Yeah, of course it’s really a level setting problem, and I think you raise a solid argument against *unrestricted* immigration, but we’re so far away from a world where that’s an issue that I’m not super concerned.
In practice, I am usually encountering the deepity you obliterated in this piece, wielded by people who are essentially wholly against any immigration, so when I say “I’ll add it to the arsenal” I merely mean that it’s nice to be able to play rock when someone else plays scissors. It’s not the whole game, but it’s an important component.
I actually really like your argument about institutional quality vs immigration, so I’ll take a version of that too; I just don’t anticipate using it as often.
Not sure if you're familiar with U.S. immigration numbers over the past two centuries, but we're at about 1/13 being foreign born at present, on par with where we were in the 1880s-1910s - a previous high point. Some argue that we're seeing the same dynamics play out that we saw during that period (a Gilded Age, the Progressive-Populist era) - anemic economic growth, flat total factor productivity, declining birthrates, widening wealth gaps, declining trust in institutions, a rise in political polarization and general violence, and the emergence of populist and reformist politics as the middle and working classes are squeezed.
Back then, the legislative fix mainly came through the three different Exclusion Acts of the 1880s, largescale deportations and precedent setting Supreme Court cases re: Mexican/U.S. cross border movement in the 1910s, and then the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 - which pretty much shut things down up until '65 and Hart-Celler.
Peter Turchin has some of the largescale data sets on this, and then for deeper dives into this era historians like Kathleen Hernandez (Bad Mexicans), Jackson Lear, Richard White, and Charles Postel might be of interest. For more on the social cohesion side of the argument, you might want to check out Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone). There's even some correlation between stronger walls as it were and higher birthrates and generally better broad measures of well- being, mainly from a demographer and academic named Paul Morland - check his stuff out too if you're interested.
For a more philosophical or political-theoretical angle, I'd probably recommend Wolfgang Streeck's "Taking Back Control?: States and State Systems After Globalism." For an intellectual history of globalism and open borders, I'd probably recommend something like Quinn Slobonian's "Globalists" or RR Reno's "Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West."
My impression is that neoliberal open borders advocates tend to be pretty outclassed when in the political arena, largely because they have to argue against a whole mountain range of data, historical experience, lived experience, and common sense. Every once in a while, you'll get an Yglesias or a Caplan who comes out and says "yes, we need 1 billion Americans", and argues for it on principle or on libertarian/neolib grounds, but these same people tend to also say a lot of other crazy things too, which makes me think they take these positions to be contrarian, which is kind of their business model as content creators.
I'm open though! So if either of you have good recs for a strong argument for open borders, I'm all ears!
I appreciate the recommended reading. I don’t know most of those authors, though I have read Turchin’s “End Times.” I like his notion of cliodynamics, but in practice there’s so much uncertainty and dynamical chaos in society at that scale, that I’m not sure how well it extrapolates.
I don’t buy the argument that immigration caused the gilded age, and that the exclusion acts are what resolved those issues; perhaps these authors you’ve listed can explain how there’s causation, not just correlation. Even if I grant that point, it’s another large leap to suggest that the same dynamics are playing out now. Much is similar, but much is different (e.g. financialization of the economy, modern technologies, etc.) and I think it’s too neat a parallel.
I’m not a neoliberal, nor an open borders advocate; I would imagine that our core difference is that I simply don’t think that immigration is as big an issue as you do, so I’m fine with more of it occurring.
I appreciate that your comment presents an actual good faith argument even if I don’t find myself persuaded. I will investigate these points you’ve raised in more detail, but I don’t think I have much more to say on the topic at present.
The book to read by Turchin is Age of Discord. The correlation is basically supply and demand related - when you add a bunch of low skilled labor, you depress demand for it, and wages go down. The rich - who now enjoy bigger margins on labor arbitrage - get richer while the poor get poorer. And so during the Gilded Age the rail and mining and cattle barons, the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers and Morgans and others, were able to break strikes more easily, slash wages, and exercise a massive advantage over labor. Only when immigration is cut off in '24, and labor markets tighten again, is someone like FDR able to come in and reign capital in and are people able to recover.
You don't have to take my word for it or any of the historians I've mentioned though. Just look at the lived experiences of the people who were around back then. They were poor and miserable, and they knew it. Conditions were getting worse, and the high rate of immigration was very much a part of this - and so they pushed immigration restriction through.
Note that it was during the New Deal era, that period from roughly 1932 to 1965, that the middle class thrived, wealth gaps shrank, and the birthrate boomed. This was a period of almost no immigration. Again, Hart-Cellar passes in '65. It would take a while for the full impact of near open borders to start hitting again and we didn't get the 1st big amnesty until '86 under Reagan - but already by '73 total factor productivity is flatlining, wealth gaps are creeping up in the 80s, and we're losing ground across a whole host of well-being measures. Check out economist Robert Gordon for more on this, or Jefferson Cowie's history on the turn against labor in the 70s ("Stayin' Alive"), or Judith Stein's "Pivotal Decade" for more on all of this.
For a really up to date read, you should check out some of David Autor's work too, in white paper form (he's at MIT). Basically, communities that "traded" manufacturing for low end service jobs - and then brought in low skilled immigrants to work those jobs - have had decades now of lower economic growth and other maladies - deaths of despair, etc (see Deaton). Part of it is China shock, but another big input is domestic labor deskilling and inflows of cheap immigrant labor.
You can also narrow in and look at sets of states that lived off of cheap labor, or single states that do. For the former, consider the Confederacy. Due to their reliance on cheap slave labor, wealth gaps between the planter class and everyone else were massive, and it put them at a huge disadvantage not just relative to pockets of the industrialized northeast, but also to the agrarian mid-west - where output, health, birthrates, and education levels were always higher.
Or scale down to the state level and focus on the present and consider the states that have the highest per capita rates of immigrants in the workforce - CA, NJ, NY. All three have out of control living and housing costs, and large and growing wealth gaps. All three also have some of the highest rates of citizen outmigration as the middle class are getting squeezed out.
And honestly, this is what gives me the most hope. My side doesn't even really need to win this argument, because winning it is baked in. High rates of immigration are just a socio-political and structural loser in that they indirectly drive a decrease in electoral weight in national politics. Places like CA, NJ, and NY are literally cannibalizing themselves via sustained, high rates of immigration and no one looks at these places and says "oh, I think that should be our future!" So the argument is kind of academic. People on the street, who aren't reading any of this, know it just from living it. Hence the 1 in 5 voters of color who just switched to Trump. Hence the massive drop in Democratic party registration in every single state that measures this that's been in the news this week. Hence things getting so shitty for even the creative class in NYC, that they're going to elect a socialist, and reinforce to the rest of the country before the midterms and the election of '28 that the open borders left is broken and crazy and should not be emulated.
This might help with the scaffolding of facts part of this essay, but there's a nice book by David Frye on the history of walls and physical boundaries called "Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick." People here might want to check it out. It's essentially a chronological record of the phenomena, from the border wall builders of Sumer and Assyria in ~2500 BCE, to the long walls of Athens, Rome's various border walls (Hadrian's, the Rhine defenses, walls on the "Asian" frontier in modern day Syriah), China's Great Wall, Alexander's "gates," the walls of Byzantium, various walls thrown up by empires and kingdoms on the southern periphery of Eurasia, the walls of Constantinople and so on, and then into the modern era some nice treatment of the Maginot line as barrier, our own border walls with Mexico, the DMZ between the two Koreas, and Israel's border walls.
The book also deals with the consequences of when walls are breached; nations basically falling as a result.
There are also some pretty good books out there on mass migrations and what the movement of people can sometimes look like, in both antiquity and the modern era - like "1177 BC - the Year Civilization Collapsed," Peter Heather's trilogy on the Goth migrations that brought Rome down and Bryan Ward-Perkin's work on the same, Alfred Crosby on migrations to the new world at the dawn of modernity, and Paul Collier's "Exodus" on modern mass migration from the global south to the north. For Americans who want to look into what mass migration did to indigenous communities in New England I'd probably recommend something like "This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving" by David Silverman, or "Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld" for an account of Anglo migrations and settler movements.
Given the history here, and just the common sense associated with walls, borders, and communal or social integrity, I can see why and how arguing against it is so hard. You have to engage in a lot of casuistry and weird word and logic association games to make the position make any sense, and even then, it kind of doesn't. Maybe this is why politicians who previously wanted to decriminalize border crossings a few years ago are now mostly on the backfoot. And then there's just the lived experience and "headline" part of it - like the $12B budget hole NYC got hit with last year that resulted in cuts to other city services because they were paying for migrants, or the 21 state AG's who are now suing the Trump admin to stop the BBB from cutting off Medicaid and Head Start resources for migrants, after telling us that those resources weren't being used for that. Or just this week, where an undocumented semi-truck driver from India - who managed to get a commercial license in CA - attempted a u-turn on a highway in FL and killed a family of three. Or the actual data we have now on border crossings and net migration and immigration numbers post-Trump's crackdown.
It all seems to indicate that yes, open borders do come with pretty high costs, and yes - we can in fact do something about this.
> For most of human history, Immigration Restriction at borders was practically impossible for most states.
Seems like a big claim. For most of history, when states existed, controlling borders was trivial because there was a trivial flow. It was even possible at the village level to decide on whether travellers could stay or be forcibly pushed on.
Yes, it's much more common to control immigration at the population-center level than at the border level.
"For most of history, when states existed, controlling borders was trivial because there was a trivial flow" I don't think this is accurate, on like 3 different levels. Controlling borders was not trivial (and usually wasn't done), flow was often high, and the "because" doesn't make sense because it wasn't done.
Migration was really tiny during the Middle Ages. Most people were tied to the land. There was some pickup in Europe after the renaissance but again the figures were trivial. During this time states actually deported groups they didn’t like.
By 1946 most people in Europe were descendants of the people there in 1000AD, where they were by the high Middle Ages.
Prior to that, of course, after the collapse of the Empire there were large population flows which weren’t of great benefit to the natives, and after the era of colonisation there were large population flows to the colonies that were not beneficial to the natives.
The issue is that travel is much, much easier now than it was in the past. You didn't need immigration restrictions when the fastest ways to get around were horses and sailboats.
"In the modern (State Control AND Immigration Restriction) sense of "borders" that people are often referring to, borders were not enforced for most of human history, and yet countries definitely existed before the 1800s."
This just is NOT FREAKING TRUE. They controlled borders for taxes and health. For Millenia. And they were very particular about taxes; even in Mesopotamia. Just bogus facts.
Every sovereign entity, across the universe (and China trade is fascinating) is conscious of their boundaries of police powers, and whom and whom not is their subject. (Taxes or raise an Army); This is a ridiculous conversation.
You can have a legitimate conversation about migration patterns and how early sovereign’s dealt with the issue…but to say it didn’t exist; is a lie. Plain and simple. Good day.
[P.S. I believe the first legislation in the US was re trade and borders. I imagine every sovereign, that was their first “law”. Trade and borders. But I am not a Mesopotamian or Chinese legal historian.]
The article takes pains to explain what borders historically mean, and why it's different from the modern conception. It's a specific conceptual point I made!
Also, I want to add, that all your example are land borders; and you fail to mention at all maritime borders, or port borders etc. Which is kinda odd if you are trying to make a point. [Which oddly leaves out disease control re the black plague and the responses by states.] [Also, by doing that, it seems you don't mention Athens, a port city, and other Island States and their control of 'movement'.]
Your conceptual point, is factually incorrect. That is all. Acknowledge the history and do some research. You can argue that people misunderstood legal words for all of history, or that concepts changed words. Sure. But your factual statement above, is wrong.
Referencing this statement: "borders were not enforced for most of human history"
Are you deliberately misreading me? The full statement was "In the modern (State Control AND Immigration Restriction) sense of "borders" that people are often referring to, borders were not enforced for most of human history,"
If you have trouble understanding my point, I recommend asking a friend or plugging my article into a LLM, without saying who said what, and asking them for a summary and analysis.
Condescending won't get you out of this pickle my friend. You really need to do some research. Let the public decide who is right. Have a good day. End.
And people should know better; it's in the bible. Joseph accuses his brothers of spying, because they entered through different gates. Now how would Joseph know this, if there were no freaking border control?
In fact, major cities had to assure food and resources to their population; so they were VERY aware of foreigners. (Which is the reason the Bible does say to treat a sojourner as equal and fair; not illegal aliens.)
But every society in history were aware of their enforceable borders. Every sovereign or lord; everyone.
Really like the historical counterexamples! I’ll be adding this argument to my arsenal going forward. Well argued, and well done!
Thanks! To be clear, I'm not saying there are *no* good arguments against immigration (I outlined one after reading the book on Open Borders here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/myp9Y9qJnpEEWhJF9/linch-s-shortform?commentId=v24cNDwgC2w2GmzEM), just that this particular one is very bad.
Yeah, of course it’s really a level setting problem, and I think you raise a solid argument against *unrestricted* immigration, but we’re so far away from a world where that’s an issue that I’m not super concerned.
In practice, I am usually encountering the deepity you obliterated in this piece, wielded by people who are essentially wholly against any immigration, so when I say “I’ll add it to the arsenal” I merely mean that it’s nice to be able to play rock when someone else plays scissors. It’s not the whole game, but it’s an important component.
I actually really like your argument about institutional quality vs immigration, so I’ll take a version of that too; I just don’t anticipate using it as often.
Not sure if you're familiar with U.S. immigration numbers over the past two centuries, but we're at about 1/13 being foreign born at present, on par with where we were in the 1880s-1910s - a previous high point. Some argue that we're seeing the same dynamics play out that we saw during that period (a Gilded Age, the Progressive-Populist era) - anemic economic growth, flat total factor productivity, declining birthrates, widening wealth gaps, declining trust in institutions, a rise in political polarization and general violence, and the emergence of populist and reformist politics as the middle and working classes are squeezed.
Back then, the legislative fix mainly came through the three different Exclusion Acts of the 1880s, largescale deportations and precedent setting Supreme Court cases re: Mexican/U.S. cross border movement in the 1910s, and then the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 - which pretty much shut things down up until '65 and Hart-Celler.
Peter Turchin has some of the largescale data sets on this, and then for deeper dives into this era historians like Kathleen Hernandez (Bad Mexicans), Jackson Lear, Richard White, and Charles Postel might be of interest. For more on the social cohesion side of the argument, you might want to check out Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone). There's even some correlation between stronger walls as it were and higher birthrates and generally better broad measures of well- being, mainly from a demographer and academic named Paul Morland - check his stuff out too if you're interested.
For a more philosophical or political-theoretical angle, I'd probably recommend Wolfgang Streeck's "Taking Back Control?: States and State Systems After Globalism." For an intellectual history of globalism and open borders, I'd probably recommend something like Quinn Slobonian's "Globalists" or RR Reno's "Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West."
My impression is that neoliberal open borders advocates tend to be pretty outclassed when in the political arena, largely because they have to argue against a whole mountain range of data, historical experience, lived experience, and common sense. Every once in a while, you'll get an Yglesias or a Caplan who comes out and says "yes, we need 1 billion Americans", and argues for it on principle or on libertarian/neolib grounds, but these same people tend to also say a lot of other crazy things too, which makes me think they take these positions to be contrarian, which is kind of their business model as content creators.
I'm open though! So if either of you have good recs for a strong argument for open borders, I'm all ears!
I appreciate the recommended reading. I don’t know most of those authors, though I have read Turchin’s “End Times.” I like his notion of cliodynamics, but in practice there’s so much uncertainty and dynamical chaos in society at that scale, that I’m not sure how well it extrapolates.
I don’t buy the argument that immigration caused the gilded age, and that the exclusion acts are what resolved those issues; perhaps these authors you’ve listed can explain how there’s causation, not just correlation. Even if I grant that point, it’s another large leap to suggest that the same dynamics are playing out now. Much is similar, but much is different (e.g. financialization of the economy, modern technologies, etc.) and I think it’s too neat a parallel.
I’m not a neoliberal, nor an open borders advocate; I would imagine that our core difference is that I simply don’t think that immigration is as big an issue as you do, so I’m fine with more of it occurring.
I appreciate that your comment presents an actual good faith argument even if I don’t find myself persuaded. I will investigate these points you’ve raised in more detail, but I don’t think I have much more to say on the topic at present.
The book to read by Turchin is Age of Discord. The correlation is basically supply and demand related - when you add a bunch of low skilled labor, you depress demand for it, and wages go down. The rich - who now enjoy bigger margins on labor arbitrage - get richer while the poor get poorer. And so during the Gilded Age the rail and mining and cattle barons, the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers and Morgans and others, were able to break strikes more easily, slash wages, and exercise a massive advantage over labor. Only when immigration is cut off in '24, and labor markets tighten again, is someone like FDR able to come in and reign capital in and are people able to recover.
You don't have to take my word for it or any of the historians I've mentioned though. Just look at the lived experiences of the people who were around back then. They were poor and miserable, and they knew it. Conditions were getting worse, and the high rate of immigration was very much a part of this - and so they pushed immigration restriction through.
Note that it was during the New Deal era, that period from roughly 1932 to 1965, that the middle class thrived, wealth gaps shrank, and the birthrate boomed. This was a period of almost no immigration. Again, Hart-Cellar passes in '65. It would take a while for the full impact of near open borders to start hitting again and we didn't get the 1st big amnesty until '86 under Reagan - but already by '73 total factor productivity is flatlining, wealth gaps are creeping up in the 80s, and we're losing ground across a whole host of well-being measures. Check out economist Robert Gordon for more on this, or Jefferson Cowie's history on the turn against labor in the 70s ("Stayin' Alive"), or Judith Stein's "Pivotal Decade" for more on all of this.
For a really up to date read, you should check out some of David Autor's work too, in white paper form (he's at MIT). Basically, communities that "traded" manufacturing for low end service jobs - and then brought in low skilled immigrants to work those jobs - have had decades now of lower economic growth and other maladies - deaths of despair, etc (see Deaton). Part of it is China shock, but another big input is domestic labor deskilling and inflows of cheap immigrant labor.
You can also narrow in and look at sets of states that lived off of cheap labor, or single states that do. For the former, consider the Confederacy. Due to their reliance on cheap slave labor, wealth gaps between the planter class and everyone else were massive, and it put them at a huge disadvantage not just relative to pockets of the industrialized northeast, but also to the agrarian mid-west - where output, health, birthrates, and education levels were always higher.
Or scale down to the state level and focus on the present and consider the states that have the highest per capita rates of immigrants in the workforce - CA, NJ, NY. All three have out of control living and housing costs, and large and growing wealth gaps. All three also have some of the highest rates of citizen outmigration as the middle class are getting squeezed out.
And honestly, this is what gives me the most hope. My side doesn't even really need to win this argument, because winning it is baked in. High rates of immigration are just a socio-political and structural loser in that they indirectly drive a decrease in electoral weight in national politics. Places like CA, NJ, and NY are literally cannibalizing themselves via sustained, high rates of immigration and no one looks at these places and says "oh, I think that should be our future!" So the argument is kind of academic. People on the street, who aren't reading any of this, know it just from living it. Hence the 1 in 5 voters of color who just switched to Trump. Hence the massive drop in Democratic party registration in every single state that measures this that's been in the news this week. Hence things getting so shitty for even the creative class in NYC, that they're going to elect a socialist, and reinforce to the rest of the country before the midterms and the election of '28 that the open borders left is broken and crazy and should not be emulated.
This might help with the scaffolding of facts part of this essay, but there's a nice book by David Frye on the history of walls and physical boundaries called "Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick." People here might want to check it out. It's essentially a chronological record of the phenomena, from the border wall builders of Sumer and Assyria in ~2500 BCE, to the long walls of Athens, Rome's various border walls (Hadrian's, the Rhine defenses, walls on the "Asian" frontier in modern day Syriah), China's Great Wall, Alexander's "gates," the walls of Byzantium, various walls thrown up by empires and kingdoms on the southern periphery of Eurasia, the walls of Constantinople and so on, and then into the modern era some nice treatment of the Maginot line as barrier, our own border walls with Mexico, the DMZ between the two Koreas, and Israel's border walls.
The book also deals with the consequences of when walls are breached; nations basically falling as a result.
There are also some pretty good books out there on mass migrations and what the movement of people can sometimes look like, in both antiquity and the modern era - like "1177 BC - the Year Civilization Collapsed," Peter Heather's trilogy on the Goth migrations that brought Rome down and Bryan Ward-Perkin's work on the same, Alfred Crosby on migrations to the new world at the dawn of modernity, and Paul Collier's "Exodus" on modern mass migration from the global south to the north. For Americans who want to look into what mass migration did to indigenous communities in New England I'd probably recommend something like "This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving" by David Silverman, or "Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld" for an account of Anglo migrations and settler movements.
Given the history here, and just the common sense associated with walls, borders, and communal or social integrity, I can see why and how arguing against it is so hard. You have to engage in a lot of casuistry and weird word and logic association games to make the position make any sense, and even then, it kind of doesn't. Maybe this is why politicians who previously wanted to decriminalize border crossings a few years ago are now mostly on the backfoot. And then there's just the lived experience and "headline" part of it - like the $12B budget hole NYC got hit with last year that resulted in cuts to other city services because they were paying for migrants, or the 21 state AG's who are now suing the Trump admin to stop the BBB from cutting off Medicaid and Head Start resources for migrants, after telling us that those resources weren't being used for that. Or just this week, where an undocumented semi-truck driver from India - who managed to get a commercial license in CA - attempted a u-turn on a highway in FL and killed a family of three. Or the actual data we have now on border crossings and net migration and immigration numbers post-Trump's crackdown.
It all seems to indicate that yes, open borders do come with pretty high costs, and yes - we can in fact do something about this.
> For most of human history, Immigration Restriction at borders was practically impossible for most states.
Seems like a big claim. For most of history, when states existed, controlling borders was trivial because there was a trivial flow. It was even possible at the village level to decide on whether travellers could stay or be forcibly pushed on.
Yes, it's much more common to control immigration at the population-center level than at the border level.
"For most of history, when states existed, controlling borders was trivial because there was a trivial flow" I don't think this is accurate, on like 3 different levels. Controlling borders was not trivial (and usually wasn't done), flow was often high, and the "because" doesn't make sense because it wasn't done.
Migration was really tiny during the Middle Ages. Most people were tied to the land. There was some pickup in Europe after the renaissance but again the figures were trivial. During this time states actually deported groups they didn’t like.
By 1946 most people in Europe were descendants of the people there in 1000AD, where they were by the high Middle Ages.
Prior to that, of course, after the collapse of the Empire there were large population flows which weren’t of great benefit to the natives, and after the era of colonisation there were large population flows to the colonies that were not beneficial to the natives.
I feel like you keep switching arguments.
The issue is that travel is much, much easier now than it was in the past. You didn't need immigration restrictions when the fastest ways to get around were horses and sailboats.
"In the modern (State Control AND Immigration Restriction) sense of "borders" that people are often referring to, borders were not enforced for most of human history, and yet countries definitely existed before the 1800s."
This just is NOT FREAKING TRUE. They controlled borders for taxes and health. For Millenia. And they were very particular about taxes; even in Mesopotamia. Just bogus facts.
Sick and tired of this slop.
> usually only for population centers, not for all of the states' official boundaries.
Every sovereign entity, across the universe (and China trade is fascinating) is conscious of their boundaries of police powers, and whom and whom not is their subject. (Taxes or raise an Army); This is a ridiculous conversation.
You can have a legitimate conversation about migration patterns and how early sovereign’s dealt with the issue…but to say it didn’t exist; is a lie. Plain and simple. Good day.
[P.S. I believe the first legislation in the US was re trade and borders. I imagine every sovereign, that was their first “law”. Trade and borders. But I am not a Mesopotamian or Chinese legal historian.]
The article takes pains to explain what borders historically mean, and why it's different from the modern conception. It's a specific conceptual point I made!
Also, I want to add, that all your example are land borders; and you fail to mention at all maritime borders, or port borders etc. Which is kinda odd if you are trying to make a point. [Which oddly leaves out disease control re the black plague and the responses by states.] [Also, by doing that, it seems you don't mention Athens, a port city, and other Island States and their control of 'movement'.]
Your conceptual point, is factually incorrect. That is all. Acknowledge the history and do some research. You can argue that people misunderstood legal words for all of history, or that concepts changed words. Sure. But your factual statement above, is wrong.
Referencing this statement: "borders were not enforced for most of human history"
Are you deliberately misreading me? The full statement was "In the modern (State Control AND Immigration Restriction) sense of "borders" that people are often referring to, borders were not enforced for most of human history,"
If you have trouble understanding my point, I recommend asking a friend or plugging my article into a LLM, without saying who said what, and asking them for a summary and analysis.
Condescending won't get you out of this pickle my friend. You really need to do some research. Let the public decide who is right. Have a good day. End.
And people should know better; it's in the bible. Joseph accuses his brothers of spying, because they entered through different gates. Now how would Joseph know this, if there were no freaking border control?
In fact, major cities had to assure food and resources to their population; so they were VERY aware of foreigners. (Which is the reason the Bible does say to treat a sojourner as equal and fair; not illegal aliens.)
But every society in history were aware of their enforceable borders. Every sovereign or lord; everyone.
"But every society in history were aware of their enforceable borders. Every sovereign or lord; everyone."
Yes, for state control purposes like collecting taxes and military control. The distinction is clearly written in the article.