Looking for it later by search engine, I see I am not the only one who saw holes in the reasoning. I'm going to ignore what everyone else has to say and just talk about it from my perspective as a US citizen expatriate (not ex-patriot) married to a Japanese citizen, with children who are effected by the Japanese no-dual-citizenship policies.
The borders of the US have been effectively closed since before I got married. I had to prove that the woman I intended to marry would not become a dependent on the state with all sorts of financial info and family affidavits, etc., just to get her into the states for our marriage and my last year of college.
(What finances? I was a struggling student trying to do what Linus Torvalds was doing at about the same time. I had no finances.)
She got her green card, but it cost me time spent at the local immigrations office that could have been better spent on my studies, at bare minimum. And it didn't exactly give her an image of a country willing to accept her, which was no small part of her motivation to return to her country.
In order to even consider having the family move back to the states where there is much more profitable work available for someone like me, I would have to prove things I can't prove about my own financial stability.
Or we would have to go in for some other purpose than staying, then stay anyway and apply from there.
No, just because the kids would have been free to come and go until they were twenty does not mean that their mother would have been free to come and go.
The borders aren't tight closed against me, but they are effectively closed.
This is not a new situation. The borders have been closed for over twenty years.
Okay. Back to the gumballs.
People are not gumballs. Representing even a million people with one gumball robs the argument of significant meaning.
That said, I will acknowledge that Roy Beck's conclusive proposal to help the impoverished people of the world where they are has some merit -- conditionally. I'll mention some of the conditions a few paragraphs down.
The question of open borders is not strictly an immigration question.
Many of the
Yeah. Where they are.
And not a few get training and experience in living in (relative) freedom in the US and take that training, and a lot of basic technical expertise, back with them when they return to their homelands.
Which helps them where they are.
And this is not largess given from above. This is people using their freedom to find creative solutions to the problems back home. This is the best way to help people where they are, in the same way teaching a man to fish is more help than giving him a fish.
If you want people to be dependent on you, give them fish. If you want them to be friends, but independent, take them fishing, show them how you do it, have fun with them. Give them feel-good experiences that will lead them away from trying to overfish the rivers, away from the tendency to try to take control of the market in fish.
People are not gumballs.
With that introduction, here is what I see has to happen if we really want to help people where they are.
We have to first recognize that the things we do in the States are not all appropriate things to teach other people to do. We export a lot of our cultural baggage, and that just weighs the people in poverty down even further.
I want to be specific about that, to give concrete examples, but many of the examples are hot-button topics in the current US.
Let's just admit that young children under ten feeding themselves by selling their bodies may not be what we intended to export, but that's how our indiscriminate use of money and our sexual revolution is hitting the dirt over there.
(There is nothing unusual about this. Japan also saw some of the same things happening, in the early 1900s. You can see it when you read the works of some of the prominent Japanese novelists of that period, for instance, in a novel called Sound of the Mountain -- 山の音、 Yama no Oto -- by Yasunari Kawabata, the main character talks about seeing a young Japanese boy on the train traveling in the company of an older foreign gentleman, and about his feelings when he assumes the worst.)
Helping people where they are means such things as going over there yourself, living for years as they live. Sharing things you know, sure, but also learning from them.
It does not mean giving them money with expectations. If you want to invest or give them grants, find out what they want to do. Get people who know the country and the culture to help you figure out if it's something you want to support them in. If it is, some conditions about the purpose of the money may be in order, but trying to tell them how to accomplish their plans is questionable help at best. Expectations such as making a certain amount of profit by a certain time are definitely out of order.
Then, after you have invested, keep your hands off, but keep in touch. If they tell you they are having problems, ask how what kind of help they need. Always avoid imposing your solutions on them, even when they think they want you to. Get them to tell you what they need.
And always be ready and willing to learn from them what you can. Letting them tell you what they are doing helps them understand what they are doing. Letting them tell you what their problems are helps them understand those problems. Letting them tell you the solutions they've considered helps them understand the solutions well enough to pick the ones that will work.
Sometimes, it requires bringing them to the States for a few months or years to experience a different way of doing things. If you are really going to help them where they are, you need this option, and it doesn't work if you have to wait six months or two years from the time you decide it's a good idea until the time you can bring them to the States to do the work that they need the experience with. Well, six months may not be too bad, but two years (or more) definitely defeats the purpose.
It's not the money or the ideas or the technology that ultimately helps. It's the opportunity to use their own creativity, and the experience they gain doing so.
Now, back to the question of borders.
You can't do this kind of help when your own borders are closed. It just doesn't work.
Help is a two-way street, one
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