as Teresa Hayter points out in Open Borders: The Case Against Immigration Controls, migration, whether political or economic, is not only a human right, but a necessary response to cruelties inflicted by war, inequality, and climate change. So let the nomads, migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, detainees, and the ethnically cleansed, go wherever they’ve got to go. Essential travel’s okay [...]

It’s the leisure travels of the leisured classes that deserve scrutiny. The automatic rush to the computer to book cheap flights—we barely even notice we’re doing it anymore. A long weekend in Guadalajara, a short one in Zagreb, Zimbabwe, or Zeebrugge. The requisite bucket-list prance through a lavender field, a pyramid, a rainforest. A ride on a donkey, dromedary, dolphin, double-decker. . . . We’re such saps! We’ve been fed a bunch of fake reasons to travel by evil geniuses determined to use up all the fossil fuels as fast as possible, so as to coerce us all into accepting nuclear power as soon as possible. We galumph across the earth at their bidding, getting ourselves into all kinds of scrapes. We get lost, we starve, we hang off cliffs, we struggle with unfamiliar plumbing arrangements and foreign currency. But do they care?