TEDxEastEnd - Danny Dorling - A World without border controls in a century

Before a career in academia Danny was employed as a play-worker in children's play-schemes and in pre-school education where the underlying rationale was that playing is learning for living. He tries not to forget this by playing with data surrounding people's lives and representing the results in new, novel and stark ways which usually reveal the inequality of the lives we each live.

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[grimmyuk]

Very light on details as to how all this would work especially in terms of health care and housing.

[iandavidson]

The reason people could move around freely within Europe over 100 years ago was the way travel and the cost of travel changed and was made easier. Border controls will change and the reasons for them, not go away. Water will be the reason for people moving on mass.

[ISMEY]

We are human first almost everything else is secondary. The more I travel the more I see this, besides having borders is pretty much like having open air prison systems.

[willsupper]

I think a number of presumptions here are incorrect. Firstly, he presumes border controls are ineffective. Many examples run counter to this. For example, enhanced border controls have vastly reduced flows of illegal immigration to Australia. Second, he takes the presumption that inequality within countries does not affect immigration flows. Even if all countries had the same mean wealth, then those at the bottom in unequal countries would be encouraged to move to the more equal ones, since they would see a jump in wealth upwards towards the mean. At the moment, wealthy countries are the more unequal countries (partly due to immigration), but even disregarding the above point, countries will continue to want highly skilled immigrants and want to avoid poorly skilled and poor immigrants for the foreseeable future (until even an unskilled migrant brings more economic benefits than the costs in extra spending etc). There are also factors he fails to mention, such as culture. Immigration changes the fabric of society, and many will not want large changes to the culture of the country from immigrants, even if those immigrants have economic parity. Further, resource scarcity due to higher population and climate change may increase costs of overpopulation. For example, some countries may need to admit fewer to enable sufficient clean water supplies to all. I do agree that increased freedom of movement will occur to the changes he discussed, but it will happen predominantly to the most highly skilled segments of society across the world.

[vereferreus]

Such a clear and understandable explanation. Thanx Danny! But if some blunt heads will ever learn from it?

[nassimabed]

Fast forward to 2020: do you still think cross-national inequality is decreasing?

[alex]

laughs in 2020. Seriously though, this is never going to happen. Has this guy ever met a human.

[sylviahall]

I always wonder about passports and border controls so thank you for answering that question I've never understood why they were necessary

[brianjacob]

nations are vitally important. like your take on brexit and the tories, but if you're just pushing a true global government, please stop.