Membership instead of Citizenship

So much blood and tears are poured over the question who is allowed to live where. It’s usually called a debate over immigration, immigration laws and rights and eventually always ends in the “defense of our borders”. There is something inherently immoral with the idea that your place of birth would imply rights to the place that others who happen to have been born elsewhere, don’t have. This immorality is increasing with the increase in the world’s population and with the increase of the differential between poor and rich nations.

 

Apart from being immoral, it is also impractical to try to keep an ever larger population being born into places without opportunity from moving towards opportunity. Desperate people will climb walls and fences, will dodge bullets and swim across streams, they will walk for miles, dig tunnels and hijack planes. They will do whatever it takes to get to the places of opportunity.

 

So, I suggest we abolish the idea of nation states, the idea of rights to countries, the idea of borders controls to keep people out who haven’t committed any crimes and suggest instead a system of memberships. Countries would become like clubs competing for the membership of the people of the earth. Some rotten places like Zimbabwe which have been ransacked by rotten leaders will soon have barely any members left, other places who are highly desirable will become increasingly less so the more people convene there. Ultimately some kind of market system will balance things out and inventiveness and creativity will bring opportunity to those places with barely any members.

 

Naturally, membership comes with all the responsibilities such as paying taxes and adhering to the laws the members enacted. The US started its existence on the basis of open borders because the existing Indian nations weren’t overly territorial or otherwise cheated out of their lands. Nevertheless, the place prospered and one could easily imagine how the injustices could have been avoided and the prosperity could have been shared better. One can easily argue that the relative openness made this place which ultimately became a country as large as a whole continent a much more desirable place then the well guarded fiefdoms of the old world which the folks had fled. There is no reason to believe that the whole world could not prosper much more if we threw away the obsolete idea of nation-states that can close their borders to newcomers.