Free Flows of Goods, Capitals, Services and People
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1. FREE FLOWS OF GOODS, CAPITALS, SERVICES AND PEOPLE
The free flow of capitals, goods, services and people across national borders is a commonly established dogma of the modern Era. It has been a basic principle of many Treaties and Agreements and several theories have been formulated: one of the most important is the “Flow idealism”, whose vision is based on the principles of economic freedom, voluntary exchange and individual initiative, combined with social and environmental consciousness. The goals are several: Peace (meaning the ongoing expansion of non-violent, mutually consenting relationships among human beings), potentially established thanks to limited constitutional Governments (founded on the rule of law) free and open democratic elections and the free flow of goods, services, people, capital, and information across borders; Prosperitiy, since entrepreneurial activities (natural consequence of the free flows) would help billions of poor people thanks to the elimination of professional licensure and other constraints on occupational freedom that nowadays increase their cost of living and reduce their choice of education, health care and housing, and Happiness. When people are engaged in productive and challenging activity in the context of a meaningful and positive community, they are more likely to be happy; as people move up Maslows hierarchy (see picture on the right), and as individuals develop their personal commitments based on love rather than fear, global happiness could be a reality rather than a dream.
So, opening borders would allow billions of individuals to sell their services on an open market more easily. By participation in a global market these people would begin creating significantly more value than they create at present, which would provide immediate benefits to their locales. They could also create a market in human capital development as people around the world discover which capacities lead to a significant increases income, and finally, they would create a bottom-up initiative (rather than the actual top-down process) that supports stable government, a fundamental success factor for global peace. But what has emerged, especially in the last decades, is the fact that while free flows of goods, capitals and services seem to be whished and well accepted all over the word, it appears not be the same with people.
The question follows: are, in fact, individuals completely free to move all over the World? And if not, why?
2.MIGRATION
2.1 Definition and types
Migration is considered one of the defining global issues of the modern times, a very complex phenomenon that has an incredible socio-economical potential but that nowadays, being very badly managed, seems to bring more troubles than actual benefits. In fact, there is not a worldly recognized definition of Migration, at least accordingly to the IOM (International Organization for Migration), the principal intergovernmental organization in this field in the whole World. The UN provides us a definition, referring to migrant as ” an individual who has resided in a foreign country for more than one year irrespective of the causes, voluntary or involuntary, and the means, regular or irregular, used to migrate”, while the common usage would include in the definition “certain kinds of shorter-term migrants, such as seasonal farm-workers who travel for short periods to work planting or harvesting farm products”. Migration is an ambiguous concept as well, since we can count different types: the first distinction is between internal and external. The first one is domestic, meant as within the National borders, while the second is the international migration; about that, we are going to focus our attention on the “South-North parts of the World” movement, since its the most significant nowadays and its still increasing exponentially, as we can see from the graph below:
The second distinction is between permanent and temporary migration; in the first case the individual moves to the destination Country for the rest of his/her life, while in the second just for a defined period of time. The final distinction involves law and regulations, since its the legal and illegal migration trade-off. We all know the definition of illegal migrant (an alien or “non-citizen” who has entered a Country without government permission or stayed beyond the termination date of a visa), but we should probably spend few words on refugees. According to the definition, a refugee is “any person who owing to a well founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his/her nationality and is unable, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself/herself of the protection of that country”: as a matter of fact, the refugee isnt considered as an illegal migrant.
2.2 History
The history of migration began with the human history. At the beginning very few restrictions limited the phenomenon; in fact, migrant just needed to be able to afford a ticket and survive a very basic health check on the arrival to the destination Country.
The very first population that had to face restrictions were Asians, since in the 1850s in the Australian colonies laws began to be passed to keep out Asians (the so called “White Australia policy”) and in the 1880s, Canada and the United States followed suit, effectively closing the door on Asian migrants.
But its especially in the 1920s and 1930s that sharp restrictions were set on voluntary migration across much of the world; the reasons were several, such as xenophobia, economic recession and the labor shortage, all consequences of World War I.
The situation changed after the Second World conflict: the emergence of “guest worker” (Gastarbeiter) in Western Europe started a period of de-regulamentation, thanks to which Countries (especially Germany) thought they could hire mainly young men to work for short periods with no expectation of winning rights as citizens or being allowed to bring in families, but things didnt go that way since, as Max Frisch stated, “We wanted workers, we got people”. Permanent migration had just re-begun. As workers ties with their home countries loosened, their economic roots in Germany deepened, although with consistent problems of social integration and acceptance.
At the same time, many of the former European colonial powers saw arrivals from their former