I think there is a disconnect here between us in terms of academic, data-only understanding and real lived experience. To suggest that Bulgarians are moving to Romania is wild. Most southern Slavs head for Germany and Switzerland, specifically because their economies are stronger, and there's a critical mass of slavs there already, so there's community. The Balkans have so much baggage that Bulgarians in Greece staying longer than summer holidays is laughable.

Which is to say that simply throwing "post-Soviet Syndrome" out there as a catch-all misses a lot of depth. Albania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia all had differing styles of socialism. Albania's was North Korea-style paranoid. They had a jobs program to build hundreds of thousands of cement bunkers because of a persistent fear that Yugoslavia would invade. It was breathtaking paranoia. I know a guy that was a kid near the Yugo border and tuned in his radio to a Yugo station - his parents genuinely thought they'd get sent to the gulag farms. Bulgaria was in the middle, and Tito liberalized Yugoslavia's economy to the point that it pissed off the USSR enough that he had to dodge an assassination attempt. Which meant that Yugoslavia's economy was thriving, and with another Slavic-speaking country next door, a lot of Yugoslavs would go to Bulgaria to exploit the disparity. The whistful ways old Yugoslavs talk about it sort of funny, and explains why Bulgaria is the way it is today. So Bulgaria had a relatively easy transition out of Socialism because they remained intact. Serbia, Slovenia, and Croatia all did well. Then Kosovo and Bosnia were trashed, and Macedonia just sort of the poor kid on the block, is too small to really do much other than get jostled around between its neighbors. Right now, Croatia is doing relatively well, and joining the EU took a decade of transition, but now they're a net recipient of immigrants. The non-EU Slavic Balkan countries empty out to staff Croatian restaurants each summer. Seriously, people take 3 months of leave without pay from office jobs to go wait tables in Croatia and make better money, then come home.

Albania had a terrible time transitioning out of socialism because of how closed off they were. A pyramid scheme collapsed the government because, and this is what every Albanian has ever told me about it, no one knew any better. The forced ignorance of capitalism made it seem like magic. Everyone genuinely thought pyramid schemes were how things worked. It's a fascinating history.

Speaking of Albania, I mean more that Lea Ypi's stance is that there's no "bad" or "good" migrants, or useful vs. useless. Which I appreciate from a human rights standpoint, but as a "good" immigrant that has empathy for fellow Albanians who are a slim minority of migrants, but are "bad" people in general, it muddies the waters in terms of practical application of her philosophy. I'm generally not super critical of Albania's corruption and organized crime within Albania simply because in the post-soviet era, it was closer to a Yakuza-style mafia that actually brought a fair bit of stability when the government itself was just some dudes trying to figure things out and hoping for the best. Less so for Serbia, but at some point it raises the question of legitimacy of governments is one thing, but then Albanian and wider Balkan organized crime isn't kind and nice and concerned about human rights. There's a lot of human trafficking and casinos and generally negative things wrapped up in there where it's a struggle for an African-style Western style government vs. an almost traditional government structure.

Why? As you rightly said, power corrupts. And the organized crime element that used to bring stability held a lot of power they don't want to give up. And the organized crime element also makes huge use of immigration as well.

Speaking of which, I think the larger issue today is that information sharing makes it easy for places to actually get flooded because of the speed with which rumors fly. There's a lot of trafficking on social media that rides on this exact effect. It's exactly the same thing about why some doughnut shop or whatever suddenly has a line down the block for mediocre doughnuts. There's more people, and more communication infrastructure, so migration patterns don't shift in long-term patterns, it's a quick turn over months.

Case in point, the low-information environments of The Grapes of Wrath and the movie El Norte. Both are tragic migration tales about the horrors of exploitation awaiting migrants at the end of a torrent of humans. Trafficking and undocumented migration patterns take advantage of this and exploit exactly the same way they always have, regardless of how complicit the state might be on the other side. Instead, today, it's organized. I once had a taxi driver in Istanbul tell me, in detail, about how his friend wanted to go to the States, so he flew to Mexico and paid a coyote, and now he's living somewhere in the midwest that he couldn't recall exactly, and he's miserable. Which is the same story I've heard from tons of African migrants, trying to explain to their families why they're not rich and can't send money home because everything is expensive and work is hard and pays nothing.

And to be clear, I'm not anti-immigration. And borders aren't a 100% detterent, they never have been. It's a barrier to entry that makes it take effort to get somewhere, be that an ocean or a mountain range or a desert or a river or a wall. Shit, how many people jumped the Berlin Wall to escape the East? Thousands - maybe tens of thousands? I'm not sure, but given the option of just crossing the border without a challenge, 90% of East Berlin would have emptied out into the West, and then what?

The part that I don't think you're really considering is that a borderless, and stateless world would feed capitalism and build it into a beast that only sci-fi novels have even bothered to imagine. Private security forces, private industry, private cities, all surrounded by townships and ghettos and slums of people dying to be exploited. Lagos is pretty much like that, and it's very much not pleasant. Children who are starving selling food they can't afford to eat themselves on packed highways. Until you see something like this in real life, I'm sure it's possible to think that it will work itself out, and that governments and laws and economics and money are objective evils. My friend, people do this to each other freely, regardless of the system in place.

Removing barriers that slow down the intensity of exploitation in some places sounds like the worst possible idea in the world to me. That's what I don't get about the no borders, no state crowd. You're desperate for a world that allows full capitalistic exploitation of anyone and everyone, and you're all just so sure of yourselves that it'll work and have to ignore so many examples of it being a genuine source of human misery. Then get pissed when people bring up that people are the problem, not borders as a concept.

But hey, I doubt I'll convince you of anything here. Again, I kind of doubt you've even read any of this and just sort of skim the first few words of each paragraph. Write the word quebapi if you've actually taken the time to read any of this. Or don't, maybe you're just an instance of an ageny on a botfarm in Malaysia and you'll go back and forth on this forever.