[huevosabio]

Today, the location of your birth is the dominating factor in what life you will be able to enjoy and how much will you be able to contribute, ethnicity, religion, and other common bases for discrimination pale in comparison.

The current citizenship system makes no sense, economically or morally. Why should the place of your birth or the citizenship of your parents should mandate which countries you are allowed to visit and in which markets you are allowed to participate?

If the trajectory of liberalism continuous its march (a consistent trend for hundreds of years, but not a certain one), then the citizenship system that we as a world have crafted will be either replaced by a more sensical one or entirely scratched (i.e. open borders). I hope that this happens within my lifetime.

[sk0g]

I can't see how that would be possible, unless every country is equally wealthy and all wars and conflicts cease.

What's anyone's incentive for staying in Syria, Iraq, Cuba, or Ukraine when bad things happen? What is going to keep people in their birth place, when they could earn orders of magnitude more in other countries?

Then again, the far reaching implications of extensive automation could lead to this. We'll see!

[huevosabio]

> What's anyone's incentive for staying in... when bad things happen?

Well that's the beauty of it. Right now we are forcing (literally, by force!) people in war-torn countries to remain in them. Should they not have the option of escaping misery?

> What is going to keep people in their birth place, when they could earn orders of magnitude more in other countries?

There would be a new equilibrium. Poorer countries tend to be cheaper, so perhaps middle class first-worlders might move there (e.g. just like some Americans move to Mexico for retirement). Or perhaps the attachment to your local culture is strong enough.

But most important of all, why do we need to keep people in their birth place?

[yummypaint]

A captive population is part of what creates an incentive to seek power through violence. If people have freedom of movement, it's much harder to subjugate them by holding land. Part of why ISIS was able to scale so effectively was by capturing economic output. If people were able to flee it might have a quenching effect.

[dragonwriter]

> A captive population is part of what creates an incentive to seek power through violence.

I'd say it is almost the reverse; the desire to establish a captive population is what leads one to seek power through violence.

> If people have freedom of movement, it's much harder to subjugate them by holding land.

If you hold land by force, you can thereby deny people freedom of movement in any direction. That's actually the only way to deny people freedom of movement, whether you concentrate on the inbound direction (as many countries do whether or not they also care about the other direction) or the outbound direction (Cold War East Germany, for a well-known example).

[TomMarius]

The problem isn't that they were held (ISIS didn't have resources for such large scale operation), but that no place has accepted them.

[dragonwriter]

“No place accepted them” is also largely denial by force (both at boundaries and in the interior of they manage to evade it at boundaries), just from the other direction.

[withinboredom]

Those that can leave, leave. Why leave the poor behind to be fodder in a war?

[sk0g]

The ease of straight up abandoning countries could have a minor rise in extremism leading to a full-on takeover. All the decent people would want none of that, and life would be easier elsewhere anyway.

Such infighting and geopolitical issues would just get us back to where we are now, with maybe a few more EU-esque bubbles remaining.

Sounds rather dystopian.

[throw51319]

This completely ignores the fact that the culture and people who make up a country do greatly impact it's success. Traditions of working together, independent thought, etc. None of this exists in a vacuum.

If too many people of the same culture move to another country, they won't assimilate. They will form their own subcommunities. This is seen in America with the latin population and in europe with the muslim population.

Very naive proposal.

[huevosabio]

> This completely ignores the fact that the culture and people who make up a country do greatly impact it's success. Traditions of working together, independent thought, etc. None of this exists in a vacuum.

> If too many people of the same culture move to another country, they won't assimilate. They will form their own subcommunities. This is seen in America with the latin population and in europe with the muslim population.

Agree. And since we don't live in a vacuum, you will notice that third world cultures are increasingly similar to those in the first world. Assimilation is already happening.

Nonetheless, the path there does involve periods of throttled migration, and this is fine. The important part is that we move in that direction as fast as feasible.

> They will form their own subcommunities. American history shows that, with time, most immigrants tend to assimilate to the mainstream culture just fine. In the 1800s, the Irish were regarded as backwards and Pope-idolizers, but they assimilated just fine. In any case, I don't worry about these subcommunities, it is a natural path for any sufficiently large state.

[dominotw]

> The current citizenship system makes no sense, economically or morally.

In usa i found it weird that kids are only allowed to go to certain schools which fall in a geographic area.

Why can't they go to any school that they please. Isn't this much simpler problem to solve than getting rid of citizenship.

[virologist]

This is a brilliant and mind bending point of view.