Brexit: UK and EU 'agree text' of draft withdrawal agreement
Opinion on Brexit. Hopefully of interest:<p>I&#x27;m torn on Brexit.<p>If Britain stays in the European Union, then it won&#x27;t have a lot of power to manage her borders. The &quot;liberalness&quot; of Britain&#x27;s immigration policy ends up being at minimum the liberalness of each of the other 27 EU countries. Germany could let in 1 million immigrants (good for them), all of them would get citizenship, all of them can go to the UK, the UK can&#x27;t say to any of them &quot;Hold on a minute. Are you even a fit?&quot;<p>Also, this kind of unrestricted immigration is a historical anomaly. 100s of years ago, it took too long to travel from one place to another, and so people who lived far away were more different to each other. It&#x27;s not clear whether throwing all the borders open will result in something stable that will last for centuries.<p>It&#x27;s also a colossal experiment. If the experiment doesn&#x27;t work out (see the above paragraph) then 28 countries pay the price. The UK will be deeply affected because it&#x27;s an immigrant magnet, due to its high living standards, a lot of employment opportunities, and a widely spoken national language; something might happen to Romania and Poland, given that much of their population has apparently emigrated. If the experiment turns out bad, then multiply the impact by 28 for each of the 28 countries.<p>And there was a recent article on HN about an EU law that says newspaper headlines are going under copyright. Again, mistakes like this affect 500 million people (the citizens of the EU) and 28 different countries. This is a monoculture, which is bad in nature; why not in politics? The Ottoman monoculture might have been one of the things that set the Middle East &#x2F; North Africa back. For instance, the Ottomans banned printing (in Arabic). How would that have been good for science? And China&#x27;s another famous empire&#x2F;union (monoculture), in which one emperor dissolved their fleet, which was the most advanced at the time, impacting their trade, and preventing them from settling elsewhere. How is a European, or even a globalised monoculture, any better?<p>On the other hand, I can see how the immediate economic impacts of Brexit might be bad.