National Borders and Nationality

I’ve failed to write in my blog for a week, with the excuse that I’ve not been well, but also because I feel I should write something rounded and complete. Today, I decided to write my thoughts and publish, without necessarily getting to the answers. Do please let me know what this provokes, as I would like to bring the strings together into answers.

As a freeman of the City of London, I’ve a slight inclination towards the city state.  The concept was historically about earning the right to trade within the city walls without paying a fine, where one could charge a premium price compared to those trading outside the gates.  To gain that right, there were three routes: by servitude (for apprentices who have served a full apprenticeship to a Freeman or for a valued skilled craftsman presented by a Livery company), by patrimony (for children of Freemen), or by nomination (reflecting having done something good for the city).

Anyone was free to enter the city. If you had earned your money somewhere else, you could rent a place to live. When it came to trading, the city wanted to set standards of competency and only wanted people who met those standards to run businesses.  Note that any freeman could run a business (trade) employing non-freemen (apprentices) as their staff.  The freedom is neither an entry permit nor a work permit; it is a business running permit.

Having passed several times through the immigration lines of both the USA and UK recently, I’ve been thinking about how wasteful the whole process is.  What is that we really fear about foreigners?  Are they really worse than nationals?  Are they coming to sponge off our welfare state?

Most would really like a job to earn their way to a comfortable life.  Yet, I could apply this sentence to foreigners and to nationals alike.

Why do we want this lottery system of where you were born and who were your parents. 

What about history?  What about all the effort in the past that has gone into nation building?  My answer would be to question whether that is really “good”.  It is protective nation or state entities that go to war to defend what is ours.  What do we defend?  The right to deprive others of the opportunities we are so fortunate to have?

I look at the organisations to which the countries of Europe belong: United Nations, World Trade Organisation, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Council of Europe, Organisation for Security and Co-Operation in Europe, European Economic Area, Commonwealth of Independent States, European Union Customs Union, Schengen Area, Eurozone, European Space Agency, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Collective Security Treaty Organization, International Criminal Court, and the Free trade areas of europe: EU(27), EAEC (6), EFTA (4), CEFTA (7), CIS (11), GUAM (4), European Neighbourhood Policy, Eastern Partnership, Euromediterranean Partnership, Mediterranean Union, Transatlantic Free Trade Area, Eurosphere.  What are we up to? Clubs for the boys or really working for an efficient world community?

I am going to suggest we would be better off without most of these national and international structures.  We need something local to handle the garbage and maintain the roads.  We probably need something global like the UN and WTO to police fair play.  But do we really need all this rubbish in between?  I think not.

The power of a company that employs millions of people worries many people.  The power of a country of many millions of people rarely does anything truly national that is for the “good” of the world. 

If you want to travel, you have to have the means to pay. 

Clandestine immigrants pay large sums of money to be sneaked past border controls, usually into thousands of pounds.  They would be better off keeping some of that money to pay rent and be allowed to buy a cheap air ticket.  So a simple rule, every air ticket comes with the obligation to transport the person back to the place of origin if they break the laws of the destination.  Most travellers will not need that, but for the few that do, the airlines and train companies could cope moving such people on the off peak days.

Legalising what everyone wants to do is better than making rules to prevent us from doing it.