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Ask HN: Does the world need a “passport equality” movement?
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?
- soueuls 5y agoI 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_Hippo 5y agoI 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.
- soueuls 5y agoBut 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.
- stransky 5y ago
- giantg2 5y agoThe door isn't closed. People still immigrate.
- soueuls 5y agoHN is supposed to be a place for civilized discussions. I am not allowed to go anywhere I want. There are plenty of countries refusing me entry, or access to land/property or force me to abide by strict business rule (like having a national owning > 51% of any company I might create there) this is fine. It's not my country. Plus, your "equality" is going to create other form of inequality. Any socialist countries relies on past contributions to finance most things like healthcare or unemployment income. In my country, immigrants are allowed to get unemployment income, without contribution anything beforehand. This just creates inequality to the ones who contributed. You seem just obsessed with equality for the sake of it. People have history, bonding among nations take time, suffering, dedication. You can't merely replace a Thai with a Columbian. They don't believe in the same things, they don't have the same values, they don't believe in the same God or divine figure, they don't speak the same language, they don't eat the same food, they don't use their money in the same way. It must take personal effort for someone to immigrate into another country.
- stransky 5y ago
- TheGigaChad 5y ago
- mcv 5y ago> You can't merely replace a Thai with a Columbian. They don't believe in the same things, they don't have the same values, they don't believe in the same God or divine figure, they don't speak the same language, they don't eat the same food, they don't use their money in the same way. But this is not just true for people from different countries. It's also true for people from the same country. Especially in melting-pot countries like the US, but also in more supposedly homogenous countries; you still have people who believe different things, have different values, live their lives in different ways, etc. Insisting on conformity has lead to tons of strife in the past. Civil wars have been fought over this stuff. It's much more productive to accept these differences. (At least in so far as they don't hurt anyone.) Of course for that it's also important to be aware of and understand these differences. To bridge them, in some way. If you move to a different country, you should absolutely put some effort into understanding the local language and customs. You can't move to another country and expect to live like you did back home. If that's what you want, you should have stayed there. But it would be nice if we lived in a world where these cultural obstacles were the only obstacles, and they weren't amplified by massive wealth inequality.
- raxxorrax 5y agoI 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.
- Broken_Hippo 5y agoI am from the US but do not live there - I live in Norway. Open immigration doesn't necessarily mean open rights to social structure: After all, most places have some limits on the safety net you are entitled to now - For example: Taking certain types of social help here in Norway hurts my own immigration. You can have some controls on this: One actual answer is to make sure everyone has basic things as rights (Such as food and shelter) and work on making everywhere decent enough places to live - but for this, we need less global exploitation.
- giantg2 5y agoTo 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.
- Broken_Hippo 5y agoI'm fine not having everyone take a citizenship test because the consequences are dire if you make people's citizenship dependent on the test. Statelessness is a cruel thing to put onto someone that can't seem to pass a test. At least the civics test I took was for immigration and I had multiple chances to pass - and mine was easier than the insane test folks take in the US and much more practical. I do agree that we should make sure everyone knows how the systems work in reality, but realistically I'd want to lean into things folks would actually use instead of memorizing dates and names: You don't need to know all the laws, just how they pertain to you. You don't need all government structure, but general and the things you'll probably deal with (local government, motor vehicle laws, etc), what to do if you find yourself disabled, poor, or needing time off for surgery. Making sure everyone knows worker and tenant rights would be a step in the right direction as well, as well as what to do about these sorts of things.
- nradov 5y agoThe US citizenship written exam is extremely easy and doesn't require memorizing many dates. Accommodations are available for those with legitimate disabilities. Failing the exam typically won't leave the candidate stateless as they still retain their existing citizenship in another country.
- Broken_Hippo 5y agoHave you seen the questions and all the memorization you need to have for it? Dates, history stuff, names of people. Scroll down: They'll ask you 20 of these. Orally - it is not a written test. (I included a government link about it). On the other hand, I had practice tests on a computer (at a school). My test was full of practical things and only a little history: Mine asked me about using the health care system and the schooling system and things like that - the sort of thing that once you learned general knowledge, you didn't have to worry too much if you couldn't remember a historical name or date. I took the civics test required for Norway, by the way, and they have a list of languages you could take it in. Of course, I had to take it to continue my residence so more folks wind up taking it. Edit, forgotten thing: Whether or not someone is stateless depends on the home country, but generally, it won't - mostly because the US doesn't make you give up citizenship before you are granted on in the US. If you want to become a US citizen, though, your citizenship is going to depend, in part, on this civics test. This is what I was referring to. https://www.uscis.gov/citizenship-resource-center/the-2020-version-of-the-civics-test/128-civics-questions-and-answers-with-mp3-audio-2020-version#:~:text=These%20questions%20cover%20important%20topics,version%20of%20the%20civics%20test https://www.uscis.gov/citizenship-resource-center/the-2020-v....
- neximo64 5y agoIf 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).
- WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
- throwawaynay 5y agoIdealistically 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 5y agoPeople 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 5y agoThe 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 5y agoAnd also corruption / crime that are a corollary of poverty
- yosito 5y agoAs 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-Xii 5y 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.
- throwaway22032 5y agoFrom 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.
- mcv 5y agoI 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 5y agoIt 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?
- draw_down 5y ago
- oneplane 5y agoNo, because it is the population that can drive change in a country where politics has restricted them.
- robjan 5y agoAre 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 5y agoI 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
- FpUser 5y ago>"Imagine passports issued by Amazon, Google, Microsoft" Shudder You load 16 tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt
- pc86 5y agoAnd 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.
- anovikov 5y agoBut 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 5y 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.
- Fnoord 5y agoCountries 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 5y agoSocial 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 5y agoI 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- _xnmw 5y agoNo. 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-after-a-30-year-absence-september-2021/ https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2021/09/26/re-visiting-dubrovnik...
- wink 5y 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).
- mmarq 5y agoYes, 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.
- bradlys 5y agoSure - 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.
- soueuls 5y agoHow 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.