Hostility isn't the right word. It's more just wary suspicion of an outsider. Which can easily and quickly escalate. But in small towns, it can without an outsider as a scapegoat.

Generally, you want someone to host you and provide some sort of cultural landing pad. Even as a tourist if you're only there to look at stuff.

First off, I want to thank you for engaging on this in a reasonable and respectful way. This is a touchy subject, and I'm honestly curious how people that talk about it think it should work. Doesn't mean I agree with the conclusions, but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate and respect your time and energy here. Thank you.

A number of Latin American countries have very loose and friendly immigration policies. Argentina and Paraguay are the most notable

Right, but I'm not asking about their democratic structures. I'm saying with all the open, and open-ish borders, what actually happens? Do people from Peru and Ecuador typically go to Brazil for work? OK, well, so is that constant draining of talent good for Peru and Ecuador? Economic migration is usually a one-way street for decades at a time.

Another good example is Bulgaria and Croatia joining the EU. There's already a lot of migration from the Balkans into western Europe, and as soon as free movement was allowed, both places saw huge migrations of young people. Bulgaria is genuinely having a demographics crisis right now, and because it's only a bunch of old Boomers left, they're doing a bunch of typical Boomer things, like being extra conservative. Which isn't to say that people should be forced to stay put, but that in every instance of people having low barriers to movement, there's a losing side. And then the free, or even low-cost movement only makes it harder to fix the problems that made people leave in the first place.

And Lea Ypi is a great example, ironically, of someone who is brilliant having opportunity to move to study in Italy and sort of proving her own point wrong in a sense that she's not some Albanian drug dealer. Though I don't think that's relevant here, as the opportunity sought her out in a sense. Though, I would say that Albania is by far its own special case. Tons of Albanians have a personal ethnic pride and intentionally move back to Albania and Kosovo specifically to make the place better. It seems fairly family-oriented, as even their Eurovision songs very often feature "don't disappoint mom" lyrics.

And I wasn't saying that companies would be gatekeepers, I mean abusers. Unfettered abusers.

if their government doesn’t like you, the border then binds you but does not protect you.

Okay, but that's just why this is the most important election of our lives and you need to turn out to vote or we'll be under the boot of the vile fascist-communist government of the Other Party That Doesn't Like Me.

Borders exist because it projects power onto people within

I mean, that's a very narrow perspective. Borders exist as a compromise between neighboring governments, indicating where one set of legal codes ends and another begins.

If you want truly free movement, you can’t have projections of power

Free movement is power projection. It's just projection by the people (and their attendant organizations and ideologies) doing the moving.

The whole neoliberal One Big Global Market wet dream was about projecting the power of Western financial and regulatory authorities around the globe. Open Borders can be as much about projecting power as closed ones. And whether you believe that's good or bad really hinges on whether you believe you're aligned with the people doing the power projection.

You absolutely could describe the Russian invasion of Ukraine (or the US invasion of Iraq/Afghanistan/Libya/Syria) as a kind-of Open Borders policy under the Bush Doctrine. The borders are simply open to those with a big enough battering ram to kick through the door.

Those subsistence farming villages are a part of geopolitical governments

Oof, tell me you've never been to one without telling me you've never been to one. These are people who depend entirely on rain-fed agriculture and other than roads to get between towns, have almost zero interaction with even local government, let alone national government. You're sort of inventing a story of people that don't exist to fit your narrative.

And I've sadly spent a lot of time dealing with IMF loan terms and conditions, and labor laws across Africa and Eastern Europe, and things like giving up land or public works are either not entirely accurate, or specific and individualized conditions based on what a country wants an IMF loan for in the first place, and it's often gross mismanagement that leads to things like that.

Here's an example: when I lived in a large coastal city in West Africa, the city water ran one day a week, on Sunday afternoons. Why? Because the Japanese government paid for and built a desalination plant that worked great for years. Then the local government demanded it be fully handed over to them, and within a year it was no longer working because someone's unqualified cousin was made manager and spent the entire budget on things other than the plant. So in a city of 2.5 million people, we had to dig a well and spend $8,000 on a water filtration system because otherwise I have to pay some guys once a week to bring a truck full of milky-white water they clearly pumped from a trash-filled stream 2km away. And so, sure enough, look who needs a loan to unfuck the desalination plant the last government fucked up? And why, exactly, do you think they won't loot the cash and let the same thing happen? Because that's typically the cycle that plays out for all sorts of things like this. It's why most state-owned power and telecom companies are a mess, it's why nearly every passenger railway is wothless when it does rarely and slowly run. And yet, it's not just the IMF, it's also China and the Afrexim Bank that also do this. Even other governments on the continent do this same stuff for each other!

And labor laws...a lot of post-colonial countries wrote themselves labor laws that are intended to make it expensive for foreigners to do business there. Which, hey, go for it, defend local production. It's more than labor laws that function that way, for the record. However, local labor laws are often entirely different for locals, and you wouldn't believe how badly wealthy locals treat poor locals. I once saw a gate open to a known local guy's fancy house, and an old lady in a housekeeper uniform was using a big hotel tile buffing machine - polishing the fucking driveway. A cement driveway. That's not colonialism, that's a fucking decision someone made to pay some old woman probably minimum wage to polish a driveway. And culturally, opulence as trappings of wealth is a thing, but I've never seen a senior traditional leader be so exploitative as that. Then again, I doubt you even read most of any of this.

You'll blame colonialism and international finance for everything and anything, and it's not entirely wrong some of the time. But holy shit, people have agency and make decisions, too. And tens of millions of people across Africa alone live lives entirely removed the effects of the IMF or national government, so you have to know when and where to apply blame to stay grounded in reality.

Funny, I've never actually read any history books about Africa written by a coloniser. I have done a translation of a local novel depicting the horrors of colonialism to get the perspective out there.

I'm deeply aware of colonialism, and I personally would love if the AU would take the bold step of undoing the Berlin Conference borders. However, that's part of why the existing borders are largely seen as immaterial with regard to human movement. When I try to drive a car across a border, I need letters and insurance and papers. When my friend drives his car across borders, he drives through a village and no one cares. It's two separate worlds at some level.

Still, you can't be like Trump and blame everything on the same Boogey man. There's plenty of African nations that did a descent job of shaking of colonialism. Yet the same problems remain. Shit, tell me why Ethiopia has these issues, having never been truly colonized.