Comment by paraknight | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paraknight | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

For half my life I had an Egyptian passport, and for the other a German passport. Having experienced both sides, that bit of paper is without a doubt the most valuable thing I own.

It's hard to quantify the kinds of doors it has opened for me. I was able to get a scholarship to study in the UK that covered home/EU rates (a third of international rates, while I might not have been able to get even a student loan otherwise), get government funding for a PhD that would not have been accessible to me otherwise and other grants, travel to international conferences without thinking twice about visas (unlike many colleagues) meeting people that would impact my career and skipping all sorts of and barriers along the way, and never had to worry about deportation because of the EU settlement scheme, easily become a founder (no visa sponsorship needed), and so much more! Even travelling/business in the the middle East, being German rather than Egyptian is an entirely different life, one that my cousins cannot even begin to imagine.

There's a parallel universe where I'm stuck making ends meet in Cairo where I was born, dreaming of a brighter future, feeling all my potential fade away. I know because my immediate family is that version of me - no less talented or worthy of the opportunities I got because of my nationality!

I see the kind of freedom that I have because of that passport as one of the biggest modern injustices.

> I see the kind of freedom that I have because of that passport as one of the biggest modern injustices.

I think you're confusing a vague and abstract problem of "injustice" with a very concrete and real difference in ways different countries manage their public services and institutions.

You only listed personal benefits that a country like Germany provides to their citizens and the higher education institutions built up by the UK, and how it contrasts with the ones provided by Egypt.

Quite bluntly, this is a discussion over privileges. Not injustice, but privileges. I assure you that countless people from Germany, UK, the EU, or anywhere in the world, would desperately want to have access to the same opportunities. Depicting this as a matter of being granted a passport is at best survivorship bias, and at worse an affront to those who had it but still weren't lucky enough to benefit from the same opportunities.

> different countries manage their public services and institutions.

This is the injustice. The decisions made by these institutions are not just. Sometimes they're business decisions (e.g. a university can make more money price gouging international students, when we're getting an identical education).

There can be an overlap with privilege, but at that point you're arguing semantics. For example, I'm privileged if I don't get racially profiled by the police, but it is also unjust for police to racially profile me. To say that it's down to the institutions/countries/individuals making the decisions is the same argument as "well that bakery is a private business, they can decide not to serve you because of your nationality".

Of course there are Germans and Brits that haven't had the same opportunities that I have had, and of course it wasn't handed to me on a silver platter either; I still had to work hard. But my point is that if I were Egyptian _no_ amount of hard work or luck would have gotten me where I am. It would have been quite literally impossible.

I'm not even going to begin to crack open the can of worms that is the colonial history of the same countries (in my case the real and lingering effect that the UK has had on Egypt). The way you compare the institutions "built by the UK" and the ones "provided by Egypt" makes it sound like "well maybe Egypt should just do better m" when the reality is that the prosperity of these very countries is built on centuries of injustice and blood. Call it what you want but it's injustice all the way down.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com