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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?
People are rewarded with large financial bonuses and promotions for academic and business trips, and therefore learn to crave them, and to crow about how many they’ve been on. The assumption is that travel is automatically fun, worthwhile, and enviable: a status symbol. But really all that’s happened is that these questionably important people (more lemmings than locusts, and therefore to be pitied) spent twenty-eight hours in airplanes and airports, twelve hours drinking, an hour or two at a dull meeting or under-attended talk, and a few hours playing golf or fucking a drunk business colleague, assistant professor, or total stranger.