The native Americans tolerated immigration, and we all know what happened to them.

On the topic of the article, every hotel outside the US I've used has asked for my passport; I didn't know that a copy of the details exposed weaknesses on the electronic side.

A democracy cannot function if the electorate is not well defined. They are vulnerable to Sybil attacks, same as the distributed ledgers and hash tables.

Go to South Sudan and tell me if you still feel the same way.

If you want to have "safety net" social programs, it can't be avoided. At least until there's only one government.

It is one of the core concepts of sovereignty--defining a territory and then deciding who or what gets to be inside. Along with a government with a monopoly on violence used inwards, and some foreign relations directed outwards, you have the recipe for a modern country.

It is a shame you are being downvoted, as it is an admirable ideology: why should someone be (dis)advantaged by the accident of where they were born.

In reality though, 8 billion people hold a wide spectrum of beliefs. I would not want to live in a society with low taxation and low welfare for example. How can I live side-by-side with those that do? Of course, we all have limited choice to move if our society does not match our beliefs.

How do you offer entitlements and quality healthcare to the entire population of the world without money?

Who should be allowed to participate in the decision-making process that allocates these finite resources?

The downvotes on this comment are wild. Like, you didn't even say we should definitely enact open borders right now. You just lamented how things are. And it is absolutely lamentable. All the responses are basically saying "but we need it!" Which isn't even addressing what you're saying. Plenty of necessary things are lamentable.

I was going to respond, but when I looked in my bag of trollfeed I saw it contained fuck all.

The comments rebuking you appear to forget that by definition GDP and wealth are derived from the population. Wealth for social programs is not a finite resource as the general consensus is that over one's lifetime more wealth is created by one's work effort than is needed to sustain the individual. Capitalism by definition extracts this extra wealth for the private interests of a few. But there's no particular reason that this extra wealth can't be used to assist those that may not even meet the necessity of output of sustaining themselves.

This is a difficult concept for people to understand because they look at their paychecks and go "I'm not deriving so much wealth!" well yeah. A huge, large chunk of your wealth is being extracted for capitalism. And in manners that will be very difficult for you to understand.

I'll try to explain it, though, for the audience that peruses these forums. You're a software developer.

You work for a public B2B software company. Your wealth is being extracted to: Pay for those company pizza parties, pay for the office you work in, pay in to the healthcare system that "your company is paying for" that isn't directly part of the premium you see on open enrollment, paying for the company holiday parties, paying into everyone's various insurance plans to reduce the out-of-pocket costs for everyone in those insurance plans (outside of your company, of course), paying for the CEO's multi-million dollar paycheck, paying for the bonuses of all of the management, paying for shareholder value and dividends, paying for the taxes your company pays, paying for the taxes you pay.

If your existence at your job didn't pay for those things, most companies will tend to lay you off.

And this goes for pretty much the vast majority of workers in the vast majority of jobs.

So saying that more immigrants somehow puts a strain on the system is just by definition incorrect, even if a percentage of those immigrants don't generate the same level of value you do as an individual. Do you think every person in your organization generates the same relative value? Of course not. In most businesses in America, does the janitor generate the same wealth as the CEO?

To be fair, there is a snarky comment to be made there about CEOs--but the objective reality is probably not. But the janitor is still generating some wealth by ensuring a safe, healthy, and comfortable workplace for the employees. Does that mean the janitor is not entitled to income? to healthcare? to benefits? to company holiday parties? to company pizza parties?

Just convert this into a much larger scale of the entirety of a country's population--and well, the answer is that most populations have enough free money floating around somewhere to provide essential services to everyone: education, food, safety and security, health, and likely even housing, electricity, and pretty much any other public service we could provide.

And this scales as a population grows.

Do you treat your immediate family better than an absolute stranger?

If so, why? Aren't they all just people?

It's because generations/families are a thing. Even the countries taking the most immigrants like USA aren't expecting an immediate benefit, they're thinking 1-2 gens later.

> authoritarian countries that issue modern e-passports but do not allow free elections

Those tend to not issue passports (of any kind) to many citizens.

Then there's access. In America for example only half the adults in the country even have a passport, and I suspect that skews quite heavily towards one demographic. Do you think that India, Nigeria, or Russia have more equitable access?

And even if they did, what stops the state issuing extra fake passports to citizens they want to vote.

of course then there's key elements of a free election, freedom of access to the ballot paper, freedom to campaign the same as others, freedom from imprisonment because you are running against the incumbent leader, having each vote being worth the same. Many countries prevent people in jail from voting, or even people who used to be in jail. Many countries give more power to one constituency than another, almost all have some level of unequal access to campaigning.

It's not a "Free election" or "no election".

The actual casting of the vote is only part of the story.

Yes, as long as the passports implement a signing scheme, and the set of valid public keys (the electorate) can be agreed upon. If you can sign arbitrary data, then you can sign other public keys, including whatever the voting system requires.

Vitalik has a great blog post about blockchain voting.

https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/05/25/voting2.html

You probably wouldn't want to use the cryptography on the passports themselves to implement the voting system. You probably want to use one of the general purpose zkSTARKs or multi-party-computation systems.

The authoritarian govt controls who gets passports and can create fake people if it wants.

> authoritarian countries that issue modern e-passports but do not allow free elections

You are trying to solve a political problem with a technological solution.

1. Many authoritarian countries don't allow freedom of travel (i.e. it is not easy to get a passport)

2. If they don't care free election, what's stopping them issuing more passport just for voting?

3. What's stopping them confiscating or revoking your passport?

What's even more impressive is that this technology has been around for decades!

> I’m wondering how they will manage to upgrade them - for future algorithms without breaking compatibility.

Just like all other smartcard systems: Very, very slowly. Credit and debit payment cards with a smartcard (EMV) chip have similar issues – even small patches take multiple years due to the relatively long average card validity.

Enhanced ID allows border crossing for most cases covered by the passport card, while real ID does not, for reasons that are unclear to me.