I grew up a few km away from the border to France.
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I grew up a few km away from the border to France. My classroom was 100 meters away from the Rhine. I was in 9th grade when they opened the borders. I was in 12th grade when they introduced the Euro. Visiting other countries in the EU suddenly felt truly magical. "Fuck you" to all politicians in this country who are currently destroying this magical idea for pure populism, to appease some fascists. It's all about staying in power - as if that helped - and I couldn't despise them more for it.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Bastian Allgeier last edited by
@bastianallgeier For context, heavily controlled borders were a 20th century invention. Up to the success of the eugenicist movement in USA, it was fairly common for European people to just wander around, or move to new places, and no political authority particularly minded (with the exception of enslaved people, which was only ultimately abolished with the issuance of the Emancipation Manifesto of 1861by the last remaining absolute monarch of Europe, who also happened to rule the last European country where slavery was legal, Alexandr II of Russia). Borders used to be about preventing hostile military from corssing into a country's claimed territory.
Unfortunately, after WWI, the eugenicists' anti-immigration ideas led to a series of countries establishing civilian immigration controls, and while these were relatively mild in the beginning, they had become quite a serious issue for refugees by WWII. Much of the Displaced People's mess after WWII would have been a lot easier to handle if there hadn't been the immigration control bullshit in the way.