What strikes me the most whenever I read about this period is how no-hassle moving between countries used to be. For some reason we think of the modern world as finally "global" and "open", but it doesn't necessarily seem as such when you try to get a visa.
That's an overly romanticized view. Moving long distances was slow and/or expensive. There was little in the way of international banking, so if you wanted to have money in your new home, you had to bring gold or silver or sell other things. If you were robbed, you were pretty much out of luck -- insofar as there were police forces, they weren't much concerned about foreigners.
It's true that you now have to cope with passports and visas, but for most places you might choose to emigrate to, you can expect a more or less fair police force, shops that will take your credit card, ATMs that will translate your money, and Internet to talk to people back home.
Well yes, I understand that this is the price of increased convenience for an average person. I simply feel that there's a certain sense of irony in those new barriers been erected as the old ones fall. Now it's harder to pull a Kosciuszko but easier to post pictures of your vacation on instagram, that's the trade-off here.
Before if someone traveled half way around the world to enter your country you let them in because clearly they were rich or industrious enough to get there in the first place. The deadbeats were excluded by the difficulty of actually traveling. Taxes were minimal and services were minimal so if you let a bunch of poors or refugees or whatever in and half of them did nothing productive it was no big deal either way. Now that any deadbeat can travel across the world and literacy/information is widely available (so the poor in country A know how good things are in country B) many nations have social safety nets countries try to pick and choose who gets in.
Edit: And before anyone thinks they're gonna score cheap virtue points by calling me racist/classist, I'm not using "deadbeat" as a dog whistle for any group(s). I'm talking about people who will be a net negative (definition is ever changing and subject to politics and whatnot) if they stay permanently.
It seems like you're the one trying to score 'cheap virtue points' by signaling your dislike of people you consider to be economic freeloaders to people of similar temperament.
One of the weaknesses of utilitarianism is that it's predicated on an assumption of reliable foresight that's not grounded in fact but is subject to all sorts of selection and confirmation biases.
I notice every time I read about some historical figure too. They just seem to hop in boats and end up in foreign countries willy-nilly.
But I think it's important to remember that we only read the stories of typically-wealthy, often aristocratic people who accomplished enough to have their lives remembered for hundreds of years. There's a lot of survivorship bias here. For every Kosciusko, there's a thousand 17th century people who never once left the village they were born in.
I'm not sure if this comment is serious or sarcasm. Today, for those rich enough to own estates, it is very easy to move between countries, as it always has. Today, it is also much easier than in the past for those not as fortunate to move between countries. How can this be so, given the often onerous immigration requirements between countries? Well, a Polish (or any other European) peasant would have been considered part of the land (the way a house or a well is a fixture on the land it occupies), and would have had to have the permission of his local landowner to even leave the plot of land he/she is fixed to. Moreover, try finding a country who wanted more peasants. There has always been anti-migration sentiment when it came to the poor; the highly regulated, but still slow, systems we have today are a clear improvement over the past impossibility.
I'm not being sarcastic at all. In particular, during the Age of Mass Migration, it was very common for the oldest son who was to inherit the land because of primogeniture to stay home and for his landless young brothers to go try their luck in the New World.
> In particular, during the Age of Mass Migration, it was very common for the oldest son who was to inherit the land because of primogeniture to stay home and for his landless young brothers to go try their luck in the New World.
So, if you belonged to a class where any one of your father's sons was inheriting anything, then you were part of the upper class. The eldest son of peasants could expect the same as his brothers -- an inability to form an estate, acquire meaningful wealth (in the form of capital), and a life of grueling servitude.
It is ludicrous to suggest that it is harder today for the poor to migrate than before. It is much much easier.
I feel the same when reading books or watching films about people doing that in the 50s or the 80s. “Let me just go to Italy and live there for a year.” Completely legally, as far as I can tell, and without being bound by five-year employment contracts. Meanwhile, I'm pretty sure few Western countries want more lowly software developers.
