> I can also bring up plenty of historical counterexamples to free speech as a human right
I think human rights are an abstract western concept that aren't as universal as the definitions like to claim.
The free speech thing for example is not upheld in the vast majority of muslim countries when it comes to various discussions and criticism of religion.
And that's a ton of countries.
There's other examples as well,.
>Most historical examples of states suppressing migration were just as interested in keeping people from leaving as they were concerned with those entering.
I don't think so tho it's of no matter to the discussion. At the end of the day keeping people from leaving was far more difficult than keeping people from coming in to the place where one did have power and jurisdiction.
>This practice continued all the way until the Soviet Union made this policy so onerous that the US decided that it would only trade with "non-market economies" if they abolished their exit visas. Emigration is already a legally recognized human right and any country that does not let its citizens leave is rightfully attacked as despotic.
India is one such country today and they trade just fine. That's not to say that I think it's just.
>As for culture, uh... I'm not sure what kind of point you're trying to make. Even if every country in Europe were sealed off from one another, the culture of today would be dramatically different from 40 years ago, or 40 years from now.
Not in the same way in any shape or form.
Despite americanisation, other international influences and local cultural changes I found the culture of my great grandparents recognisable and familiar and can trace the family back hundreds of years in that same spot.
Look at the census list from napoleonic times and all the other family names sound familiar too.
I have their mannerisms, I speak their dialect, i speak their language, i eat their foods, etc.
If i go to an open air museum to look at one of the dwellings from hundreds of years I find a ton of design elements that are essentially the ones I found in my great grandparents farm.
Mind you there are strong differences still and they exist even within less than 40 years but there's an obvious difference between those two kind of changes that one can only look past if they're wilfully doing so.
For example on the contrary I go to my capital and it's surroundings and they don't have the dialects there from a century ago. In fact they don't even speak the same language. Consequentially they watch different media and vote differently. They don't identify themselves with the people that existed there a century ago and to top it off and all of it led to sectarianism affecting our politics to this day. (which was utterly predictable.)
There was a second wave of external migration mostly in the last 2 decades leading to those with national descent being about 20% of the population of which less than a quarter speak the old language (typically without the old dialects).
This is Brussels I'm talking about and the same change that happened there now happens across the country at a slower (read historically breakneck) speed.
It has proven not to be beneficial for the local population (unemployment is trough the roof, there's a ton of religious radicalism, outsized crime and integration issues, etc)
We also still live in a context where a fully sovereign nation has control over who it accepts and were it fully democratic it would answer to it's citizens who when faced with migration that does not serve them would mostly block it. Not by building a wall but by simply barring from the privileges and functions required to exist in society.
Every country does that to some extent and so I'd say the universal part of this supposed human right is so universally rejected that it can't be called one at all.