borders that in so many other ways had effectively come down anyway? And at such a tragic human cost.
Byork,
So, now we're supposed to believe that this practice is going to snowball all around the world ? I think the opposite will take effect as soon as people see their hard earned tax dollars are being used to undermine their own future. Just look at France & Germany.
People coming to another country with next to nothing cost the host more than it's own citizens. How many years do you think you might want to pay more tax to accommodate an unregulated flow of people with no prospect of employment ? It might be good to put up a model for all to see. You might have something quite reasonable in mind but we're not mind readers.

<the idea that people are the problem is an artefact of bureaucratic rule.>

Why then do so many bureaucrats advocate high immigration?

<Capitalism, using prices, can rationalize the scarcity, assigning resources to their most urgent uses *as judged by the people themselves*. Socialism can’t, because without profit and loss it only has rules and regulations to go by – planned chaos. It’s socialism, not capitalism that regards people as the problem.>

Okay, so if a few thousand people suddenly move into my street, any annoyance I might feel about the consequences is as a result of my socialist psyche. Meanwhile, my capitalist psyche should be beaming with all the new opportunity. So the best I can expect is partial happiness.

But what of the notion of quality over quantity? What if the net result of all those extra people was a reduction in the per capita productivity? What do capitalism or socialism have to say about living standards for that matter? Surely quality of life is the purpose of these systems? Such a focus might also save us the inconvenience of fracturing our personalities in the pursuit of happiness.

Byork <300,000 in camps are classified as needing urgent resettlement>

Do you know why those people are in those camps?
Tribal territorial warfare. In every instance it is a war between two ethnic groups(tribes) with the one or both groups hellbent on killing or driving the other tribe from the territory.

Even in democracies where people vote for a leader, it does not prevent these kind of civil wars in fact it is often the catalyst that starts the war when one ethnic group does not accept the handing over of the rule of their country to the other ethnic group via the ballot box.

Do you and the writer of this article want to set up another Palestine-Jewish conflict. The allowing of hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees into Palestine has resulted in the fight over the land we see happening over there.

Don’t think that humans here are any different from humans anywhere else in the world and that it can’t happen here.

Loudmouth <Governments should be playing a far more active role in supporting democracy and opposing corruption in other countries and in strengthening people’s participation in running their own countries and thereby minimising the threat of civil wars, social breakdown, repression and the creation of refugee populations.>

Just how do you propose any government should do this? Should they bring it up at the United Nations when the representatives of all those countries are there. Do those representatives tell them to keep their foreign policy to themselves and butt out?

Does a government invade one of these countries led by a tyrant and seek to impose Democracy and then have the two dominant religious tribes in that country refuse to form a democratic government but instead almost start a civil war murdering the other tribe members over who is going to have a majority rule in the parliament? Yes I am talking about Iraq.

Or does one of these governments try to establish democracy by giving women the vote and allowing them to go to school as in Afghanistan only to have the religious men throw bombs at schoolgirls.

I think what you ask of your unnamed governments is not possible.

How do you change the religious mind-sets of some of these fundamentalist populations. Maybe you could offer a suggestion. Sanctions don’t seem to have changed a thing in these countries. Billions in foreign aid seems to have changed nothing either.

The fact that Australia sends 12Billion in aid to Indonesia didn’t stop the Bali bombings.

Anyway as I said in my post above to Byork, wars, civil or between countries are fights between ethnic bloodlines(tribes) over territorial control. They’ve been going on through the whole of history.

Peter Hume to Byork <you have not eliminated the possibility that population anxiety about open borders is based on fears of scarcity.

But no-one selling water, or housing or services regard it as a problem.

Strange that you should mention the fact that in our big cities and regional towns today we are having to pay much more for water. Water was regarded as extremely plentiful when I grew up and noone even thought of it as being scarce or having to pay big amounts for it. It actually backs up the reality of the fears the public has of things becoming scarcer when populations keep on multiplying. Provides evidence so to speak.

Peter Hume

<There is no future in the past and the day when the people of the world can freely move peacefully and trade between countries will be the fullest expression of our common humanity.>

This is a wonderful sentiment but what we should have learnt from the past and all the conflict in the world today is that this kind of utopia isn’t going to happen for maybe hundreds or thousands of years. We can talk about it and wish it was so all we like but what we have to realise is, that it is not this way and it won’t be for any foreseeable time in the future.

At the biological survival level the human being is unchanged and war will rage across this planet the way it always did and still does. When you watch the great conquerors of history from your nice comfy armchair,Atilla the Hun, William the conqueror and all the thousands of others, realise that nothing has changed the human animal since then and it is not the past but the present you are watching only the clothes and the horses and spears have changed to modern day weapons and attire.

There is an old saying, <wishing does not make it so>