Migration and Structural Inequality: A Life of Asking Permission

The modern world likes to think of itself as global, open, and connected. And yet it remains organized around borders: imaginary lines that form countries. Borders don't just divide territory — they distribute life possibilities. They determine where you're allowed to live, travel, work, and build something of your own.

The problem shows up the moment you try to settle in a country where you don't have an automatic right to stay. That's when moving stops being an everyday act and becomes a request. Living under a permission regime means that even the most basic things — working, renting an apartment, traveling, planning ahead — depend on an external authority and its judgment.

Permission isn't distributed based on who you are

Permission isn't granted or denied based on your character. Nobody checks whether you're honest, responsible, or acting in good faith. What gets evaluated is whether you fit into a legible category.

The first filter is origin. Before anyone looks at your personal history, your "merit," or your individual track record, every country has already sorted you into an initial category: your passport. Some nationalities come with the freedom to live across many countries; others require permit after permit just to pass through. This asymmetry is so normalized that it starts to feel logical — as if it were simply natural for freedom of movement to be unevenly distributed from birth.

The second filter is the visa — a temporary permit. What you can apply for depends on your nationality, and the immigration authority always has the final word on approval or denial. Before that permit expires, staying means applying for another one, or an extension, and waiting once again on someone else's decision. On top of that, permits are often capped in the number of hours you can work, restricted to certain jobs, limited in which activities you're allowed to do, and can gate opportunities behind extra bureaucratic steps.

A necessary caveat: some limits do make sense

Not every filter is unjustifiable. It's reasonable to restrict entry for someone who poses an actual risk — crime, violence, threats — because that's a matter of public safety, not identity.

It's also reasonable to expect some minimum level of integration: living alongside others means respecting certain shared norms. And friction is inevitable when fundamental values collide — for instance, when a person or group upholds practices that violate basic rights, whether rooted in culture, religion, or personal worldview. In those cases, limiting freedom of movement isn't arbitrary; it's the logical consequence of requiring a baseline for coexistence.

Strategic compliance: saying what institutions want to hear

A friend of mine lives in the U.S., and his girlfriend wanted to visit him. When she applied for her visa, she was honest — she said she was going to see him. She was denied. Ironically, if she'd said "tourism," she probably would have been approved. It's not just about following the rules; it's about learning which story is legible to institutions.

That's where what I'd call strategic compliance comes in: adjusting your language to minimize friction, trigger fewer red flags, and get through the filter. Saying what's expected. In many institutional settings, honesty stops being a virtue and becomes a risk variable.

The same logic shows up in job interviews. In theory, competence is what's being evaluated; in practice, it's often how you sound — how much confidence you project, how stable you seem, how easy you are to "process." Inflating, exaggerating, performing confidence becomes the norm. And here's the paradox: in many fields, the more you know, the more aware you become of what you don't know. The deeper your understanding of a subject, the more obvious its complexity becomes.

In that context, total honesty isn't always a virtue — not because truth doesn't matter, but because the system doesn't reward precision. It rewards performed confidence, legibility, the ability to never sound uncertain.

An ethical clarification: personal relationships

For me, there's an important line between the institutional world and the relationships we build with people. In personal bonds — friendship, family, romantic partnership, or any deep connection — I do believe honesty should be absolute. Without honesty there's no real trust, only cohabitation, negotiation, or appearance. There's room for tact, timing, and sensitivity in how you say things, but not for deliberately constructing a false version of yourself.

Freedom to move doesn't mean everyone moves

One thing worth clarifying, since it tends to come up as an automatic objection, is that more freedom of movement wouldn't mean mass migration. Even in a far more open world, most people would still overwhelmingly choose to stay where they grew up. That's a basic feature of human life: family, relationships, belonging, language, networks, and habits all anchor us in place.

Emigrating isn't just changing geography — it's stepping away from the life you know. Not everyone wants to rebuild themselves somewhere else. So a world with greater freedom of residence wouldn't trigger permanent migratory chaos or a total reshuffling of life as we know it. What would change isn't that everyone leaves — it's that more people would have the option to live somewhere new, without facing a disproportionate administrative cost for doing so.

Irregularity as a stage: when the system manufactures lives on pause

There's a consequence that rarely gets mentioned, and I find it deeply counterproductive: when a migration system is too restrictive or too slow, it doesn't necessarily stop human movement. Often, all it does is push people into years of undocumented status — because they still want to stay and build a life in their new home, even if it comes at an enormous cost to their quality of life.

In some countries this happens almost structurally: the implicit logic becomes "get by however you can, survive however you can, and if you hold out long enough, maybe the system will eventually let you in." In the meantime, you're stuck in limbo — precarious work, no real access to rights, no stability, afraid of any official process, your life administratively frozen. Ironically, this kind of irregular existence ends up being tolerated even though it produces the exact opposite of what the system claims to want: vulnerability, informality, and degraded integration.

In other places, the logic runs the opposite way: irregularity isn't tolerated, it's punished harshly. In some countries, being caught can mean deportation, a reentry ban, or even exposure to life-threatening situations. What's striking is that both models — the one that tolerates irregularity and the one that violently represses it — reveal the same underlying problem: the system isn't necessarily designed to integrate people. Sometimes it seems designed to produce fear or exhaustion; other times, to accept a low-intensity kind of integration.

There's also something important worth naming: for a lot of people, this entire problem is invisible. Anyone who spends their whole life in one country, or within a zone of free movement, never activates the permission regime — so for them, it might as well not exist.

Nationality as a "Label"

I was born Argentine, but I don't necessarily feel defined by a national identity — who I am isn't described by where I was born. Sure, I have habits, tastes, and cultural reflexes shaped inevitably by where I spent my first 23 years of life. But plenty of others aren't. And it's obvious that if I'd been born somewhere else, I'd have different habits, different references, a different way of being in the world.

I actually lived a moment in Portugal that illustrates this perfectly. I met a Portuguese guy who, through family history, also holds Argentine nationality because he was born there. When he told me, I assumed automatically that he spoke Spanish. Without thinking, I started speaking to him in Spanish, the way you would with someone "who is Argentine." But within a few seconds he stopped me — he barely understood a word. It turned out he'd only lived there for the first year of his life; his entire life had been built in another language and another culture. The nationality was there on paper, but the real connection — linguistic, cultural, lived — simply wasn't.

In the end, a passport doesn't describe who you are — it describes how you'll be administered. The institutional world treats it as if it were some defining property of the person, as if it said something profound about who you are. But it isn't an intrinsic feature of your being: it's a coordinate of origin, an inherited social construct that, even though it has no objective existence outside our conventions, concretely shapes how we move through the world and how we're perceived structurally.

A passport doesn't say who you are. It says how easy the world will make it for you to exist in certain places.