Is there an option for "I was born in France and have lived in France for 10 years and was a student in France so why the fuck has the EU made it virtually impossible for me to live here legally simply because my parents are American?"
Give me a visa and the EU would get tax money from me for christ sakes!
ideally #1, but if people can consume finite and slow/expensive-to-change local (town, region, country) resources (public funds, housing, transport, health, education, etc) from the moment of arrival, that seems impractical.
I think it needs more context than that. I've no problem with people being allowed to live/work wherever they like, but what about claiming benefits, not integrating, creating alienating cultures within the culture they've economically migrated to or in other ways making the existing culture worse for the indigenous people of the place they've migrated to?
Not that I'm saying that indigenous people have a right to an intransient culture or that we should expect others to integrate with our culture without our culture integrating with theirs to some extent or that someone that's worked here for some amount of time isn't due to some amount of benefit if they become unemployed or fall ill or we should abandon care of children just because they're parents migrated here rather than were born here.
I guess in general I want people (indigenous or otherwise) to want to be fully functional members of society. Who want to add to society, integrate with their fellow human beings and not sponge off it. Fortunately for us we've a society that's relatively giving to those living off the state (it's not great, but you generally don't starve/end up homeless), which might attract the sort of people that don't want to work. It's a difficult situation with no answers that can be found in legislation without a good deal of people falling through the cracks.
There should be free movement of labour to reflect the free movement of goods and capital, but like with fixing banking, it really needs global market reform. If a system is badly broken you can't fix it in one place only.
So I picked 1, but I don't think it's something a single country can implement in isolation.
I voted for the first one, mainly because I discovered I can't even emigrate to New Zealand unless I'm a millionaire because I'm too old (at 32) to be profitable. New Zealand! I mean, come on...
In principle I'm in favour of a no borders approach. In practice I think that getting from here to there would need to be done in a controlled manner over a reasonable amount of time, so that infrastructure can be expanded where necessary.
People should be free to live and work wherever they like and can find someone in the other country who would like to swap with them, either temporarily or permanently.
There is no absolute right to migrate (or to anything else). The people who own a country are the people who live in it. I cannot speak for anybody else's country.
I myself welcome economically useful or self-supporting migrants, and those who have had to flee their own toxic countries as long as they don't seek to undermine my society.
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pete stevens (from livejournal.com)2010-05-01 01:24 am (UTC)(link)
I'd like a no borders approach, but I think it's very important that you can afford to buy/rent the land/food/services on which you'd reside in your target country.
Rocking up and expecting the existing locals to provide it for you anyway doesn't obviously seem fair unless you have a bilateral agreement that the citizens from your country would do the same for citizens in the target country (which we do within the EU although the level of civil support in countries is currently very different).
It's a shame the Daily Mail has polarised the issue by regularly finding the corner cases where the system is apparently unfair, in that any system of workable rules will have odd cases, despite there being perfectly legitimate questions to ask on the subject.
The government completely failed to plan for the level of immigration we've seen - official figures estimated 5k-13k per year, compared to 185k that actually arrived. These immigrants place legitimate increased demands on hospitals, schools, housing, transport etc. which none of the services have planned for thanks to the governments completely hopeless numbers.
Bilbo Baggins' patience began to wear thin well before the thirteenth dwarf had arrived. Does that make Bilbo a bigot?
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andrewducker) wrote2010-04-30 03:33 pm
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Not sure I entirely agree with your assumption, there! Portugal and Norway are similar countries?
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Give me a visa and the EU would get tax money from me for christ sakes!
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Not that I'm saying that indigenous people have a right to an intransient culture or that we should expect others to integrate with our culture without our culture integrating with theirs to some extent or that someone that's worked here for some amount of time isn't due to some amount of benefit if they become unemployed or fall ill or we should abandon care of children just because they're parents migrated here rather than were born here.
I guess in general I want people (indigenous or otherwise) to want to be fully functional members of society. Who want to add to society, integrate with their fellow human beings and not sponge off it. Fortunately for us we've a society that's relatively giving to those living off the state (it's not great, but you generally don't starve/end up homeless), which might attract the sort of people that don't want to work. It's a difficult situation with no answers that can be found in legislation without a good deal of people falling through the cracks.
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God I can't wait until this debate is over. It's bad enough during non-election times.
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So I picked 1, but I don't think it's something a single country can implement in isolation.
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There is no absolute right to migrate (or to anything else). The people who own a country are the people who live in it. I cannot speak for anybody else's country.
I myself welcome economically useful or self-supporting migrants, and those who have had to flee their own toxic countries as long as they don't seek to undermine my society.
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Rocking up and expecting the existing locals to provide it for you anyway doesn't obviously seem fair unless you have a bilateral agreement that the citizens from your country would do the same for citizens in the target country (which we do within the EU although the level of civil support in countries is currently very different).
It's a shame the Daily Mail has polarised the issue by regularly finding the corner cases where the system is apparently unfair, in that any system of workable rules will have odd cases, despite there being perfectly legitimate questions to ask on the subject.
The government completely failed to plan for the level of immigration we've seen - official figures estimated 5k-13k per year, compared to 185k that actually arrived. These immigrants place legitimate increased demands on hospitals, schools, housing, transport etc. which none of the services have planned for thanks to the governments completely hopeless numbers.
Bilbo Baggins' patience began to wear thin well before the thirteenth dwarf had arrived. Does that make Bilbo a bigot?