ABSTRACT
The movement of peoples has been historically so widespread that it has a strong claim to being recognized as a ‘civil right’ in much the same way as freedom from ‘tyranny’ and ‘direct abuse’ is today is regarded as a civil right. Since travel enables one to escape inhuman and oppressive conditions, like other civil rights, free movement enables one to achieve the equalization of opportunity. This is best explained by Roger Nett, who writes that, ‘the right of people to equal opportunities is rather clearly the underlying theme of all civil rights today’ quite simply because people have become conscious that the purpose of such things as ‘free speech, religion, and the right to vote’ is ‘to make possible a life that would otherwise be denied, and that it is in this sense that we are most likely to define justice today’.2 But does an argument for greater free movement rights overstate this case? Not so, according to Roger Nett, who writes a system of open migration is preferable today because:
The main and most concrete advantage to all societies, however, is that a major type of social waste would begin to dry up. Adding open migration to the basic human rights would be a giant step, perhaps the biggest we could now seriously imagine, toward providing a functional basis for doing away with situational inopportunity at relatively low world cost. Any other social device for doing the same, including laissez faire, would probably cause much more dislocation and entail more effort. By eliminating one primal cause of poverty and involuntary subordination, it would allow individuals to rise by their individual energies and give hope of real betterment to untold numbers where little now exists. All of this might be done by changing only one key factor. The social waste referred to is of two parts; one is the loss of contributions to overall human purposes – talent for science, production, higher humanistic efforts – from people who are so disadvantaged that they spend
virtually all their time and energies just maintaining life. The other is the amount of concrete effort, including emotional energy, spent by those who try to contain the former. It is hardly possible to measure the costs of all the different kinds of reaction, which may well include undeclared and cold wars and more generally non-cooperation, where cooperation could reasonably be hoped for.3
