Subject To Change

Subject To Change

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Open Borders?

For some reason I enjoy reading blogs and comments from "the other side". I was poking around this blog about human rights tonight. This guy is more pretentious than anyone I've ever read on HuffPo. Take this post about open borders (common ownership of the earth). This is just a small piece.

Hence, if Americans for example are just lucky to have been born in the U.S. and didn’t do anything to deserve being born there, what right do they have closing their borders and allowing access only to a chosen few selected according to criteria that they have unilaterally decided and that mainly serve their own interests? None whatsoever. In claiming that right they make it impossible for others to do something about the misfortune of having been born in a poor country. Hence, they double other people’s disadvantage.

As Joseph Carens has put it, immigration restrictions are the modern equivalent of feudal privilege, inherited status, birthrights and class rule. In our current, so-called modern and Enlightened societies, the good luck of being born in a wealthy country supposedly gives you the right to exclude others, just as in the olden days the fact of having been born in the class of nobles or aristocrats gave you the right to condemn others to the class of paupers. The lottery of birth yields unfair advantages in both cases.

One may claim that none of this necessarily argues in favor of open borders. The fortunate of this earth could compensate for their good luck by other means. For example, they could have a duty, not to open their borders, but to transfer money and resources to those who have had the bad luck of being born in the wrong country.

 His blog description is pretty pompous too. 

This is Filip Spagnoli's blog, which is mainly about human rights - including political and economic human rights such as the right to participate in government (democracy being a subset of human rights) and the right not to suffer poverty - seen from different perspectives, such as philosophy, art, politics (hence "P.a.p."), economics, statistics, law, psychology etc.

See how much shit you can read over there. 

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