural, and so is our desire to protect what is ours. In this planet we have long lived under the maxim of conquer or be conquered.

The ones denying the existence of this rule of life are quite often the conquered ones.

Moving to another country and settling on an available plot of land is not the same as invading someone else's home.

People naturally migrating is not what is happening, it is a purposeful flooding to break down an existing system to bring in a new world order system of one rule for a globalist agenda with a greater subservient underclass. The greatest transfer of wealth and control in history. There is a diminishing window to stop this

I wouldn't go so far as it is some sort of a planned invasion ..but I think the reason for modern migration is people moving for better life to the west .. which they have the right to do because borders are unnatural imposition ..

The proof is in data .. how many people say for example moving to US v/s moving away from US to other places ..

Which means if most of the people aren't pushed to leave their homes just to make survival money , they would choose to stay in their homeland with friends and family and the weather they are used to ..

There will still be explorers and tourists .. and they are always welcome everywhere ..

Bitcoin fixes this , because with hard money in their stash , everyone has a fighting chance where ever they live.

Mass migration has always been due to some catastrophic event .. in our case it is economic disparity. Thus our current migration pattern is unnatural!

That plot of land is the property of the local population that fought to have its ownership.

It is those exact borders that enable your luxurious lifestyle today. They separate your civilization and resources from others, so you and your children can enjoy them.

You might disagree and prefer to enable the flooding of your nation because you are kind hearted and see future optimistically. You will still live comfortably even as streets are on fire, your next generation will be the one to suffer and then be forced to leave. They will conquer some other place with a naive or weak native population and so the same cycle repeats itself.

This happened to my family on the previous generation. My mother was in favor of open borders and freedom. They got kicked out by the next outsider group who later took over their land by force. Even though she lost everything, even as an old lady she still doesn't understand why they were so violent even as she stretched out her hand to help. Reality is a bitch.

humans do control the Earth. If me and my tribe have a good thing going and you want in, if you and your culture are shit then you can go fuck yourself. Come here and we'll simply kill you. This is the way life works.

Why jump to Earth levels of abstractions when we cannot even integrate with our own neighbors –who are of the same culture.

You all in this thread, invite your neighbors to a barbecue, now!

Yes

I share walls with my neighbors and I don't even know these people 🫣

And I'll pass the barbeque. Thanks

*barbeque 😁

Do you think you’re missing on something?

A girlfriend maybe 🤔

It’s a little early, not to mention quite cold but I’ll give them a knock…

For mulled wine instead?

I grew up that way.

My father barbequed in a parking lot in front of our garage at least once a week for years. The garage was in front of a 4 storey building with 30+ apartments in it. When a neighbor passed he greeted them had a chat and invited them to join frequently if not all the time. 80% of them never joined, 10% very rarely and just 10% regularly.

We also had people eating with us this way who just had garage in the same line or ran local shops and such. He really tried his best to be part of the community but not many people wanted to join. Most people we had were working class, some intellectuals but all around the same economic background.

It was great to grow up that way! It is interesting to reflect on it, how it was in Eastern Europe in the 90s.

What do you think were the reasons for the 80% to not join?

I had the same experience when living in a tenement house. Since I have my own property, people show up, but only the ones owning property themselves. The tenants still show up rarely.

Open borders is completely unnatural. Humans have always defended tribal property and most wars have been fought over territory.

Borders cannot disappear, you can only collapse the territory down to individual towns or houses, so that people have to shoot people at the gate. We don't have to do that, anymore, because we can assume that they were vetted at the border.

What the border gave us was a larger territory to transverse without having to stop and pay horrendous tolls or be frisked and questioned at every step. Medieval movement was painfully slow and expensive, for citizens. Even just traveling the Rhein, you got stopped and shaken down at every one of the picturesque castles.

We have so much freedom of movement within our borders because we pushed the borders further and further out, like with Schengen.

Who amongst the legends of the past had passports? None. You have missed the point.

Passports standardized travel papers. They didn't invent them.

You used to have letters with a seal, from a local authority, granting or requesting safe passage. Most people never needed one because most people never traveled. People who wandered about, regularly, had special uniforms to clarify their status. A lot was done with clothing, as it was prohibitively expensive, so it wasn't prone to imitation.

If you traveled without papers, you would have to avoid gated towns, as they would question you at the gate and sometimes incarcerate you. This was very lucrative because you could be ransomed, such as happened to the Lionheart. Without a valid passport (or visa), you have no legal right to entry and could be detained and sent home, such as at Ellis Island.

Passport, the word, originally referred to landing papers at harbors, that allowed you to dock, trade, or even to travel freely inland after disembarking. You were, in other words, allowed to "pass the port".

What an EU passport does is allow you to travel across almost all countries on the planet, without having to ask at each one for safe passage, as the negotiation was done at state level.

Another thing you are missing, is that there were "traveling corridors", like the old Roman roads, that anyone could simply walk upon. Such as traders or when on a pilgrimage. These were dotted with inns and monestaries.

You had no legal right to leave the corridor. And you definitely couldn't just walk around wherever, like a local. And it was immediately obvious who the locals were, due to clothing, physiognomy, and speech. And that fact that everyone knew everyone around them.

You're defending a system that's barely a century old. The universal passport system was created in 1920 after WWI. Before that, movement was far more fluid - even the United States didn't require passports for international travel until 1941, except briefly during the Civil War and WWI. The U.S. Border Patrol wasn't even established until 1924.

The current system of border controls was introduced during WWI by European governments to control 'subversives' and prevent people with useful skills from leaving. When peace came, governments simply kept these wartime restrictions.

Your medieval examples actually prove my point - they were just letters of safe passage or tax receipts, not universal requirements for movement. The standardized global passport system is barely a hundred years old, yet you're treating it like ancient wisdom.

Respectfully, what you're calling 'natural' is actually just modern state control that would have been alien to most of human history. You're mistaking a century-old wartime innovation for timeless human behavior.

Movement was _not_ more fluid. Most people never left their region and borders weren't heavily policed in peacetime because there was mostly movement from one side to the other.

You didn't have Chinese and Syrian people entering over Mexico.

Standardized traveling papers are an innovation that allow us to travel globally, knowing that we will be accepted on the other end.

"Passports" were issued at war times so you could visit your family members across battle front. There was no such thing as a permit to enter a territory. There were only permits to leave (because you were a proprty).

No one is concerned about movement, this isn’t movement going on. It’s deliberate flooding to collapse America and Europe to a Globalist agenda of total control through the breakdown of identity.

It's hard for people to imagine there are agendas and people with the resources to carry them out.

Is it though? Think about it.

Sure it is. Most people don't want to believe that there is an elite power structure trying to push society in a particular direction for its own gain. The question of cross-border movement is a good example.

If a cabal wanted to collapse a country, creating a scenario where millions of people are actively encouraged to cross a border must be considered. Then you have to get beyond the local reasons for migration and ask what interest the cabal has in the movement.

Few among the masses want to acknowledge that the cabal exists, but those who do are not racist because they see it.

It's a time honored method for destabilizing a country, flood it with incompatible foreigners

One has to protect the society one likes, from those that prefer something different.

Sounds like right-wing X.com talk to me.

It's globalist importing economic units in a last ditch effort to save their Ponzi fiat debt based banking system. There are channels and processes in place for those seeking a better life. Also, if the globalist really wanted to, they could divert money and effort into countries that are void of opportunities. But that would risk their control of power down the road.

When we discover viable time travel we'll be in touch, you can go test the theory.

It should be amusing.

Or you can skip the wait & go to North Sentinel Island instead...

I wouldn't recommend it.

Because as it turns out, Apex Pack Predators are in fact territorial.

Well why don’t you just test your open borders narrative and remove your main entry door to your crib for a year. If you’re still alive to talk about it we can have an honest conversation about the complexities the fundamental rights of human movement.

Since the advent of agriculture there is the need to secure land, property, having some kind of border which means security of property. With that we had feudal lords, kings, the state etc leading us to what we have now toda, a complex and predatory state structure. Just advocating for open borders does not seem a solution without fixing the problem of property and security and the predator state. Living in a #Bitcoin standard world might lead us to true freedom including freedom of movement but right now open borders only means unleashing chaos…

It's perfectly natural for people to wander on and off your property at will in that case.

Honestly, the open border thing is why I can't bring myself to fully call myself libertarian. It's genuinely common sense that you don't let people freely enter other countries without very stringent immigration processes, especially in this day and age.

This. I'd go further and have transferable residency permits for states, and then again for counties / municipalities.

Most libertarians don't believe in open borders.

Because it denies property rights.

I agree with open borders, however, the caveat is there can't be a welfare state. Because I agree with your assessment of the brain drain argument... But with giving welfare to immigrants, ie California, you incentivize the worst to come, not the best. Because if you give free money to all immigrants you get the lowest common denominator.

Economists tend to discount anything interpersonal, when doing their calculations, and they are fond of seeing equivalency, where there is none.

If mass-immigration causes the local population and culture to be replaced, they say this is neutral because humans are fungible. The people being replaced might see this differently.

The math is done exclusively with quantities, not qualities.

As an anarchist I would argue that getting rid of borders isn't the problem, what incentivizes migration is: False humanitarianism driven by the government mafia. It is as unnatural as state mafia borders, creates a bad migration incentive and results in a negative feedback loop. True humanitarianism comes directly out of the heart of humans, to help other humans in need, creating a positive feedback loop.