Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 13 of Chandran Kukathas’s superb 2021 book, Immigration and Freedom (footnotes deleted):

Yet it was not until the rise of Napoleon that any ruler took the trouble to locate a country’s borders with precision; not until the First World War that serious efforts were made to control the movement of people between countries; and not until the 1960s that the most prosperous countries in the world thought it necessary to distinguish legal from illegal migration.

DBx: Note that nations, including the United States, existed – and were conscious of, and confident in, their existence – before the occurrence of any of what Chandran here describes.