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Comment by flipbrad | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, I don't see why national borders are so strongly part of the equation. I suppose that depends on your worldview. I live within the Schengen Area, and to me it seem patently obvious that most 'bad things' in the world are hardly affected by national borders. They're typically supra-national (climate change, credit crunch, cracking, etc) or intra-national (most crime, etc. I don't mean to argue for more checks / security measures, overall, but why do you want them to be focused at the border?

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My understanding is World War I. Apparently passports and visas were an innovation inspired by the militarism and nationalism that swept Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century.

However governments rarely divest themselves of power once acquired, and so although many, many more folk are internationalist these years, there exists this relict of national control.

/stills rant about how in the United States, the Social Security was promised never to be used as a universal identifier.

Apparently passports and visas were an innovation inspired by the militarism and nationalism that swept Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Passports were referenced plenty in Around The World in 80 Days, written in 1873. ( http://aroundtheworld.phileas-fogg.net/80days.html )

Although if you mean the systematic use of passports, rather than their invention, yes - Wikipedia Says:

*During World War I, European governments introduced border passport requirements for security reasons (to keep out spies) and to control the emigration of citizens with useful skills, retaining potential manpower. These controls remained in place after the war, and became standard procedure, though not without controversy. British tourists of the 1920s complained, especially about attached photographs and physical descriptions, which they considered led to a "nasty dehumanisation"

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport

I often still marvel when reading the biographies of enlightenment-era people, who often travelled and worked extensively in all sorts of cities and countries. There are often tales of going to Rome for a year or two, then returning to Scotland, then off to Germany for a while, or wherever.

While the modern-EU person can do this without any trouble, anyone from outside the EU (or the US), this is just a pipedream without serious legal money to throw at the visa manufacturing industry.

Nationalism is still heavily with us, and even more so than in earlier times.

Drug trafficking and illegal immigration?

drug trafficking, illegal immigration don't serve as counterpoints; you're putting the cart before the horse

The drugs trade is the flow of narcotics from source to sink. Stopping them at a national border is one approach; stopping them elsewhere in transit (as it leaves the source, on the open sea, at the destination by local police, etc) is another. And then you have one more: tackling the existence of a source and a sink. In other words, you look at supply (i.e. creation/generation of stock) and demand. I believe that this is perhaps the best approach, and it is definitely one to which borders are irrelevant. So I don't really accept that as a counterpoint to what I was saying. In some ways, the fact you thought it was illustrates my point: our focus on borders is simplistic and maybe distracting us from finding more effective approaches that might be inspired by a thorough analysis of the system dynamics.

People trafficking is to some extent the same thing: source, sink, and a flow over many miles from one to the other (maybe across a border, maybe not).

As for illegal immigration, you have a flow that exists because of inequality (i.e. it's a flow down a gradient) - a difference in living standards, job opportunities, safety, etc. This inequality makes the recipient country a sink and the donor country a source. But of course, once again we shouldn't be talking about countries. Some regions are more attractive than others, and people have always moved between them, generally to the gain of one region and the detriment of another. Population flows can be cross-border, or not, despite the similarity in causes. Once again; should borders really be the focal point at which destabilising migrations are addressed by modern, globalised societies?

You got me wrong: I'm saying why they are - I'm not saying they should be.

Without getting into an argument that is very far off the topic: Especially those two things are only made into problems. The first is easily solved by partial legalization and the second is just protectionism.

Human trafficking is the new drugs. Apparently it's enormously more profitable to import sex workers and keep them in a kind of narcotic/whatever assisted slavery, because of the reuse of the person vs. the consuming nature of the drug.

We're getting way off topic but I'd be interested to see a source for that claim. I imagine that the costs associated with a prostitute (food, shelter) would be significantly higher than those associated with a stock of inert crystalline powder, pills, or resin. Even if nominally borne by the prostitute, those greater costs still reduce the profitability of the overall enterprise.

I read a scholarly article on the subject that I unfortunately can't find at the moment but I recall that plausible deniability was one of the big advantages of that enterprise.

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