Why does anyone have any moral or legal right to move from one place to another?
Before the rise of states, people had all the freedom to move where they wanted, and if any conflict arose, force must have decided the matter, but they probably didn't migrate as individuals, for if anyone had ventured out on her own, she wouldn't have survived for long.
After the rise of states, in the feudal age, serfs, apprentices, and servants did not have the right to move from one place to another even within the same realm without the permission of their feudal lords or masters.
Capitalism expanded freedom of movement in colonizing nations and established new restrictions in colonized territories, especially in settler colonies. Within a colonizing nation, people (increasingly expropriated from their land) became freer to move from one place to another (in response to which poor laws, vagrancy laws, modern police, etc. were instituted to manage people's newfound freedom in capital's favor). People of a colonizing nation were also encouraged -- sometimes forced as punishments -- to move to its colonies. The colonized who were enslaved by colonizers of course lost all freedom. Even the colonized who escaped enslavement lost their freedom of movement as well as their land, excluded from the colonizers' quarters. Palestinians in the occupied territories, whose anti-colonial struggle has yet to succeed, still do not enjoy the freedom to move from one place to another, even just to move from their home to school or work.
When did independent capitalist states acquire the right to exclude visitors and immigrants from other independent capitalist states?
<blockquote>Most familiar to people today is the right of states to control entry, a prerogative that has come to be understood as one of the quintessential features of sovereignty. It is important to note, however, that the widespread recognition of this prerogative is a fairly recent development. In a survey of the international legal opinion available during the period immediately preceding the First World War, Bertelsmann was unable to muster any consensus for the view that states had an unequivocal right to bar foreigners from entry into their territory.53 (John Torpey, "Coming and Going: On the State Monopolization of the Legitimate Means of Movement," <http://www.democ.uci.edu/papers/torpey.htm>, 1998)</blockquote>
Civil rights struggles and changing political economy (from manufacturing to service, from welfare states to neoliberalism) removed the most obviously racist immigration controls in the 1960s (cf. <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2004/2004-October/024405.html>), but independent capitalist states have not lost the right to control entry.
As feudalism, mercantilism, the New World chattel slavery, and colonialism (though some exceptions like the Israeli occupation still exist in this last category) were successively abolished, capital increasingly acquired more freedom of movement within and between states. So did labor, at least within states. As far as freedom of movement between states is concerned, however, labor has yet to regain the scope of freedom it had before the First World War, let alone acquire a greater scope of freedom than that. The contradiction between capital's freedom of movement and labor's lack of it is one of the barriers to further development of capitalism, which is most clearly observable in the way that the Japanese ruling class's anti-immigrant conservatism (as well as its sexism) has limited its ability to resolve the crisis of deflation more clearly in its favor. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * "Proud of Britain": <http://www.proudofbritain.net/ > and <http://www.proud-of-britain.org.uk/>