One hundred years from now the world's governments will formally and legally recognize the basic human right of mobility: a person may live anywhere on earth if they agree to obey local laws

I)Free speech and one-vote ideologies are not universally (by a long shot, 66%+) assumed.
II)"Local Law" often imposes obligatos (taxes, miltia) and restrictions (Immigration Laws) that would disallow, or at least hinder, movement in and out of a jurisdiction/state. Rectifying this would be prolematic to say the least.

Although free speech and democratic voting systems are not univerals, trade is. The increased ease of travel will allow more people to roam the world at will, doing business where they choose and with whom they choose. Even given internal taxation and import/export tarrifs, etc., those who will profit most from sales of goods and services will find a greater market by freedom of choice. Seasonal migration patterns will again occur, as they have for centuries. I think cold hard cash will finally open the borders of most, if not all, countries on Earth.

I was watching an episode of "Now" on PBS (the US Public Broadcasting television network) tonight on how clerical and telephone sales/customer care is increasingly being outsourced to firms in India, and realized (not directly from the content of the show) that a major rationale for restrictive immigration is going away fast - the fear that local workers will be displaced by people who move here to work - now the work is going out to them (the show reported that in one case, local workers were costing the employer in question US$12 an hour, while their replacements at an office in Bombay only cost US$3 an hour).

Admittedly, many occupations must be performed in person, but many don't have to be, and there will either have to be some complex set of rules to ensure something like full employment for workers within a nation's borders (always a tricky thing to arrange) or acceptance on the part of all countries that their labor markets are going to be fluid. Or some compromise between these extremes.

I think that outsourcing is going to be a major issue in the 2004 Presidential campaign - in Arianna Online, another poster talked about the President betraying the workers of America by outsourcing 50 campaign phone jobs to India.

I reminded the man that Clinton had done this to MILLIONS of American workers simply by granting China most favored nation trading status, thus allowing dramatically underpaid, sometimes prison labor to compete unequally with American workers.

"Remember the union label," huh?

It just occurred to me that some telephone calls or Internet transactions are legal in some places and not in others.

Does the "right to mobility" as long as one obeys local laws protect someone who is breaking laws somewhere else over the Net or in some other virtual or electronic manner?

Example - the US Congress has approved a national "do not call" list of citizens whom it is illegal to call simply to solicit business or sell things. This practice is known as "telemarketing."

Almost all the respective States had enacted state-level "do not call" lists - but the authority of a state government to prosecute telemarketers living and working in another state has been challenged, hence the Federal list.

But there are plenty of intelligent, cheap-working speakers of English in India. Many of them are already working as customer care phone operators for American companies - dealing with Americans over the Indian, American and global phone networks.

The only impediment these people face in doing work formerly done by American citizens in America, with American customers is the difference in accents.

What if telemarketers outsource their business to India? Right away, their payroll expenses drop to a fourth or a fifth of what it costs to hire the same number of telemarketers in the US.

And there's a wonderful added bonus - does the US have the authority to tell telemarketers that they can't call people in America from India;

or operate Internet pharmacies, casinos, smut sites, etc which are largely patronized by Americans?

Big can of worms open. All of a sudden, the "global village" isn't something for people to snicker about - it's a very real thing, and what the Indians do one side of the village affects us here on the other aide, and vice versa.

Mobility seems to have aspects which aren't explicitly recognized in the language of the bet. Maybe you can live wherever you want, but you may not be able to do business with people in other parts of the world.

Issue with the bet language - does virtual "presence" in a country by means of telephone calls, telecommuting, webcams, whatever, count toward being allowed to "live" in a given country?

What brought this up in my mind is the hoorah over the National "Do Not Call" list (for those of you NOT from the United States, this is a list of people that telemarketers - the charming folks who ring you up at suppertime, or during intimate encounters, to sell you long distance phone service or pre-need funerals - are legally forbidden to call).

A Federal circuit judge here in Denver issued an injunction against the list on the grounds that telemarketers' annoying use of the phone lines was covered under the First Amendment (for non USA-ers, that's the Constitutional amendment guaranteeing people here freedom of speech).

That order was vacated by a higher judge still.

I think the problem lies in an EVOLVING concept of virtual presence - which is very on-topic here.

Telemarketers DO have the right to speak freely - as long as their audiences are willing to listen.

However, most citizens have to pay for telephone service, and when they pick up the phone, they're expecting to speak to someone they WANT to hear from. So calling someone on the phone is the electronic equivalent of knocking on someone's door, not of writing a newspaper editorial or declaiming from a soapbox in the park. It actually invades space that a person might reasonably regard as private.

Now, "the right to privacy" is itself an unwritten guarantee at best - emanating from the Fourth Amendment freedom from unreasonable searches and other explicit Constitutional guarantees.

However, the existence of "do not call" lists implies that people here in the States WANT to regard their electronic addresses - phone numbers and Email accounts - as places they can choose to allow or deny access to, just like their physical addresses.

Whether the courts buy that sort of reasoning remains to be seen, but it throws another wrinkle into whether either of the parties has won the bet - does virtual "presence" in a country by means of telephone calls, telecommuting, webcams, whatever count toward being allowed to "live" in a given country?

If I physically live in Bombay and make my "living" calling people all over the United States to explain the benefits of time-share dentistry (or something) on behalf of a firm either located in the US or which does business there, can the US government bar me from calling people who happen to live in the United States? The popular sentiment here would probably be a thumping "YES," but Congress could be required to amend the laws to explicitly recognize the concepts of electronic privacy, electronic presence, and electronic trespassing before the Supreme Court feels at home allowing those concepts to be protected.

Most of the discussion so far has been from remote-workplace perspective. Here are some different recipes.

Firstly, many countries already recognise the benefit of mobility, which allows selective migration (e.g. easy access to passport and possibility of getting visa provided you pass certain criteria).

Hence the real questions are:

1. Whether all socio-economic cross-section (e.g. from low skill groups) of a typical country will really be able to move freely. For example, they may not have enough money or resources to pay for travelling.

2. Whether all will be freely issued passports by their home county. For instance, home countries may feel that unskilled people may be exploited overseas.

3. Whether all will be freely given visas by their host counties. Evidently because host countries may think they presence will reduce the general standard of living for their own citizens. Then there will also be increased risk of security as well as political turbulence.

4. To what extent the cultural assimilation be possible at a global scale. Skilled migrant workers generally do not feel as much at ease as in their home countries for at least a decade. Unskilled migrants tends to reduce the standard of living in host country (e.g. by driving real wages downwards). When this knowledge will get widely known to main-stream populations (of respective countries), the level of migration may eventually reach an equilibrium point.

In next 100 years, for argument sake, even if there happens to be a dramatic change in geo-political structure of the world (e.g. one Global citizenship etc.), then also the aforesaid points may pose significant barriers.

My own belief is, although the global travel may increase in numbers, it will not be possible for a large proportion of the world to be able to move around the world freely.

Isn't this prediction a little redundant? Isn't this 'right' stated in Article 13 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

(fyi, I do not support this principle.)