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Ask HN: Should having just political borders and no social borders help?

3 points by m33k44 ↗ HN
If the world follows a system of just political borders and remove social borders, will that reduce the fallout of wars?

In ideal situation I would have said that removing all borders will reduce major conflicts. But we don't live in an ideal world. The "ruling class" will not want to let go of the borders for political reasons. But removing social borders(i.e. allowing people to move across the world unhindered) will help disconnect the masses from the classes. Most of the major wars are started by the classes and millions from the masses die due to that. If the social borders are removed, it will be very difficult for the classes to drag the masses into conflicts due to political reasons/borders. In that case the wars are then relegated to a very small section of the society and hence will be limited and of smaller duration.

with political borders comes jurisdiction, so even if social borders are removed there won't be problem of criminals going unpunished. We do have present structures such as local justice system, international courts etc in place to tackle those issues.

6 comments

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PaulHoule
People in developed countries are afraid that immigrants are going to put stress on the welfare state and other infrastructure. In practice it is the opposite, almost always countries are pretty selfish about who they let in so that immigration actually bolsters the economy and helps keep the welfare state sustainable.

Practically you run into so many issues, for instance in California the residents are opposed to building more housing. Young people in the US might not want to get a college education if they have to pay an order of magnitude more for college than people do in some other country. There is really a lot of fear that employers will take advantage of labor that works for less, etc.

On top of all that there is the fact that people are stressed by the fact that they”re going to die in a world very different from the one they are born in, often people find it hard to take that things have changed and certainly a changing population is part of that.

soueuls
I fail to see why that would be an ideal situation.

1. People should not be interchangeable. Polish hold different values than Cuban. They have their own languages, cultures, values, traits, physical appearances. Keeping borders is also making the world richer. I will be saddened for the rest of my life because I will never experience a massive culture shock like navigators experiences a few centuries ago. Now, I can pretty much have raclette anywhere, Starbucks, McDonalds, KFC, coke, Netflix, Hollywood is pretty much everywhere, and it's sad.

2. If we let go of the borders, we will give up on a vast amount of literature. Fiodor Dostoievski's masterpiece would have never existed if 40% of his population were French, Italians, Nigerian, Polish, Germans.

3. People would just abuse the system, using highly capitalist, low tax countries during their youth and move to socialist countries as they as getting older (of course that does not work, you need borders for this) and it's utterly unfair to let people from outside abuse a contributive system.

m33k44
It actually is counter intuitive, but removing social borders will actually reduce immigration! Here is why, people don't like to leave their motherland unless the situation gets bad. Most people migrate to the countries that have exploited them in some way. E.g. most people from former UK colonies will migrate to the UK, most people from Mexico, south america and China will migrate to the US(Indians started migrating during the cold war, when there was massive pressure on India from the west). Most african countries will migrate to France, and from the recent events most middle-eastern citizens(Iraq, Syria, Libiya and Afghanistan) have migrated to europe and the US, etc. If there is free movement of people, then there is more pressure on the recipient countries to not get into the exploiting expeditions where people from both the recipient country and the target country suffer. That way people from the target countries are less likely to travel to other countries. They will travel only when they require it and most of them would like to go back to their home country(if it is not messed up).
toast0
> . People would just abuse the system, using highly capitalist, low tax countries during their youth and move to socialist countries as they as getting older (of course that does not work, you need borders for this) and it's utterly unfair to let people from outside abuse a contributive system.

The United States is kind of a micro example. Federal taxes are uniform of course, but state taxes and services are not. Retirees tend not to move to high tax, high social services spending states, they tend to do the opposite: move away from California, New York, etc to Arizona, Florida, etc to live less expensively, even if there's fewer services.

soueuls
The US is not a good example, your social welfare is quite limited. Spending your youth in the US accumulating capital at a rapid speed and then moving to a "socialist country" like Sweden or France and living off your investments (bonus points if your new country does not tax foreign incomes)

And you can literally vampirize everyone else, abusive a contributive welfare system without really contributing much.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg, many citizens don't want to live with others from specific countries at a massive scale.

The world would blend too much and become vastly uninteresting.

dagw
The US is actually a good example, but in the opposite way. I know lots of people who moved from Scandinavia to the US in their early-mid 20s, after having finished their free university education, to earn the big money. They almost all came back when they felt it was time to have kids and start a family, so that they could enjoy free child care, parental leave and plenty of holidays.