Consider this: At the height of the Roman empire, most inhabitants of Rome were slaves. Citizenship meant the difference between pursuing your own ideas or furthering someone else's.
With the death of slavery, does citizenship mean anything anymore?
I say the reinstitution of slavery would fix many problems. Unpaid debts. Medicine. Crime. Military service. All could be solved.
All that without even considering how easy it would be to establish slaveholders' responsibilities and oversight of such.
Okay, it's actually great that you are willing to take a second-look at dangerous ideas, and I respect that. However, I would like to step away from slavery as it was practiced in Ancient Rome because, quite frankly, the Romans were a bunch of douchebags.
The Athenian system of slavery was a different story, and that is probably more likely to happen during modern times. During the Hellenistic period, what amounted to slavery wasn't really a form of ownership at all, even though it sort of was technically. People actually served Athenian citizens for the rank and privileges of being part of a wealthy Greek's estate, and these servants could earn their citizenship by doing work under the table and even have opportunities at seeking political office. It wasn't the worst thing in the world, and it wasn't the best thing in the world either; it just isn't anything like what we think of slavery as being, viz chattel slavery. Really, the Athenians took a little bit of national pride in the fact that they treated their "slaves" very fairly, all things considered.
Today, we'd be doing something a little bit similar to what the Athenians thought of slavery as being if we did something like require such-and-such hours of community service before we would declare a person to be a legal citizen of the United States. This would mean that, if you weren't showing up for your hours of community service, the federal government would put you on a bus, and you would be shipped back to whever you came from.
Something relevant would be maintaining the country's interstates and picking up various forms of litter. If we have very beautiful roads and attractive scenery, what this this is going to do is draw money into the country. That's what really determines whether someone with any amount of money is going to
want to immigrate to the United States.
So let's say that some uneducated fellow from Guatamala wanted to move into the USA and work legally, perhaps become eligible one day for citizenship. Since he isn't qualified for any of the kinds of high-rolling careers that we really need an immigrant to try to fill, we're going to demand thirty hours per week of community service from this guy for a full two years, and we're going demand another twelve hours per week from this guy for an additional four years, set up to be flexible so that it could work around a class schedule at a technical college or something. We really want the guy to succeed, so he can bring in more revenue, so we're not going to deliberately impede any of his efforts to do so.
So then let's say that some guy from Mexico City, which is a fairly educated and wealthy center of population in the country, is looking for a cooler climate to move to. He is a very affluent individual, and he would stack the revenue curve in our favor if he were to move in. If he were flying over our country and looking out his window at our cities, we'd want him to see a very attractive landscape, so he would be more inclined to want to move in. Well, with a small army of would-be illegal immigrants working on just that kind of job, that's exactly what he would see. There is a three-way gain here where
we get extra revenue and a lot of cheap labor, the workers get to earn their citizenship relatively painlessly, meaning "painlessly" compared to being shot at while they try and cross the border," and the Mexican millionaire gets a nice piece of real estate to move his family to. I don't see anything wrong with that.
Also, the increased value of our land would result in a form of gentrification, therefore driving out a lot of the riffraff out there who don't really want to do any legitimate work. The more gentrification taking place in our population centers, the more likely to chronically impoverished and unemployed are to move out into the countryside where they belong. Out of sight, out of mind. I say we should bring back gentrification because our population centers represent us as a country. Our population centers are what people see of our country. As cruel and callus as it sounds, we need money to keep those riffraff on their food stamps. It costs money, lots of it, to make sure that someone receives treatment during a medical emergency. It costs money to make sure that their children have a chance at a decent education, so maybe their lives won't end up as fucked-up and wasted as those of their parents. That money has to come from somewhere. It's in everyone's best interests to put our best foot forward when people from overseas come here to visit.
The thing is, this community service would be kind of like a form of slavery, but it wouldn't really be like what most people would call "slavery" in modern times. A slave, in the time of Ancient Athens, was a fairly privileged citizen compared to how we treated the negro people. The same applies to "slavery" as it was practiced in Scandinavia: a so-called "slave" was really just a common person who lived on the premises and worked for room and board. It might have been essentially slave labor, but it was better than vagrancy.
Anyway, thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. They are most appreciated.