free migration is not a universal human right
i just want to state that this is my own opinion. i know others will see it differently and this post is gonna get 50 downvotes because people ... idk what people are thinking.
anyways, if you look at world history, sure, people always migrated, but mass-migration of people was rather the exception than the norm, and basically anytime that massive amounts of people migrated at once, it was because they conquered another place and committed a genocide. because there was no general other way to settle a place that's already settled. because of reality constraints: food production doesn't scale linearly with farmers. it scales linearly with land available.
anyways, we live in modern times now and surely things are different? well, kinda, but not fully. yes, when european people settled in america, it did cause dramatic suffering among the native population. there are various estimates out there saying that around 30 million native americans lost their lifes due to disease, famine, violence. (ironically this was probably less devastating than many other genocides that happened in world history when large migrations occurred, because about 10 million native americans survived, which means it's not a complete genocide. still bad though)
anyways, my summary is that basically there's never really been a large-scale migration in human history that hasn't caused chaos on the receiving end. that's why i fundamentally don't see free migration as a universal human right.
comment your opinion
6 replies
My opinion is that if you ever find yourself minimizing a genocide, you should stop and rethink things. Probably everything.
Invest in a keyboard with a shift key.
Right of asylum is enshrined by United Nations in Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.
Don't you think the dominance of urban living and global commerce makes your whole point totally inaccurate? You don't need to kill people and take their land to survive in a new place in the modern world (if that was ever necessary). You simply contribute to the local economy and import more food.
In fact this is exactly what we see happening in virtually all modern waves of migration. Countries that accept immigrants see huge economic benefits and no increases in violence, despite fear-mongering to the contrary.
Remember that when your homeland is on fire
Various cultures have integrated with their newly-conquored realms to various degrees. Being the victor doesn't even guarantee that your culture fully replaces the old. It can and it did sometimes, but not always. The degree to which a people were conquered historically also mattered. Physical genocide (as opposed to a cultural one) was not at all necessary for a victory. In many cases, especially if you wanted the new lands as a vassal, you needed them to do labor to provide tribute and they can't do that dead.