[PaulHoule]

The more I think about it the more incoherent it seems. We don’t know what the person’s immigration status is, we don’t know if they have a passport, but if they did the bouncer/bartender only cares about your birth date, not your visa. Is the author asking for the abolition of all border controls? That’s something different from patriotism.

Before 1920 there were no passports or standardization of border controls but there were also no international human rights. If your state wanted to do you in they could just do it and not face any consequences. “Genocide”, “War Crimes”, and “Crimes Against Humanity” were all introduced in the next 30 years. Any formalization of your rights requires that the state “see like a state” and document your existence. In a lot of places, like China, there are restrictions on internal migration because a rapidly industrializing country faces challenging problems in development.

Today there was a great podcast episode about the origin of human rights as we know it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/13/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...