immigration and visas

to go to cape town i will fly with british airways. i have to change my plane in london so i need to stay on the heathrow airport for about an hour. for that i need a british visa. the procedure requires about ten documents and it takes four days. this is super frustrating.

this reminds me of how stupid the whole fear of immigration is. the main excuse for the existence of visas is fear of immigration and control of criminals. countries that have higher gdp assume that if they open the borders gazillions of poor people will sprint into their cities in search of work. they also assume these people are dirty, stupid and probably evil – whatever that means. britain now has a campaign “british jobs for british workers“, while a lot of italians still don’t get that classifying the human kind in two groups: “eu citizens” and “outisde eu” (extracomunitario), is not really the coolest thing. in austria if someone with a serbian passport or even only origin robs a bank they easily announce: “serbs have robbed a bank again!” somehow i do not think that if these bank robbers were surfers they would say: “surfers have robbed the bank again!”

i have no clue where this enormous paranoia comes from. it is completely foreign to me. first of all most people do prefer to stay where they were born. this is where their families are, this is their home. just as most of the italians do not really move to brazil so will bulgarians, polish and serbs stay home if there is even a smallest chance of being able to have a normal life.

western countries are hardly a heaven. i lived in usa, italy and france and in all of these countries everybody works too much and most of that work makes little sense to me. an average citizen needs decades to generate some normal living conditions and has very little free time for anything. this is not something that happens only in developed counties but it is most dominant there. i at least was not impressed, these places were strange and cruel to me. for few hundred polish teenagers that work on london bike tours this might be great for few years when they are young but i am sure even they don’t care so much about spending their life in some far away place only because they could dive a better car or have few extra square metres of living space. developed counties are not that much better than most of developing countries.

some european union countries made a huge mistake in estimating the immigration effects of eu expansion towards east. these estimates were inspired by primitive paranoia and nationalism. their estimate of potential number of immigrants from new eu members was ten times bigger than it actually turned out to be.

the world outside western europe is not a horrible place everyone is trying to escape. this ancient western block propagnda shoudl be forgotten. not all citizens of eastern europe, central europe, south eastern europe, south east asia, central africa, north africa etc want to invade western europe and north america.

even if they did so what? the last politician who was crazy enough to express this problem directly and publicly committed suicide in berlin in 1945.

not to mention that parts of the world which are not pleasant for living are like this due to extremely irresponsible mismanagement of the western and north american governments. i can give an example of my own country: why would serbs want to leave serbia if not because of decade long sanctions that created such extreme isolation so it was not possible to even find medicine while a perfectly supplied hospital was only few hours drive accross an imaginary line that divided people into countries.

i could keep on writing about this because this kind of injustice frustrates me greatly. i try to ignore it and classify it under something that will not be improved while i am alive but i can not help it, such lack of disorganization and disrespect towards fellow humans, and such hypocrisy frustrates me greatly.

united nations guarantees the feedom of movement but this is only a silly sharade – the rule loses authority immediately at the doors of embassies of the member countries. freedom of movement has been more and more restricted over the time even though it shoudl be easier due to the advancements of technology. never before was it so easy to travel due to technology yet so hard due to beurocracy. as soon as people got closer they started fearing each other more.

super frustrating for a sunday afternoon.