Why people will get the Right to Migrate
And governments will lose the right to restrict it.

People will get the right to migrate because:
• It is increasingly apparent that it is unfair to restrict where people live based on where they were born.
• Increased prosperity will allow us to feed and clothe everyone wherever they are in the world.
• And low birthrates will make inward migration a necessity for successful societies.

Peter Drucker in “The Effective Executive” writes about the need to understand the underlying assumptions behind a situation and to know how to recognize when the assumptions are wrong. If the current solution keeps requiring more and more complex rules to make it work it is, according to Drucker an indicator of outdated or incorrect assumptions about the underlying situation. He used as an example telecommunications industry regulation and forecast in 1985, when he wrote the book, the regulatory nightmare that the industry would face in the future.

The same thing is happening now to immigration. The United States issues more than 80 different types of visas and keeps adding more, the fee schedule for obtaining a visa is more than 50 pages long and the Canadians, Mexicans, Cubans and Haitians all receive different treatment at the border. Drucker would tell us to find which of our underlying assumptions is wrong and fix it. Adding new patches or barriers to a broken system might delay a total failure of the system but will not fix it. The faulty assumption at the root of today’s immigration problems is the assumption that governments have the right to tell people where they can and can’t live.

In our globalized world trying to restrict movement is becoming more and more difficult. We allow free movement of capital, almost free movement of goods and increasingly free movement of information. Walter Wriston was one of the first to write about this in his book entitled “The Twighlight of Sovereignty” in 1992. His forecasts are coming true.  H. L. Mencken's comment about democracy, “The solution to the problems of democracy is more democracy,” Is also true about freedom of movement.

There are myriad problems with moving toward the freedom to live where you chose. And people of goodwill and their governments will have to solve them. But the problems we will confront by not moving toward more freedom of movement will be much larger and in the long run much less acceptable.