I agree with you. If nationality/citizenship weren't enforced on people, suddenly so many things would be better. We wouldn't have opressive governments - people would just leave the country and left it to go bankrupt. Countries would be forced to compete on giving the best quality of life to attract labour force. Corrupt governments with inneficient policies and economy would be forced to improve or go broke. We could have decent services offered for people across the globe without huge public debts - just look at how many NGOs are capable of offering help to remote areas basically on donations and good will, now imagine it on scale. I still have hope, though.
Allow me to disagree. China is an opressive government, but that fact gets conveniently ignored by other countries who use it as a factory floor. My own country (Brazil) is riddled with corruption for decades and still economy moves forward driven by credit and consumption. Somalia, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Laos, Burma, just to name a few, are plagued with porvertry as result of bad governance and ethnic genocides but the only movement for change you see there is voluntary work paid by donations - you don't see USA or Europe interested in democracy there because they don't have oil to get sucked or money to buy their crap.
People, particularly rich people, do leave China in considerable numbers. The same with Brazil. States with corrupt or inefficient governments do go bankrupt, sizeable amounts of people leave one way or another, and some of them are forced to improve (for some values of improvement) as terms of their financial rescue.
All the things you mentioned do happen, the issue is that few things concerning large organizations happen fast. Even in near-perfect-capitalist Silicon Valley environment organizations as troubled as Yahoo or Palm can keep on going for quite a while.
Governments might try to prevent people from leaving but at that point they are only buying time.
That's not the problem with citizenship. The problem is, other countries will refuse to let you in, or make your life miserable and you won't have the same rights as citizens.
Of course. Why would they let you just show up? You have to offer your target state something they value, it will depend on the state whether it's cheap manual labour or learned skills, or something else, or in some cases both. Once you can do that, proceed to my second point.
I am a citizen of a wealthy country, but I didn't earn this privilege, I got it by birth, and that gives me more rights than a lot of poor people working here much harder than I do.
Oh, go ahead, eliminate citizenship. Then states will instead privilege their current residents, a rose by any other name.
Countries/states/provinces/regions/cities are organizations of people, by definition people living in the geographical area (minor modern aberrations like small amounts of nonresident citizens notwithstanding). I'm really not sure how you imagine doing away with a notion of citizenship will convince a group of people to allow "others" into "their" group if the others don't offer the group something it values. This isn't evil statesmanship, it's basic human psychology.
I'm really not sure how you imagine doing away with a notion of citizenship will convince a group of people to allow "others" into "their" group if the others don't offer the group something it values.
That's a fair point and I don't know what would happen if we eliminate citizenship. It might be replaced by something just as bad. I'm just pointing out why I dislike the concept, how it is similar to nobility.
