At 06:58 PM 9/9/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote:
Remember, folks, it is _governments_ which interfere with natural movements of people, capital, but not birds.
I don't want to jeopardize my reputation as a List.Racist, but I think one of the longterm (not in the next 15 years) implications of the things we talk about will be the increased lowering of national borders. (Yes, I have long talked about national borders being only speed bumps...here I'm talking about _physical_ borders.)
I assume defacto open borders pretty quickly. We currently have 40 million crossings a year (mostly us and Canadians) but as people get richer that is bound to grow rapidly. Since technology causes wealth and wealthy people like to travel and governments don't like to block wealthy travelers and travelers can increase faster than border guards swamping occurs. What happens when 2000-passenger surface effect aircraft (or other new travel technologies) start showing up on the market and la migra has to deal with high volume travel. They're having trouble with current levels at JFK and Miami. They scale back. I'm not predicting de jure open borders just defacto open borders. And with those who work on the net being able to work from everywhere and nowhere, they will be able to work in countries where they do not have work authorization as easily as a novelist can today. DCF