Up to a million migrants have gathered in Libya, from where they will attempt to sail across the Mediterranean for Europe and, ultimately, the UK. New estimates reveal that there are two million migrants massed in the North African country and that half of them plan to sail to the European mainland and travel on to Britain in the hope of building a new life.  The Guardian.  January 13, 2008.  Full article.

It is a sad truth that being born in, say, Stirling, Scotland (my birthplace) gives you an enormous and completely unfair advantage over someone born in, say, Kigali, Rwanda.  After all the apparent attempts to help developing nations, masses of poor people still want to flee their homelands for the developed nations of the west. 

I am reading American Vertigo, by Bernard-Henri Levy.  In his de Tocquevillian enterprise, among many other places, he goes to the United States/Mexico frontier.  Every year, there are numerous deaths and casualties as Mexicans try to cross from the south to the north in search of a better life.

The movement of capital long ago transcended national boundaries, and to give an example, large fruit companies like Del Monte and Dole think nothing of amassing huge wealth and then violating the tax laws of their countries of origin.  That’s because they are big and powerful enough to find large off-shore tax havens and because governments generally are too scared to prosecute (or even regulate) the rich.

In this light, it seems a gross injustice to prohibit people from going to whatever place capitalism has created the most prosperity.  Indeed, I have heard it argued that open migration is self-evidently fair and humane, so much so that governments must work doubly hard legally and in terms of propaganda in order to criminalize it.

Unlike the millions of people who are prepared to put their lives at risk in journeying from Africa to the UK (and the millions of Mexican counterparts who eye America with similar desperate hope), I enjoy the right of UK citizenship.  I did not work for this. 

I currently enjoy Canadian citizen as well as UK citizenship — something I only barely worked for.  For $200 and about 2 hours of study for a multiple choice exam, that new formal piece of paper is now mine.  Of course, the real hard work had been carried out years earlier by my parents.

It goes without saying that these events have made me one of the most fortunate of all people in the world.  And yet, it was all by accident.  Why did I enjoy all these privileges, and not somebody else? 

Advertisement