A few years ago in my neighbourhood there was a Kurdish migrant. Not Iranian, not Iraqi, not Turkish, he would tell you, but Kurdish, the stateless ethnic group wedged between unsympathetic nations. His name was Abbas.
He did odd jobs to get by, loading things, moving furniture, buying cigarettes. He was young but his face was already an atlas of struggles, with lines, creases and cuts. I never asked how he ended up in Bangkok, or if he was here legally (most likely not), though we all know that the porous borders of modern nations -- despite control and prejudices -- aren't always effective in keeping desperate people out.
Is freedom of movement a basic human right? Ideally, yes. But the world is not an ideal place -- ask David Cameron -- especially a world torn between the inevitability of openness and the allure of isolation.
It's a world where globalisation, internationalisation and common markets can put us on a course toward prosperity, and yet it's the same world that leaves a long trail of hardship, inequality and selfish politicking, a breeding ground for the interminable ghost of nationalism. Again ask Mr Cameron, or looking closer to home, at Aung San Suu Kyi perched over the crowd of thousands of Myanmar migrants in Thailand last month.
Abbas, the Kurd, left my neighbourhood one day. No one knew where he went. In the past few years we have seen Rohingya migrants instead.
The world moves, money moves, information moves -- all at the breathtaking speed of your bandwidth -- so what force can stop people from moving?
At the European Union summit in Brussels this week, Mr Cameron told European heads of government that anxieties about freedom of movement were central to the decisions by Britons to reject the EU. I believe this must not to be confused with racism. The Brexit vote was very much an expression of economic worries, job concern, weariness of the status quo, etc. All of this is valid in principle, only that in the oversimplification of a Yes or No referendum -- when a hundred issues of great complexity are reduced to an either or, to 1 and 0 -- those genuine concerns have been lumped into the toxic basket of nativism and xenophobia: for instance the outrageous "Independence Day" declaration by a right-wing politician (he seems to have forgotten how many countries won independence from the Brits after World War II).
On Wednesday Mr Cameron promised a swift clampdown on hate crime, possibly racially motivated, that has spiked after the vote. The utopia of open borders prided by the EU has hit a snag, a long-buried resentment having been unleashed. The lightning-fast movement of information and capital is welcome as long as it doesn't entail the movement of human beings. Fluid, shapeless postmodernity has lost this round to the pre-modern values of fixed frontier.
But the flaws of openness shouldn't become the siren call of exclusivity. Yes, the way the EU works needs to be scrutinised -- look at poor Greece -- but the UK-EU divorce is a sudden shock that no one can fully grasp yet. In the time of global interconnectedness, isolation, physical or virtual, is counter-intuitive for Europe, and for that matter for Thailand, Myanmar and maybe Asean as well.
There are about 3 million Myanmar legal and illegal migrant workers in Thailand, plus a few hundred thousand more Cambodians and Lao. You see them (or maybe not?) every day filling up your tank or cleaning your houses, and you definitely don't see the majority of them working in seafood factories in Mahachai.
Last weekend when Ms Suu Kyi was in town, the NGOs seized the moment to propose a set of demands that would guarantee a fair treatment of Myanmar workers, such as the right to earn a minimum wage and to have freedom of movement. In other words, the basic rights that Thai workers would demand when they work abroad (and the basic rights that the Rohingya minority has been asking from the Myanmar government, and now from Ms Suu Kyi).
On paper, the two governments are working to improve the conditions of migrant workers, which in a way makes us more sensible than the UK-EU dysfunction at the moment. But the popular backlash against the "demands" was also swift: how dare the lowly Myanmar workers come here and ask for this and that?
Casual racism, entrenched nationalism or a simple economic concern? Maybe a bit of everything, and the challenge of modern nations is to recognise them and hopefully overcome them. This whole thing reminds me of Abbas, statelessness; all borders rejecting him with no choice but to breach them.
Kong Rithdee is Life Editor, Bangkok Post.