The Dream of Open Borders Is Real—in the High Arctic

The Norwegian territory of Svalbard has been open to citizens of the world since 1920. But don’t call it a utopia.

When you land in Longyearbyen, the largest settlement in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, you can step off the plane and just walk away. There’s no passport control, no armed guard retracing your steps, no biometric machine scanning your fingers. Svalbard is as close as you can get to a place with open borders: As long as you can support yourself, you can live there visa-free.

That doesn’t make Svalbard an egalitarian place—far from it.

https://www.thenation.com/article/svalbard-arctic-open-borders/


Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s