[jmnicolas]

Because a white person from Ukraine will work for cheaper than me, a white person from France. How long before it's impossible to work for a decent salary (which are already not that decent in France).

And there's the problem of welfare, look at what's happening in Calais. All the illegal immigrants from Africa are trying to reach England from this French Port since they believe England is the best welfare state.

So yeah I agree we're all brothers, but I'd rather see French in France and Ukrainians in Ukraine.

[learnstats2]

> How long before it's impossible to work for a decent salary (which are already not that decent in France).

So, it is already impossible for the person in Ukraine to work for what you consider a decent salary.

The people above you on this scale are using politics to make sure your salary and opportunities stay low as well. You get a monopoly type of advantage here, but you can't compete fairly in other countries and in other situations, when you are a consumer.

This is a power structure that should not be something you seek to maintain. I doubt closed borders benefit you, except on a very short-term scale.

[jotm]

On the one hand, I support open borders and immigration, but on the other hand, it's human nature to go where it's easier to live instead of trying to better your current place of residence.

Without borders, people will just flock from one place to another, destabilizing and draining the cities of resources until other places become more desirable, and when that happens, they'll just move to other, better places.

It's very much like all the nomadic tribes of old (incl. North American Indians), and the gypsies today, only the world is overcrowded and we can't maintain a progressing, stable civilization with that kind of lifestyle.

I believe education plays a key factor, people need to change their worldviews and culture to live together on Earth, and that's not gonna happen anytime soon.

Maybe if the rich would invest in infrastructure all over the world, to better everyone at the same time.

Too many times I've seen millionaires living in huge mansions while the neighborhoods around them crumble. But they won't invest in their local community because there's no ROI (They really need $24 million in their bank accounts, 1 million less would be catastrophic, right? /s), and they can always move somewhere better. This mentality is destructive...

[ux-app]

> "Without borders, people will just flock from one place to another, destabilizing and draining the cities of resources..."

I'm not sure about that. After all, even within countries there are huge disparities between regions and we don't see this effect take place.

[antillean]

Apart from what merpnderp said about per capita income, I'd guess there are at least two important things at work here.

The first is that the disparities between regions within a country like the US are quite different from the disparities between countries across the world. In particular, wealthy regions and cities in rich countries tend to have lots of poor people. I think they might even have disproportionate shares of the poor.

Then there's the redistributive effects of things like having a single currency, single regulatory regimes, and explicit central government redistributive taxation. These all (especially the last) work to prevent disparities between regions within rich countries from becoming as big as disparities between countries across the world.

[ux-app]

> "The first is that the disparities between regions within a country like the US are quite different from the disparities between countries across the world."

That's a fair point, I'm sure there are differences which make looking at a country in isolation not very useful.

What about the EU? There is free travel across the EU and the economic disparity between member states is huge. For example look at UK/Germany as compared to Estonia/Bulgaria.

This hasn't resulted in catastrophic mass migration across the union.

[antillean]

The European jury is out on whether or not there is ongoing catastrophic mass migration across the EU.

Anti-immigration sentiment has been surging in the EU over the last few years in large part because of perceptions of excessive migration from eastern European countries like Estonia and Bulgaria ("the periphery", as they call them) to western and northern European countries like the UK and Germany ("the core countries", as they call themselves). In the UK, for instance, the UK Independence Party got something like 13% of the popular vote (though only 1 seat, because as bad as UKIP is, the first-past-the-post electoral system in modern Britain is worse) in this year's general election, and they're a single-issue, anti-European-immigration party. Word is that similar things are happening in other rich European countries, as seen with the National Front in France, the Danish People's Party in Denmark, and the AfD in Germany.[1]

To zoom in a bit on the UK (where I live), there is evidence that migration from the EU is high and growing[2][3]. But I don't think that anyone outside of those who are right-of-mainstream on this issue think it's catastrophically high. I'd guess at three main reasons for that. Firstly, accession to the EU requires certain "convergence criteria", which include levels of economic prosperity and social stability which, while not strict enough to mean that all the joining countries are virtually the same on these things, are strict enough to mean that they aren't as far apart as, say, the US and Haiti -- or even the US and Mexico. Secondly, the EU has a good few common institutions, including ones that do things along the lines of redistributive taxation.[4] And thirdly, there are differences in language and culture which might be restrictions to many people, especially in a continent as linguistically (if not culturally) diverse as Europe. (I'm guessing that and size are parts of why everyone isn't flocking to Luxembourg.)

1. Germany's Angela Merkel under threat from Pegida rallies -- http://www.cnbc.com/2015/01/06/threat-to-merkel-from-right-w...

2. British and other EU migration -- http://www.migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/britains-70-million...

3. Bulgarian and Romanian migration to the UK -- http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/migration1/migration-statistic...

4. EU contractors and beneficiaries of funding from the EU budget -- http://ec.europa.eu/contracts_grants/beneficiaries_en.htm

[ux-app]

Thanks for your European perspective. I live in Southern Australia, so about as far away from Europe as possible, so all of my knowledge on the issue is anecdotal.

In the EU, hasn't the net result (across Europe) been a positive one? I.e. the positive impacts on weaker economies have outweighed the negative impacts on the more developed, core, countries?

I think you're absolutely right that the difference between US and Haiti can't really be compared with the differences between EU member states.

I really hope the EU experiment does end up working. A world without borders would be amazing.

[merpnderp]

Where are there larger disparities inside of a country than from a large emigrating country? The reason people from Mississippi don't all pack up and move to California is they are per capita richer than the UK, even though in the US that state is considered the poorest.

[ux-app]

Off the top of my head I don't know of any one country that has a huge disparity (though I'm sure examples exist), but the EU is a good case study.

Legal Economic migration within the EU is definitely an issue, however it hasn't resulted in "destabilizing and draining the cities of resources".

E.g. Estonia's GDP is 99.07% smaller than the UK's[1], and Estonia is not empty. Edit - as pointed out below a per-capita comparison makes much more sense... oops

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=estonia+gdp+vs+uk+

Edit: I know that GDP is not a measure of standard of living, but they are correlated and it servers as a reasonable proxy

[jsnell]

Raw GDP is an absurd proxy for standard of living, you're comparing a country of 70 million to a country of 1.5 million. At the very least you'd need it to be per capita. Maybe PPP adjusted.

[ux-app]

Thanks for pointing this out and you're absolutely right. The per capita comparison is much better, and shows Estonia's economy at 54% smaller [1] (Bulgaria makes for an even starker contrast at 82% smaller per capita [3])

Edit - As a final edit, the largest disparity across standard of living in the EU is between Luxembourg and Bulgaria, and comparing their per-capita GDP shows that Bulgaria's economy is 93.2% smaller [4]

This is still a considerable difference between the two countries and yet not everyone has fled from Estonia/Bulgaria.

The point though is that there is a very big spread in the standard of living [2] across the EU and yet mass migration is not occurring.

[1] - http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=estonia+per+capita+gdp+...

[2] - http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/dec/11/uk-living-stand...

[3] - http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=bulgaria+per+capita+gdp...

[4] - http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=bulgaria+per+capita+gdp...

[realusername]

I agree, people are always saying they want to abolish borders but in reality, there are hard consequences to that, you need to have some border for countries to improve. Otherwise everyone is just going to move somewhere else with a better quality of life and this is providing a race to the bottom with giant slums in those places whereas some countries would be almost empty because everyone would move.

[ikeboy]

Studies show that increased immigration is actually good for the economy. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/03/bernie-... has a bunch of sources for that.

Besides, if extremely large numbers of immigrants would be harmful, you can open up borders gradually.

[Nursie]

>> Studies show that increased immigration is actually good for the economy.

Yes, but I believe the jury is still out on whether it actually benefits the ordinary workers in that economy, or if just benefits business by providing a cheaper workforce.

[ikeboy]

One study I saw suggested that 90% of workers saw improvements.

Edit: see https://www.nber.org/papers/w12497.pdf

[Nursie]

Well, that's certainly interesting.

It does say there seemed to be a small negative effect on the least educated, who are presumably competing for jobs at the low end.

[ikeboy]

Yes, those without a high-school degree saw a small decrease. Although even that may be countered by lower prices, I've seen that argument somewhere.

[realusername]

I don't doubt that, it's just I don't believe in opening borders in one go, it would be too brutal and it would do more harm than good but indeed if we open the borders slowly little by little and improve the conditions in other countries in the mean time (to reduce inequality between countries) it could be much better. Otherwise you are going to have 15M Chinese and Indians moving into the same city in just a few months, it would be way too brutal. So maybe one day it will work but for now, there is way too much inequality for this to work.

[ignoramous]

As a matter of national security, some things may never come to pass. But as the world progresses towards a better future, the boundaries will vanish, if they haven't already. Who would have thought the EU was possible just 60 years back? The European countries have a long history of wars and hostile relationships stretching from the medivial ages up to 1945.

The case of cheap labour isn't a valid argument anymore. If the value-add is significant, then certain things will happen, thanks to the capitalistic nature of businesses in the West.