Ask HN: Does the world need a “passport equality” movement?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30243302

by acadapter • 4 years ago

46 87 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Having a citizenship with low status is a significant loss of opportunity in life for the affected individuals. Since Hacker News is a relatively international crowd, I'm sure that many of you can relate to this in one way or another.

Should the UN try to create a political taboo (and in the long term, a ban) against sanctions towards general population when countries clash in diplomatic issues?

soueuls5• 4 years ago

I think the UN is already doing way too much. I don't want to live in a world where the concept of trust is nullified in the name of equality.

I decide who I want to welcome in my home. I believe Thailand, Russia, Brazil, Germany are completely free to do the same and fix their own rules.

Broken_Hippo7• 4 years ago

I decide who I want to welcome in my home. I believe Thailand, Russia, Brazil, Germany are completely free to do the same and fix their own rules.

But you don't. Take the US, for example. Everyone born there is a citizen. Everyone born to an American parent is a citizen (or can be). None of the folks get a choice in where they were born, or what nationality they get. And you have all sorts of folks - people that will rape you and your family, and others that will give you food without going through a means check. You don't get to choose what the child next door will become any more than you chose your next-door neighbors.

Yet somehow, keeping out "the others" is giving you a choice? You don't even get real say who they keep out and who they let in. It isn't choice at all, I think.

soueuls5• 4 years ago

But you are surrounded by people whose parents contributed to your economy, who were more or less raised with at least a decent amount of shared values.

People don't just come to a new country and just abandon their past. They bring their values, ideals, beliefs, problems and solutions. As the number of foreign people coming, cosmopolitanism increase.

Then you quickly reach a point where you can eat a raclette anywhere, soccer is the most famous sports, Hollywood is the main entity broadcasting entertainment. There is no point in traveling, because every place more or less lost their spirit.

And I am not talking about the fact that, if countries completely drop their requirements based on nationality, they will keep their "usefulness" requirements (who is able to take a job we are looking for)

What's going to happen? Well educated people are going to move easily. Further depriving countries of the very ones they need to develop their countries.

It will be a one way street. I don't imagine hundreds of thousands of Americans moving to eastern Africa anytime soon.

raxxorrax• 4 years ago

I think this is awesome but I also believe the US pays a price for that. Few systems based on solidarity, a weak federal state and the culture promotes people being responsible for themselves instead of relying on public infrastructure or authority.

It doesn't have to be this way if trust between groups improves such systems could appear. Ironically the ambitions to solve racism did create even more distrust as it seems, but the setback is hopefully temporary.

I don't think a country with strong social security could ever survive open immigration for too long. It would have to adapt and restrict social security because the societal consent has to be reestablished.

I am not from the US.

giantg22• 4 years ago

To be honest, I think it would be a good idea to have people teach/test the citizenship test in high school. The content should mostly be covered under civics classes anyways. It always amazing to me just how many people are completely clueless on government structure, mechanics, rule of law, etc.

neximo642• 4 years ago

If the movement of people was equally balanced and not one way between countries I don't see how that would be a big deal.

It is easy to say it ought to be equal but then the resulting flows need to be equal too.

Likewise it does seem like maybe the country with the worse off passport etc maybe be worse off but its likely there are rules preventing open and complete investment in, e.g owning land without 99 year leases, 51% ownership rules, outright restrictions on foreigners etc to match more open countries too (typically the ones with stronger passports).

throwawaynay• 4 years ago

Idealistically yes. But you should focus on financial inequality first(for example with global remote work accepted as the norm). If all of a poor third world country move to a first world country overnight this is just the same poor country on another continent.

I'm 100% for immigration, but realistically if you just allow everyone to move overnight, it's just going to make a big mess unless we first focus on financial inequality.

maxerickson• 4 years ago

People mostly don't have the resources to even get to another country. A country where most of their established social network won't be able to help them.

And for example, in the US, if you don't speak English or Spanish it is going to be difficult to get unskilled work (understood that there are some places where other languages would work, I'm characterizing the overall situation).

bouncing• 4 years ago

The reason there are different passport restrictions, mostly, is wealth/income inequality. As countries become richer, their passports typically become stronger. The solution is to attack the root cause of the issue, which is that so much of the world is still so poor.

mam4• 4 years ago

And also corruption / crime that are a corollary of poverty

yosito2• 4 years ago

As a nomad, and someone who's traveled to 40 countries and speaks 3 languages, I'd personally love to live in a world where passports don't exist and people are free to travel to any country they want to. I think trying to make all passports equal is the wrong solution. Passports are issued by the authority of a country, and not all countries have equal authority on the world stage. UN issued passports might be a possible solution, but I can't envision global trust in the UN's authority. If the UN started issuing passports for stateless people, I can imagine the passport would immediately be treated as a low-status passport by countries, if they even accepted it at all. I think a better solution is to abolish passports altogether, but I can't envision that either.

The truth is, the world is not an equal place. Never has been, and never will be. In terms of justice, the best we can do is to make sure that those at the bottom have all of their basic needs met, access to opportunities to increase their status, and a continually rising standard of living for everyone via innovation and sustainable development.

As an individual, the best one can do is to work hard to obtain a better passport. That's what I've done, and there are many opportunities to do so.

hypertele-Xii2• 4 years ago

I'd personally love to live in a world where passports don't exist and people are free to travel to any country they want to.

The European Union exists. It's pretty cool. Go anywhere, no password required.

mcv7• 4 years ago

I think you still need to have a passport, it just won't be checked by anyone. Unless you get arrested, probably.

nikanj• 4 years ago

For some low values of anywhere, anyway. Being able to travel between the member states of the union is nice, but not very different from what USA citizens enjoy w.r.t free travel between states.

zeckalpha• 4 years ago

Not completely true. You are thinking of the Schengen Area. Ireland for example requires a passport when arriving from elsewhere in the EU, but is part of the EU.

loudmax• 4 years ago

The truth is, the world is not an equal place. Never has been, and never will be.

I agree with just about everything you said, and the world will probably never be an "equal" place, whatever that means. But I don't want to concede that the world will never be a fair place. Anyone should be able to travel the planet, regardless of the circumstances of their birth. Obviously this isn't possible today due to existing political infrastructure, but it's something we should strive for. We shouldn't give up on ideals of justice just because they're hard to reach.

VictorPath• 4 years ago

The truth is, the world is not an equal place. Never has been, and never will be.

From the time of the cave paintings and Venus figurines 50,000 years ago (and before that) until 10,000 years ago, there is no evidence of inequality, class society or surplus production anywhere. Nor today in the few remaining hunter gatherer bands in the world today.

2000 years ago travel 100km north of modern Stockholm and you found a completely egalitarian society.

Your history is wrong which does not say much for your prediction.

yosito2• 4 years ago

Would love to see some evidence of your claims.

FpUser2• 4 years ago

"That's what I've done, and there are many opportunities to do so"

Kudos to you and I did the same in the 90s. But for some countries those "opportunities" do not exist in any practical way today. It is a sad world for many. When I think about it I get depressed.

neximo642• 4 years ago

There exists a UN issued passport, the Laissez passer, but its not used for the purpose of leisure.

throwaway220325• 4 years ago

From an ethical / fairness perspective, I think that the idea that someone should be prevented from visiting or settling in my country by virtue of their birth situation is utterly ridiculous, abhorrent, and awful.

From a logistical perspective, I think that if my country accepted anyone from anywhere around the world, I think that the lovely little picket-fence green England I live in would turn into an absolute hellscape of poverty even faster than it already is.

I think most people probably hold those two views simultaneously and try to reconcile them.

Passport control is kind of just like a larger-scale way of keeping the supermarket checkout worker out of your Michelin-starred restaurant society Facebook group. They'd just fuck it up and make it awkward for everyone. Is it fair? No.

mcv7• 4 years ago

I think borders are stupid and should disappear. But I also know that there are too many reasons it's not that easy in the real world.

In a way, passport inequality is a result of economic inequality. Rich countries have no problem opening their borders to each other. And although I have no experience with it, it sounds like it's not that hard to cross borders between some poor countries either. Rich people are welcome everywhere. But allow poor people into rich countries, and everybody is upset.

Opening more borders would be easier if there weren't any refugees, economic or otherwise. If everybody was free to settle wherever they liked, I think most people would still prefer to stay near their place of birth if they could afford to. The problem is that extreme poverty in one place and extreme wealth in another, naturally draws people to the rich place. It's always been like that. In the middle ages, people moved from the countryside to the cities (and still do). Now people also want to move from poor countries to rich countries. It's natural, but the rich countries want to protect their rich-people ghettos. So we create ever stricter and stricter borders and visa requirements.

To create a more free world, we probably first need to create a more equal world. Freedom and equality need to go hand in hand. But too many established interests prefer the world the way it is.

tgsovlerkhgsel• 4 years ago

It doesn't have to be extreme poverty to trigger economic migration. How many here relocated to a different country because they were paid a ridiculously high (compared to their home country standard) salary vs. a comfortable salary at home?

mmarq5• 4 years ago

“Lovely little picket-fence green England”, assuming it’s even a thing, won’t be destroyed by foreigners, but it is destroying itself because it hasn’t been governed since the 2008 crisis. It’s probably the only place in Western Europe where salaries haven’t increased since 2008.

throwaway220325• 4 years ago

even faster than it already is.

No arguments here!

voisin• 4 years ago

Limit quantities of immigrants but not originations?

oneplane• 4 years ago

No, because it is the population that can drive change in a country where politics has restricted them.

robjan• 4 years ago

Are we talking about travel or right to work? The latter tends to be beneficial to both countries as it prevents brain drain without the country having to impose exit bans / quotas.

sharikous• 4 years ago

I see more and more people believing in a future of big tech players being as authoritative as countries (I am not sure about that but I am hearing that a lot)

Imagine passports issued by Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc.. to their workers or to workers of smaller companies using their cloud services. The only thing missing is armies

FpUser2• 4 years ago

"Imagine passports issued by Amazon, Google, Microsoft"

Shudder

You load 16 tons, what do you get?

Another day older and deeper in debt

pc863• 4 years ago

And how exactly would the UN do that? The countries enacting and enforcing these sanctions, to be blunt, don't really care what the UN thinks about much of anything.

anovikov2• 4 years ago

But this is precisely the point of nationhood at all. Otherwise, what is the meaning of one's nationality? This is opportunity which gives you an unfair advantage vs less fortunate nations, which your forefathers created and defended for you and you can enjoy - and defend for your posterity.

It is like capital: you can be born into money and enjoy the unfair advantage of never having to work 9-5. Just collective, shared by everyone with the same citizenship. Do we need to abolish private capital too?

I come from Soviet Union where we tried to do just that. Result was the worst passport to have, truly :) to the point that the border defences were pointed inwards - to prevent escape rather than infiltration.

tzs• 4 years ago

But this is precisely the point of nationhood at all. Otherwise, what is the meaning of one's nationality?

If it was the point of nationhood then wouldn't we expect immigration control to be one of the first things new nations implement?

Yet the United States had wide open borders until 1875, 83-99 years (depending on who you ask) into nationhood. It wasn't until the Page Act in 1875 that restricted immigration of Chinese women that the US started controlling immigration.

That was followed by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which extended restrictions to include men.

By the end of the century they had added some restrictions on non-Chinese immigrants such as a small immigration tax, a requirement that you could take care of yourself, and a requirements that you were diseases free.

In 1917 a literacy test was added, but you could take it in your native language.

It wasn't until 1924 that the US got restrictions the seriously limited integration beyond the anti-Chinese limits. The Immigration Act of 1924 introduced per-country limits based on how many people in each country were in the US in 1890.

The official goal was to "preserve the ideal of US homogeneity". But no one really cared whether or not say the ratio of Scots to French in the US was changing. It was almost certainly about Jews.

The European countries whose contribution to US immigration had increased disproportionately were largely those that had greatly stepped up persecution of Jews, and it was Jews trying to escape that persecution that was making the immigration increases from there disproportional.

By limiting those countries based on 1890 levels they could reduce the number of Jews that got in. That's not as effective as an actual limit on Jews, but even in 1924 that would have been difficult to do.

anovikov2• 4 years ago

Maybe this is precisely because before 1875, the country had a lot more land than people, and simply needed to fill in the ranks? Canada and Australia does the same till now (ok there's a point-based system but it's so easy anyone qualifies).

Fnoord2• 4 years ago

Countries are sovereign, and they decide who they allow to pass in (and even out!) or not. The COVID-19 crisis underlined this even more. If you want to live with little to no restraints in a foreign country, become a (good) diplomat/spy. Which is limited by supply (and kind of like a tradeoff with the target country).

Yes, ideally, this world would be a peaceful place, with no military, no terrorists, no dangers, no security risks, no blackhats, no drug addicts, no gangs, no children military or selling drugs, (screw all that just no crime/violence flowerpower & peace sign) etc etc. But in the real world, all of this exists, and a whole lot more. That's why not everyone's allowed. Then there's the economic difference between countries, and power differences. The rich countries want to stay ahead of the curve, and the poor countries want to step up. Any propaganda to reach the goal is warranted. China uses different techniques than USA or EU. Much more authoritarian, for starters. Remember what I said about diplomats/spies? Your proposal would open the floodgates.

refurb• 4 years ago

Social welfare prohibits any sort of open borders.

And I’m not sure why inhabitants of a country that made good economic decisions (e.g. Singapore) should pay for countries that made poor ones (e.g. North Korea).

j7ake• 4 years ago

I think one can look at the EU as an experiment of what happens with passport equality.

You have countries ranging from Croatia, Poland to Germany and Norway under one common passport.

Then you can ask specific questions like whether Germany and Norway has deteriorated by its influx of people from poor EU countries speaking destroying its way of life.

It seems to me that the EU experiment shows it’s possible to have passport equality without some downward slide to chaos.

One interesting side effect of the EU experiment is how quickly public views EU as a homogeneous block. While in reality the cultural differences between Netherlands and Croatia is probably larger than the difference between France and Morocco.

_xnmw2• 4 years ago

No. Cultures exist. Races exist. Unique human modes of being exist. One of the most devastating effects of the European Union was the absolute desolation and loss of beautiful cultures in Eastern Europe, such as Croatia and Romania. Entire regions became ghost towns, and major cities became standardized, soulless, faceless blocks.

Here's a before/after review from someone who travelled to Dubrovnik, Croatia before it became part of the EU.

Our impression from that trip was mildly disappointing, because the distinctive culture of the country seemed to be fading into European Union standardization and blandness. The local high cuisine in particular was already long forgotten.

[1] https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2021/09/26/re-visiting-dubrovnik...

wink• 4 years ago

One of the most devastating effects of the European Union was the absolute desolation and loss of beautiful cultures in Eastern Europe, such as Croatia and Romania. Entire regions became ghost towns

The same can be said for Germany's reunification. So many people moved from the former GDR to the West where the jobs were and as it's been a few years now the population is aging and dying.

That is a fact. My opinion now is that I don't think that this would've been a good reason to not reunite Germany. And the same is true for your EU example.

Also wow, that link you quoted. I would not cite that as a useful reference, that was a little painful to read.

Their biggest hope is to grow as equals within the European Union which is today just another word for NATO, meaning vassals of the United States. Croatia is thus willy-nilly aligned against Russia and surely soon to be aligned against China.

From someone who describes 80s Yugoslavia as:

The Yugoslavia of my memory was to a great extent a fun-loving place where the business people with whom I associated had a well developed a sense of humor, cultivated witticisms, enjoyed immensely good food and good drink.

Weird, all I personally know from 80s Yugoslavia is from people who came to Germany to work on construction sites for not-exactly-great money, they didn't really look the fun-loving kind to me. Maybe the author was mingling mostly with upper-class people who seem to not have gotten the short end of the stick so much. (JFTR, the first time I went to Croatia at all was a couple years ago and I was not old enough in the 80s/90s to have formed a good political opinion, BUT my viewpoint is simply what I heard from only non-rich people who emigrated to Germany, and from their kids).

_xnmw2• 4 years ago

Weird, all I personally know from 80s Yugoslavia is from people who came to Germany to work on construction sites

Selection bias. Emigrants tend to be the least happy people - there's a reason they left. Emigrants are not a good sample of the "real" native people.

My opinion now is that I don't think that this would've been a good reason to not reunite Germany

Sure, borders change and sometimes countries get unified. But the OP was asking about unifying the entire world, not two sides of a neighbouring country with the same language. That is a painful thought, we should be fighting to protect cultures like we fight to protect endangered species.

mmarq5• 4 years ago

Yes, we should stop treating the poor of the world as if they were subhumans or a pest waiting to invade our homes.

Even from an egoistic perspective, Western countries, especially those whose pension system is an unreformable Ponzi scheme (say Italy) and those with a limited welfare state (eg UK and USA), should stop pretending immigration is a problem.

bradlys2• 4 years ago

Sure - it does. But it first needs equality between countries. This means that the wage, cost of living, and quality of life is generally quite comparable between countries. One country is not pillaging another and one does not exploit the other - etc.

The problem is that neoliberals and capitalists don’t want this because then they can’t have as cheap of a slave class that they currently do. HN is full of these types and why you’re not seeing this recognized further up.

Wage inequality is the biggest barrier to a universal passport. You need to get this part done first - and then universal passport and removal of boarders will be good. Then we can just have the United earth federation or whatever BS.

But that’s all like 1,000 years from now. By then - I presume we’ll have killed most of our species off and regress back to 1,000 AD.

soueuls5• 4 years ago

How would you achieve this when people don't value the same things? Teachers are well paid in the US and Germany, not so much in Hungary and Turkey.

Who is going to impose what is to be valued by society? You basically just want to deprive countries from having any kind of political freedom, choices, their own personal destiny, success and failures. What a sad world to live in.

bradlys2• 4 years ago

What kind of straw man argument is that? Come back with a better one.

Ask HN: Does the world need a “passport equality” movement?

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