Ask HN: Does the world need a “passport equality” movement?

From an ethical &#x2F; fairness perspective, I think that the idea that someone should be prevented from visiting or settling in my country by virtue of their birth situation is utterly ridiculous, abhorrent, and awful.<p>From a logistical perspective, I think that if my country accepted anyone from anywhere around the world, I think that the lovely little picket-fence green England I live in would turn into an absolute hellscape of poverty even faster than it already is.<p>I think most people probably hold those two views simultaneously and try to reconcile them.<p>Passport control is kind of just like a larger-scale way of keeping the supermarket checkout worker out of your Michelin-starred restaurant society Facebook group. They&#x27;d just fuck it up and make it awkward for everyone. Is it fair? No.

As a nomad, and someone who&#x27;s traveled to 40 countries and speaks 3 languages, I&#x27;d personally love to live in a world where passports don&#x27;t exist and people are free to travel to any country they want to. I think trying to make all passports equal is the wrong solution. Passports are issued by the authority of a country, and not all countries have equal authority on the world stage. UN issued passports might be a possible solution, but I can&#x27;t envision global trust in the UN&#x27;s authority. If the UN started issuing passports for stateless people, I can imagine the passport would immediately be treated as a low-status passport by countries, if they even accepted it at all. I think a better solution is to abolish passports altogether, but I can&#x27;t envision that either.<p>The truth is, the world is not an equal place. Never has been, and never will be. In terms of justice, the best we can do is to make sure that those at the bottom have all of their basic needs met, access to opportunities to increase their status, and a continually rising standard of living for everyone via innovation and sustainable development.<p>As an individual, the best one can do is to work hard to obtain a better passport. That&#x27;s what I&#x27;ve done, and there are many opportunities to do so.

I think the UN is already doing way too much. I don&#x27;t want to live in a world where the concept of trust is nullified in the name of equality.<p>I decide who I want to welcome in my home. I believe Thailand, Russia, Brazil, Germany are completely free to do the same and fix their own rules.

The reason there are different passport restrictions, mostly, is wealth&#x2F;income inequality. As countries become richer, their passports typically become stronger. The solution is to attack the root cause of the issue, which is that so much of the world is still so poor.

But this is precisely the point of nationhood at all. Otherwise, what is the meaning of one&#x27;s nationality? This is opportunity which gives you an unfair advantage vs less fortunate nations, which your forefathers created and defended for you and you can enjoy - and defend for your posterity.<p>It is like capital: you can be born into money and enjoy the unfair advantage of never having to work 9-5. Just collective, shared by everyone with the same citizenship. Do we need to abolish private capital too?<p>I come from Soviet Union where we tried to do just that. Result was the worst passport to have, truly :) to the point that the border defences were pointed inwards - to prevent escape rather than infiltration.

I see more and more people believing in a future of big tech players being as authoritative as countries (I am not sure about that but I am hearing that a lot)<p>Imagine passports issued by Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc.. to their workers or to workers of smaller companies using their cloud services. The only thing missing is armies

And how exactly would the UN do that? The countries enacting and enforcing these sanctions, to be blunt, don&#x27;t really care what the UN thinks about much of anything.

If the movement of people was equally balanced and not one way between countries I don&#x27;t see how that would be a big deal.<p>It is easy to say it ought to be equal but then the resulting flows need to be equal too.<p>Likewise it does seem like maybe the country with the worse off passport etc maybe be worse off but its likely there are rules preventing open and complete investment in, e.g owning land without 99 year leases, 51% ownership rules, outright restrictions on foreigners etc to match more open countries too (typically the ones with stronger passports).

Social welfare prohibits any sort of open borders.<p>And I’m not sure why inhabitants of a country that made good economic decisions (e.g. Singapore) should pay for countries that made poor ones (e.g. North Korea).

No, because it is the population that can drive change in a country where politics has restricted them.

Countries are sovereign, and they decide who they allow to pass in (and even out!) or not. The COVID-19 crisis underlined this even more. If you want to live with little to no restraints in a foreign country, become a (good) diplomat&#x2F;spy. Which is limited by supply (and kind of like a tradeoff with the target country).<p>Yes, ideally, this world would be a peaceful place, with no military, no terrorists, no dangers, no security risks, no blackhats, no drug addicts, no gangs, no children military or selling drugs, (screw all that just no crime&#x2F;violence <i>flowerpower &amp; peace sign</i>) etc etc. But in the real world, all of this exists, and a whole lot more. That&#x27;s why not everyone&#x27;s allowed. Then there&#x27;s the economic difference between countries, and power differences. The rich countries want to stay ahead of the curve, and the poor countries want to step up. Any propaganda to reach the goal is warranted. China uses different techniques than USA or EU. Much more authoritarian, for starters. Remember what I said about diplomats&#x2F;spies? Your proposal would open the floodgates.

Yes, we should stop treating the poor of the world as if they were subhumans or a pest waiting to invade our homes.<p>Even from an egoistic perspective, Western countries, especially those whose pension system is an unreformable Ponzi scheme (say Italy) and those with a limited welfare state (eg UK and USA), should stop pretending immigration is a problem.

No. Cultures exist. Races exist. Unique human modes of being exist. One of the most devastating effects of the European Union was the absolute desolation and loss of beautiful cultures in Eastern Europe, such as Croatia and Romania. Entire regions became ghost towns, and major cities became standardized, soulless, faceless blocks.<p>Here&#x27;s a before&#x2F;after review from someone who travelled to Dubrovnik, Croatia before it became part of the EU.<p>&gt; Our impression from that trip was mildly disappointing, because the distinctive culture of the country seemed to be fading into European Union standardization and blandness. The local high cuisine in particular was already long forgotten.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gilbertdoctorow.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;09&#x2F;26&#x2F;re-visiting-dubrovnik-after-a-30-year-absence-september-2021&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gilbertdoctorow.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;09&#x2F;26&#x2F;re-visiting-dubrovnik...</a>

I think one can look at the EU as an experiment of what happens with passport equality.<p>You have countries ranging from Croatia, Poland to Germany and Norway under one common passport.<p>Then you can ask specific questions like whether Germany and Norway has deteriorated by its influx of people from poor EU countries speaking destroying its way of life.<p>It seems to me that the EU experiment shows it’s possible to have passport equality without some downward slide to chaos.<p>One interesting side effect of the EU experiment is how quickly public views EU as a homogeneous block. While in reality the cultural differences between Netherlands and Croatia is probably larger than the difference between France and Morocco.

Are we talking about travel or right to work? The latter tends to be beneficial to both countries as it prevents brain drain without the country having to impose exit bans &#x2F; quotas.

Sure - it does. But it first needs equality between countries. This means that the wage, cost of living, and quality of life is generally quite comparable between countries. One country is not pillaging another and one does not exploit the other - etc.<p>The problem is that neoliberals and capitalists don’t want this because then they can’t have as cheap of a slave class that they currently do. HN is full of these types and why you’re not seeing this recognized further up.<p>Wage inequality is the biggest barrier to a universal passport. You need to get this part done first - and then universal passport and removal of boarders will be good. Then we can just have the United earth federation or whatever BS.<p>But that’s all like 1,000 years from now. By then - I presume we’ll have killed most of our species off and regress back to 1,000 AD.

Idealistically yes. But you should focus on financial inequality first(for example with global remote work accepted as the norm). If all of a poor third world country move to a first world country overnight this is just the same poor country on another continent.<p>I&#x27;m 100% for immigration, but realistically if you just allow everyone to move overnight, it&#x27;s just going to make a big mess unless we first focus on financial inequality.