Borders
Every country has borders. It's kind of built into the idea of 'country' that there are borders.
I live in Vancouver. Seattle is about 150 miles south of here. There is a border between the two cities that is a country border.
You can't see it.
But if you cross it without the permission of the government of the country you come into you are in trouble.
Once, long ago, I went to Europe on a freighter called the Bell Anthony. She offered a single stateroom for passengers (in this case my friend Phillip and I). We ate with the crew. There was no pool but we were allowed on deck. That was enough. The north Atlantic in November is wild.
We docked at Bremen in the evening. The captain said, "get out". So there we were on the dock in Germany in the dark. I was from a port town and knew how to find my way around docks. We found a street and then a bus and then we got to the youth hostel.
I hitch hiked from there to Great Britain. Point is here; I didn't encounter a border guard or anything like it on that journey until I got off the ferry at Dover. We had to line up and show passports and explain ourselves. I said I'm going to pick flowers for the Sheriff of Nottingham (true :-) and he let me in.
That was 1968.
Now crossing a border is way more trouble. The last time I went to the USA to visit friends I got hauled off the bus and had to wait for the next one while I was checked. The family I was visiting got called to verify my story. I'm pretty sure that that family got checked out too
I'm sure that it's obvious that a paranoid system like that cannot handle thousands of asylum claimants in a timely fashion.
And then we have a world that produces many many asylum seekers. They have to get away or die.
It's not easy. I like Canada as a secular country. I admit I'd be uncomfortable if a lot of religious Americans wanted to move here. What if they were driven by water shortages?
Canada has always been a welcoming country. 60 years ago we embraced draft dodgers from the USA to our benefit. And they felt secure within our border.
These days borders are a bit different. Canada has had trade wars with America for decades now. An example is the softwood lumber trade. In Canada most of our forests are public lands that companies pay a stumpage fee to have the right to harvest. The Americans who harvest from private land complain - seems it means that Canadian wood is cheaper on the market than American wood since we have different rules.
Here in Canada wood processing companies pay the government a stumpage fee for the right to harvest timber from public lands. Americans have to pay extra because the logs come from private land with all the real estate expense that that entails.
I chuckle. The free market thing is to impose a punitive tariff on Canadian wood. The irony is that it's not punitive to Canada - it's a big world and there are lots of customers for our wood. It's punitive an American consumers who need to pay more than they should if the market was free.
My thinking naturally tends towards globalism. I would far prefer a world with no national borders at all. That idea is far away - as the UN shows. The aspiration there was for a global government with universal human rights for everyone. But the UN is too schismatic to have much power, tho they do do a lot of good work in many areas. But it's nothing like a global government.
And really - the American idea of globalism is that the world should play by their rules. "We're the shining city on the hill. Come do things our way" . The British Empire was globalist that way.
I know that there are mass migrations happening now for lots of reasons; people really do need to flee from famine war and gangsters. If a place is not a place where people think they can live without fear and prosper in then of course they want to move.
Easy to understand but it has unintended consequences born of the fact that humanity is now divided into many cultures that all have different ways of getting along. Cultures don't always get along with each other. What's normal or even good to one culture may be horrid and bad to another.
When masses of people move they can create bubbles of one culture within another culture.
Places like Lebanon, and the former Yugoslavia, North Ireland (just a few of many examples) show how dangerous that can be.
Canada is a secular and multicultural society in my experience. We are split into many cultural groups. Anglo, Francophone, Sikh , hindu, Muslim - heck we even have christian nationalists among us.
The irony is, that even as America is challenged about how to handle the pressure at the southern border; so is Canada challenged at -our- southern border.
https://twitter.com/j_n_foster/status/1282915253018169345
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.