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Immigration


Swan Red

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Cracking thread here on the WEF attendees larping around in the role of refugees and why this isn't just distasteful but ignores that many of the people in attendance are responsible for the very conditions refugees, asylum seekers and migrants face. 

 

My personal preference is for open borders, but this remains a somewhat unpopular position but I am interested in where people are on the subject and will do my best to clarify my own position if anyone is interested / cares.

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I'm in favour of opening borders, but I think it will be impractical to reach that ideal in one big step: there would be a large and unevenly spread impact in the short term and that would need to be managed, most likely by a gradual opening of borders with measures to ensure the consequences aren't concentrated at certain locations which receive little or no assistance to deal with them.

 

I think there's very little reason why all European countries can't move quickly to open borders with each other, at least.

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How does climate breakdown related mass immigration affect our thinking? Within decades, large parts of the world will be completely uninhabitable and there will be potentially hundreds of millions of people looking for a place to live. Then what?

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How does climate breakdown related mass immigration affect our thinking? Within decades, large parts of the world will be completely uninhabitable and there will be potentially hundreds of millions of people looking for a place to live. Then what?

 

This process has already started.

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I'm instinctively in favour or FOM and open borders but it's not a position that I have thought through inn real depth and in a world where there are states countries,  etc. then it does create problems - i see the benefits (and necessities) as far outweighing those though. 

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How does climate breakdown related mass immigration affect our thinking? Within decades, large parts of the world will be completely uninhabitable and there will be potentially hundreds of millions of people looking for a place to live. Then what?

 

Opening borders operates to provide people with the right to move in the event of climate breakdown but also as an incentive to reduce our impact on the environment by ensuring that we don't compound the incentives for people leaving the areas where we are born. Border controls allow for the exploitation of the global south and the environment by ring fencing richer nations. 

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How does climate breakdown related mass immigration affect our thinking? Within decades, large parts of the world will be completely uninhabitable and there will be potentially hundreds of millions of people looking for a place to live. Then what?

let your imagination run free

Children Of Men but much worse

 

if anything, people like Trump -  their obsession with immigration goes hand in hand with their (public) climate change denial

when the day comes when hundreds of million of people are faced with the choice of march north or die, the scene will be set for a war for resources that the people who don't live in Africa or the Middle East or even Southern Europe  'simply have to win'

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I've no set feeling here. On the one hand I believe nobody should be able to stop me wandering to any country on the planet. We're not here long and nobody owns it.

I have felt for a long time that the right to move freely over the surface of the planet is a curious omission from universal concepts of human rights. More surprising to me is that the majority of people I have mentioned this to have actively stated that they would not want that right. *shrug*

 

Absolutely no borders. What even is national identity anyway? Yes, I'm Irish, but I just happen to be Irish by accident of birth. I see no differences in people.

Right. It seems to me to be a highly arbitrary abstraction of group membership which some people derive comfort from.

 

Opening borders operates to provide people with the right to move in the event of climate breakdown but also as an incentive to reduce our impact on the environment by ensuring that we don't compound the incentives for people leaving the areas where we are born. Border controls allow for the exploitation of the global south and the environment by ring fencing richer nations. 

Allow for exploitation and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

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How does climate breakdown related mass immigration affect our thinking? Within decades, large parts of the world will be completely uninhabitable and there will be potentially hundreds of millions of people looking for a place to live. Then what?

more reason to open borders, although as I said, a free-for-all probably won't work. It's more a case of prioritizing those migrating from places in the process of becoming uninhabitable.

 

Conversely there should be a gradual improvement in the habitability of certain far northern (southern?) locations which should be taken out of the juristiction of nation states.

 

(my investment in 2035 Novaya Zemlaya Sauvignon Blanc is looking good)

It may, and should, eventually be an accepted human right.

:yes: and those who disagree annihilated

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more reason to open borders, although as I said, a free-for-all probably won't work. It's more a case of prioritizing those migrating from places in the process of becoming uninhabitable.

 

Prioritising? Like a points system (aka the Australia model)? Who decides the criteria for the model, is it those that are well educated, the doctors and nurses etc? or are you talking about the places disappearing under seawater by the hour that you're talking about? That seems a bit selective and a big f*** you to a lot of the population. I know my response can be picked holes in (the 'we can't let everyone in surely' brigade will be out in force) but this whole selective idea of who we, (we, I f***ing laugh at that as if 'we'' have some god given right to choose) to "let in "is laughable.

 

We're all in the cage, deciding who to let in or out won't sort it.

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I like the idea of open border, and particularly in terms of destroying the utterly pointless notion of national identity. But I think humans are (currently? always?) too selfish for something like this to work - it would just become a case of survival of the fittest, both for those trying to flee / get to a better country, and for those in more fortunate countries (i.e. those in areas that have prosperity, and will be less devastated by the ecological disaster we're moving towards).  

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Prioritising? Like a points system (aka the Australia model)? Who decides the criteria for the model, is it those that are well educated, the doctors and nurses etc? or are you talking about the places disappearing under seawater by the hour that you're talking about? That seems a bit selective and a big f*** you to a lot of the population. I know my response can be picked holes in (the 'we can't let everyone in surely' brigade will be out in force) but this whole selective idea of who we, (we, I f***ing laugh at that as if 'we'' have some god given right to choose) to "let in "is laughable.

 

We're all in the cage, deciding who to let in or out won't sort it.

 

prioritizing, deciding criteria, etc. should be done via a democratic process - and, of course, the question of how to actually HAVE a democratic process is a yet more fundamental one that goes beyond this particular question and underlies almost everything.

 

Anything which is not a 'free for all' is essentially selective, of course. My point here is that the selectivity should be in favour of those most urgently threatened by climate change issues and much less, if at all, based on what particular specialist skills a nation state wants to cherry pick from around the world.

 

And it's a very good point you seem to be making that a lot of this policy seems to be based on the assumption that a country like UK can decide who they want to "let in". This is fundamentally flawed, IMO, and it should be more about an internationally determined consensus on which people and how many MUST be allowed in whether the nation state likes it or not.

 

Nation States, IMO, are a fundamental part of the problem here and we should be moving towards their abolition.

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I’m pro open borders but I’m also pro an extremely strong welfare state, including UBI, and I don’t see how these positions are compatible.

 

I've struggled with this but ultimately I'd rather secure the right of free movement and constrain welfare rights where welfare such as UBI or existing entitlements are qualified, whether on grounds of contribution or citizenship or some other mechanism.

 

I think open borders would go some way to us realising that our actions, be it war or consumption or whatever, have consequences.

 

This is a significant part of it for me, if we understand that the countries that people migrate to are generally rich at the expense of the countries that people migrate from it forces us to consider our role in the wealth distributions across countries. And yes not bombing people and creating local crisis is motivated on this account.

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Absolutely no borders. What even is national identity anyway? Yes, I'm Irish, but I just happen to be Irish by accident of birth. I see no differences in people.

 

Totally agree. All this 'proud to be...' nonsense. I'm Irish by virtue - fortune or otherwise - of birth. I have no pride nor shame in Ireland. Likewise - the reason you're not a refugee is purely through the fortune of your place of birth. 

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