Right, but I’m not asking about their democratic structures. I’m saying with all the open, and open-ish borders, what actually happens? Do people from Peru and Ecuador typically go to Brazil for work? OK, well, so is that constant draining of talent good for Peru and Ecuador? Economic migration is usually a one-way street for decades at a time.

Really depends on economic conditions in the various territories. If you look at the US-Mexico border between the 20th and 21st centuries, a lot of the migration was entirely seasonal at first. Mexican laborers would move north during the planting and harvesting seasons, then go back down south during the winter. Only after restrictions on cross border travel tightened did we see people permanently relocating. And that was largely because every attempt to cross the border carried an increased cost and a host of new bureaucratic difficulties.

I don't know a ton about the Argentinian economy relative to its neighboring states, so I can't speak to the long term economic impact of loose immigration policy. But it has historically been one of the stronger South American state economies - second only to Brazil - with a GDP/capita third in line behind Chile and Uruguay. Hard to say they're suffering because of dramatic inflows or outflows of people, at least relative to their neighbors. But obviously there's a lot more at play than just immigration.

Peru and Ecuador aren't nearly as rich as Argentina, so - if anything - people are migrating into Argentina rather than out.

Another good example is Bulgaria and Croatia joining the EU. There’s already a lot of migration from the Balkans into western Europe, and as soon as free movement was allowed, both places saw huge migrations of young people. Bulgaria is genuinely having a demographics crisis right now, and because it’s only a bunch of old Boomers left, they’re doing a bunch of typical Boomer things, like being extra conservative.

What you're describing is mass displacement due to a stark shift in economic policy brought on by the post-Soviet Shock Doctrine. FFS, Bulgaria went from the 16th strongest economy in the world to the mid-50s practically overnight.

I don't consider this exodus of young people a bad thing. It was a pressure release valve. A large number of young people kettled into a country with a collapsing economy could have just as easily ended up like Serbia and Bosnia, with an endless series of retaliatory genocides as rival ethnic groups play tug-of-war over scarce resources. Or like Turkiye, which has become a bottleneck in between Europe and the Middle East, where refugees simply pile up in camps and die by the hundreds. Or any of the North African countries, like Libya or Tunisia or Syria, where people in tiny boats attempt to (illegally) paddle their way across the Mediterranean and drown.

The prospect of a Bulgarian family legally and safely picking up, moving to Greece or Romania, finding a stable job, and reestablishing their fortunes doesn't seem frightening by comparison. Not even if it means the country's interior is hollowed out for a time. Bulgarians may return, as the state of affairs in Bulgaria adjusts and the political climate moderates. Or they may not, as they re-identify with their new home countries.

I might argue that the Shock Doctrine of the 90s/00s was horrible policy. And stripping the wiring out of the old Soviet Republics to prove, once and for all, that communism doesn't work was a bad long-term economic plan for Europe. But I consider the freedom of movement afforded by the EU to be the least-bad thing that came out of their induction into the bloc.

And Lea Ypi is a great example, ironically, of someone who is brilliant having opportunity to move to study in Italy and sort of proving her own point wrong in a sense that she’s not some Albanian drug dealer.

I don't recall anything in Ypi's works suggesting that people who move out of Albania are all drug dealers. She strongly critiques the Cold War Soviet Policy of strict immigration controls, state censorship, and over-policing. And she uses the recollections of herself, her family, and her neighbors to argue the virtues of a free and open society, unconstrained by rigid ideological constraints or militarized borders.

That's full consistent with her own life story. I'm not sure how you could argue otherwise.

And I wasn’t saying that companies would be gatekeepers, I mean abusers. Unfettered abusers.

Power corrupts. As soon as you establish gates, you need gatekeepers. And who else is going to man these gates if not the agents of the socio-economic elites?

In the US, that's the Waltons (among others). They have a significant financial interest in constraining immigration - both internationally and domestically - in order to put downward wage pressure on workers and control capital flows.

The Waltons abuse border controls and the criminal justice system that surrounds it more than any coyote or drug smuggler.