Uhh... ok. If you drive a few minutes past the horrifying automotive blight you arrive at... a shoulderless road going through an empty field. It's not a suburb, but it demonstrates the problem with car-centric development and sprawl. I grew up in a similar area a couple hours away, and it was a terrible place to be a kid. Yeah, I had some fun exploring the woods by my house until I got old enough to be bored by it, but that cost was that I never got to see other kids or go anywhere without having to bother my parents to arrange something and drive me somewhere. I always figured that suburban kids got to play with other kids all the time, but the impression I get is that this doesn't really happen. Suburbs are still car islands, and a kid has to be pretty lucky to have other kids their age they get along with in their general vicinity.
That "horrifying automotive blight" is less than one square kilometer and virtually nobody lives there. If you don't like it (few people do) then don't live there. The rest of Bedford Country has thousands of other square kilometers for you to live in, with numerous small towns that aren't interstate rest stops. Go streetview in Bedford PA, where about 3000 people live vs Breezewood's <200. It's a modest community, the people there aren't rich but they have nice yards, sidewalks all over the place, and few cars on any of the roads. Teach your kids to look both ways before crossing a street and they'll be fine. Only somebody who's hopelessly neurotic would worry about their kids walking to their friend's house in Bedford.
> kids don't like growing up in the country
Most do, but if you think yours won't then go live in a small town or a city. Citing Breezewood as a problem with American society is simply idiotic. It's a tiny aberration that doesn't effect you or anybody else except for the handful of weirdos who choose to live there.
The problem is that your purchases in aggregate are used to profile you and decide how you should be treated as a customer. Companies decide whether to reject your returns, or to offer you deals on products, based on consumer scoring [1]. Even the background check for my current job involved accessing my consumer score. I don't know if this is in fact done, but I can imagine that an employer could use information reported about your spending to determine what salary they think you would accept. In any case, I don't really want to have to think about this. I don't need to worry about abuse of data that I don't give out in the first place.
Also, apart from your personal self-interest, every dollar you spend in cash is a vote for it to continue being accepted. This is important because there's a minority of people who are excluded from the financial system and depend on cash. For example: undocumented immigrants, sex workers, tax protesters, victims of identity theft, protesters who have had their bank accounts frozen [2], and people who, for inscrutable business reasons, are deemed too high-risk to have bank accounts [3]. If those were the only people who used cash, companies would probably not care to accept it anymore. But the more people continue to use cash on principle, the longer it will remain as an escape hatch for those who need it.
> it was really difficult to travel anywhere except maybe between neighboring countries.
Yet most of the inhabitants of the United States are descended from people who immigrated during the time period you're talking about. Why was it ok for them but not for people immigrating today?
> Do you want criminals from other countries coming to your country?
Do you want criminals from other towns/counties/states coming to yours? No, but that doesn't justify banning everyone from coming to your town. The normal standard is that to stop someone on the basis that they might be a criminal, law enforcement has to have some reasonable cause for suspicion. But for some reason, in the case of national borders (and not state, province, etc), the burden of proof is reversed. Everyone is guilty by default and has to prove to the state's satisfaction that they aren't dangerous. Why? If open borders work between Washington and Oregon, why don't they work between Washington and Canada?
> We also have the issue of economic migrants. No country really wants to be inundated with millions of poor people from some other country; in the era of modern social services, countries don't have the resources to provide for them.
Immigrants pay taxes, and the state doesn't need to pay for their education. It's not clear that the mean additional immigrant under an open-borders policy would have a higher net cost to the state than a native citizen. But whatever, let's just assume they would. Instead of banning them, why not just let them come but make them ineligible for social services? That's cruel, but it's way crueler to not even offer them that.
they work much less well washington -> ca because the regulatory diff is larger.
and it was more okay for prior immigrants because we had systems like sponsorship. you couldn't show up and get on the dole. this has changed, which is why central american refugees will skip mexico (a closer country they MUST instead stay in to be legitimate refugees) and come through to here.
there are hordes of people who would come here and take advantage of social programs if we let them. those programs effectively keep people here - you can't argue for supply and demand if you tip things such that people are never forced to go elsewhere to look for work, support a family.
>Yet most of the inhabitants of the United States are descended from people who immigrated during the time period you're talking about. Why was it ok for them but not for people immigrating today?
Why do you think it was OK back then? Have you talked to any Native Americans about the effects of uncontrolled migration on their tribes? Plainly put, it was an unmitigated disaster and a genocide. They used to control the whole continent (but divided between various tribes of course, that sometimes didn't get along); now their numbers are puny and they're corralled in some shitty reservations.
>Do you want criminals from other towns/counties/states coming to yours?
>If open borders work between Washington and Oregon, why don't they work between Washington and Canada?
Within a country, it's easy: people have criminal records, and can't just skip town and go to the next town and assume a new identity. (Centuries ago, however, they did.) Between countries, it's not so easy: countries don't share their criminal data that easily. That's why we have passports: it's an identification document that shows the destination country that the person is not a criminal and is allowed to travel (since they agreed together not to give these out to serious criminals).
>Immigrants pay taxes
Some do, some don't. Some go to Germany expecting a free ride, passing through all the poorer countries along the way.
>Instead of banning them, why not just let them come but make them ineligible for social services? That's cruel
Why is that cruel? If 100M people suddenly decided to move into Andorra, how exactly do you think the country is going to pay for social services for them?
> Why do you think it was OK back then? Have you talked to any Native Americans about the effects of uncontrolled migration on their tribes? Plainly put, it was an unmitigated disaster and a genocide. They used to control the whole continent (but divided between various tribes of course, that sometimes didn't get along); now their numbers are puny and they're corralled in some shitty reservations.
In 1776, the population of the United States was mostly British. Most of the population of the United States today is descended from non-British European immigrants. But they didn't wipe out the existing British population – they just assimilated into it. The genocide of indigenous people was not a consequence of "immigration," it was a consequence of conquest. I'm against immigrants waging war against and driving out existing populations of the countries they come to, but that is not what is being discussed.
> Within a country, it's easy: people have criminal records, and can't just skip town and go to the next town and assume a new identity. (Centuries ago, however, they did.) Between countries, it's not so easy: countries don't share their criminal data that easily.
Ok, so then countries should work to start sharing criminal records and then they can have open borders, right?
> That's why we have passports: it's an identification document that shows the destination country that the person is not a criminal and is allowed to travel
A passport effectively only allows you to travel if you come from a rich country. If you come from a poor country, you need to apply for a visa. But in either case, you still need to go through a controlled border, and you're only allowed in the country for a limited time. If the concern is really about letting in criminals, and a passport or visa alleviates that, why is it so limited? And why aren't countries working to share criminal records so they don't have to do this song and dance? Hint: it's not really about crime.
> Why is that cruel? If 100M people suddenly decided to move into Andorra, how exactly do you think the country is going to pay for social services for them?
Andorra is part of the Schengen Area – there's no reason why they would all stick around in Andorra. If 100 million people came into the Schengen Area, they would get jobs and pay taxes to fund social services just like everyone else. But you ignored my main point – if you're convinced that immigrants will consume more social services than they pay taxes, why not just let them in but make them ineligible for social services? It's not really about social services either.
The reason that first-worlders don't want third-worlders coming to their countries is because (a) they don't like their skin color, (b) they don't like their culture, and (c) they'd rather have people live in extreme poverty far away than in a reduced level of poverty where they can see it, the same reason they're against building affordable housing in their own neighborhoods. When Western countries started implementing immigration controls, they were very open about this, but since the 1960s it's become fashionable for them to pretend otherwise.
Now, you might object: if that's the reason, why don't all the rich Western countries have open borders with each other? I mean, most of them do (Schengen), but still, why doesn't the USA have open borders with Canada? And the answer is: there's no reason at all. I can't think of any argument against open borders with Canada. The only reason it's not the case is because if all the white countries had open borders with each other, they wouldn't be able to lie about the reason anymore.
Or you know, D) they'd rather keep their own quality of life than significantly reduce it. They wouldn't be able to keep their mostly crime-free, large safety net high trust society with open borders, it's just not possible. There's already significant struggles in some European countries due to refugee immigration, and that's with fairly strict borders. It's a bit absurd that you're phrasing it as if the only sacrifice would be seeing poor people tbh.
But yes, the core reason is obviously selfish, but also understandable.
i do not trust foreigners and their governments with my information. i don't even trust our own government, but we can at least not hand that over to others.
most of the people entering America right now are not doing so under passports or visas.
and actually i have no problem with opening up immigration contingent on ineligibility for all social services. that way, people will be forced to leave if there is no work and can easily come if there are open jobs.
that said, i think practically this would harm our quality of life. our cities are already breaking. look at how poorly the yankees handled the few thousand illegals we shipped to their "sanctuary cities".
> Someone being able to prove they are who they say they are is only dystopian to a vocal minority.
There are plenty of non-dystopian ways for people to do that. I was able to prove that I'm ComposedPattern by typing my password. For a higher-stakes identity, I might provide biometrics or show that my appearance matches a previously-provided photo. Those things are possible without involving the state. In fact, it might surprise you to learn that people got healthcare and paid for housing before the early 20th century! The government doesn't enable people to prove who they are. It forces people to use a single state-controlled identity for, at first, just government services... then finance, then healthcare, then transportation... and now there are bills being proposed everywhere to require government ID for "age verification" to use porn sites or "social media".
One cpupd also use, and I think this might be a brilliant start-up idea, use a device, maybe a cube or so, to scan biometrics of people... Maybe in exchange for, I don't know, NFTs or so.
Or one could simply trust a democratically elected government with that instead...
Children, who don't experience sexual desire, are not interested in pornography. Whenever I encountered lewd content as a child, my reaction was always "uggh... adults are so gross" and I'd skip over it if I could. Children don't seek out pornography, and they spend almost all their time online on platforms like YouTube that don't host pornography that they might see inadvertently. And if they did see porn for whatever reason – why is this supposed to be such a big deal? As far as I can tell, the harm that comes from a child seeing porn is that they'll be grossed out. It seems roughly as bad as seeing the corpse of a rabbit that was run over by a car – a shame, but not something that we need to Do Something About. People act like encountering sexual content will somehow warp children's minds and make them homosexuals or deviants or something, but as far as I know this isn't based on any scientific evidence. It's entirely about adults' feelings.
> It's a whole lot easier to control the population when you gradually make it harder for them to travel unhindered and untracked.
Cars are required to have registration and license plates, and most of them have GPS tracking as well. If you don't want to be tracked, ride a bicycle.
Plates are only visible from a line of sight (and there has been tons of opposition to automatically reading them with cameras, for good reason.) My car has GPS but that's just a receiver.
Have you tried to take a 500-mile trip on a bicycle? While carrying a hundred pounds of luggage?
Quite the nonsensical argument. Alice pays Bob to rent his house, not her house. This is secondary to the nonsense situation we have at hand though, thanks to usury (aka interest) being normalized.
