Mobility and migration between communities

Movement, residence, membership and citizenship are not the same thing

When discussing mobility, several different relationships are easily collapsed into one. Movement means that a person can physically travel. A visit is temporary presence without necessarily moving the centre of one’s life. Residence means actually living somewhere. Membership is a relationship with a specific community or organisation and may carry particular rights and responsibilities. Citizenship is a legal status in relation to a state and is governed by public law.

These categories can overlap, but they are not identical. A person can reside in a municipality without being a member of a voluntary cooperative located there. Someone can belong to an association in a place where they do not live. A citizen can live in another country for years. A temporary worker may use local services without having the same political status as a permanent resident.

This article therefore uses working definitions rather than claiming universal legal categories for every jurisdiction. The institutional point is simple: before speaking about 'entry' or 'exit', we have to say what a person is entering or leaving — a territory, residence status, membership, contract or political status.

International law contains an important distinction that is often oversimplified. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights protects freedom of movement and choice of residence for a person lawfully within a state, the right to leave any country, and the right to enter one’s own country. The UN Human Rights Committee describes liberty of movement as an important condition for the free development of a person.

That does not create a general right for anyone to enter and settle in any foreign country without conditions. For non-nationals, lawful entry is generally governed by domestic law, while the state must also comply with its international obligations. The EU is a special regional example of deeper integration: EU citizens enjoy substantially broader rights under Union law to move and reside in other Member States.

We also have to separate voluntary migration from flight from persecution, war or another serious danger. Refugees and people seeking international protection are covered by special obligations, including non-refoulement, which prohibits returning people to circumstances where they face persecution or other serious and irreparable harm. That situation is therefore not an ordinary dispute over whether a voluntary community wants a new member.

This distinction matters for a network of communities as well. A person’s ability to leave a community is a strong safeguard against entrapment; the rules for entering another community are a separate question. Before discussing migration we should first know whether we mean a visit, voluntary relocation, employment, membership, citizenship or international protection.

Transport is infrastructure for real exit

A person may have a formal right to leave, yet that right is much weaker if there is no physical way to reach the next realistic option. Roads, railways, public transport, cycling links, access to a car or another transport route are therefore not merely matters of convenience. In this article they are infrastructure for exit and connection.

Here The Green Book is useful as a short supplementary comparison because it treats transport as a basic need. THY-REALITY does not adopt its economic model, but it does take one useful question: how real is my ability to leave if access to mobility is controlled by a single provider, a single route or a price I cannot afford?

“Who Maintains Shared Infrastructure?” and “The City as a Network of Communities: Decentralisation Without Fleeing to the Countryside” already showed that transport functions often require a wider scale. This article adds the user side: alternative routes, accessible public transport and connections among communities increase not only economic efficiency but also a person’s practical range of choice.

One of the largest gaps between formal and real mobility is housing. A person may be legally entitled to work in another city or country, but if rent is unaffordable, homes are unavailable, or a lease requires documents a newcomer cannot yet possess, the practical option to move narrows sharply.

The European Commission’s work on intra-EU mobility has found that access to good and affordable housing is especially important for mobile citizens; in the latest available figures, roughly 19% of EU movers were overburdened by housing costs compared with 8% of the comparable national population. The Commission’s European housing work also explicitly notes that high housing costs impede labour and educational mobility.

Slovenia is a useful local example. The OECD Economic Survey 2024 linked high home ownership, constrained housing supply and housing-market pressures with low residential mobility. A legally open path does not create choice on its own; there also has to be a physical place to live at the destination.

Portability of work and qualifications determines how costly a move becomes

Relocation becomes far more expensive if a person must almost restart a professional life from zero in the new place. Recognition of qualifications, comparable standards and portable records therefore directly affect real mobility.

The EU offers a useful connection between “Shared Standards Without a Common Ruler” and this article. Regulated professions have procedures for recognising professional qualifications, and some professions benefit from automatic recognition. The system is not administration-free and different countries may require specific documents, but its purpose is precisely to reduce the barrier created when a professional has to prove everything again after crossing a border.

The broader lesson for networks of communities is that shared standards support freedom when they allow a person to carry skills and evidence from one system into another. If each system demands wholly proprietary certification with no mutual recognition, formal choice between systems quickly becomes expensive.

Mobility is not merely the transport of a body. A person carries a work history, social insurance, health information, pension entitlements, education, contracts and family obligations. If relocation erases or freezes years of acquired rights, exit costs can become so high that a person remains even when they would otherwise leave.

EU social-security coordination is a useful example of a polycentric approach: national systems remain different, but common rules identify which system is competent, take previous insurance periods into account and, for many cash benefits, prevent an acquired entitlement from disappearing solely because a person moved. This is not one European social-security system; it is coordination among different systems for the sake of a mobile person.

“How Can Communities Cooperate Without a Single Center?” and “Shared Standards Without a Common Ruler” are therefore direct prerequisites for this article. Autonomous communities can remain different while agreeing on enough common records, evidence and mutual recognition that changing environment does not amount to administrative erasure.

Entry rules should be clear, known in advance and tied to the type of community

If exit is a real safeguard, it does not follow that every kind of community must have identical rules of entry. A public state, municipality, housing cooperative, intentional community and private association are not the same type of institution. Their powers and limits are also shaped by law, which a voluntary agreement among members cannot simply override.

For THY-REALITY, a useful minimum test is that entry conditions are published in advance, understandable, connected to the actual function of the community, proportionate, and applied through the same procedure to comparable cases. If a condition is invented after the fact solely to exclude an unwanted person, it is no longer a stable rule but discretionary power.

In public jurisdictions, such rules must comply with constitutional law, human rights, non-discrimination and specific legal obligations. Voluntary communities may have more room to define internal membership, but membership cannot become a pretext for denying rights that the wider legal order guarantees to the person.

Capacity is a real question — but not a licence to find a scapegoat

Every community has finite physical capacity: housing, schools, healthcare, water, transport and other systems. If the number of residents changes quickly, real pressures can arise. That is a legitimate planning question and pretending otherwise does not help.

The OECD’s work on migrant integration highlights housing and infrastructure challenges faced by newcomers, while also stressing that migrants cannot simply be treated as the primary cause of the broader housing crisis and that, in some countries, migrants are an important part of the sectors building new infrastructure. Capacity should therefore be measured as system capacity, not used as a moral label attached to a person.

The practical response is data: how much housing exists, where bottlenecks are, which service needs additional investment, how quickly capacity can expand and how costs are shared fairly. This reduces the risk that a genuine infrastructure problem is converted into an identity conflict.

Mobility can constrain community power — but exit power is very unequal

“Institutional Competition: Does Choice Limit Power?” showed that choice among institutions can constrain power. If a person can change school, provider, employer or community, the existing system has stronger incentives to respond to dissatisfaction. Geographic exit, however, is among the most expensive forms of exit.

Moving requires money, time and housing, often a new job, perhaps qualification recognition or a new language, a school change for children and distance from family and social networks. The same formal right can therefore be a realistic option for a healthy, well-paid and mobile person while meaning almost nothing to someone who is poor, ill, older or responsible for dependants.

An institution is not free merely because the strongest can leave it. The higher the exit costs for some people, the more important voice, appeal rights, basic protections and safeguards against arbitrariness remain within the community.

Freedom of movement also includes the ability to stay without being pushed out

Mobility is often measured only by how many people are able to move. Yet relocation is not necessarily an expression of freedom. A person may be pushed out by unaffordable rent, loss of work, environmental degradation or the disappearance of an essential service. That is physical mobility, but not necessarily an increase in choice.

European housing policy has expressed this tension concretely: excessive housing costs not only obstruct movement toward opportunity but can also push people away from places where they have family, work and roots. This article does not derive from this a general legal entitlement to a specific home or exact location. It derives a practical test: does the system expand a person’s real set of options, or merely move them from one necessity to another?

A mature network of communities therefore values both sides: open routes for those who want to leave and sufficiently healthy local conditions that people are not forced to leave simply because basic life has become unattainable.

A practical audit of mobility between communities

For an individual, a community or a network of communities, this article can be turned into ten questions:

1. What is the person actually changing? A visit, residence, membership, employment, jurisdiction or citizenship status? 2. Can the person legally and physically leave? Which rules, documents or routes constrain departure? 3. Where can the person realistically enter? What are the known conditions of the other community or jurisdiction? 4. What does the transition cost? Transport, deposit, rent, lost income, documents, language and time? 5. Is there access to more than one transport route or mobility provider? 6. What happens to work and qualifications? Are credentials recognised or must the person start over? 7. Which acquired rights and records travel with the person? Social security, health data, education and other key records? 8. Does the new community distinguish residence from full membership and clearly state the rights and responsibilities of each status? 9. Who has the least exit power? People who are ill, poor, older, caregivers, children or those without their own transport? 10. Does the network also make it possible to stay with dignity? Or are people pushed out by artificial barriers, lack of housing or monopoly control over essential services?

The audit does not require eliminating every boundary or making every community identical. It requires that mobility be measured by a person’s real options rather than by a formal sentence saying departure is permitted.

Awakening into Natural Law uses freedom of movement as one of the most direct examples of human liberty. This article adds the institutional architecture. Departure becomes real only when a person has a physical route, sufficiently portable status and a genuine alternative. Entry into another community, in turn, requires clear rules that reflect the kind of community, its capacity and the rights of others.

This means that a network of free communities can be based neither on total closure nor on the assumption that boundaries and membership have no meaning. It needs mobile people, clear statuses, mutual recognition and enough openness for exit to be credible — together with enough responsibility that the arrival of a new person is not legally or materially undefined.

“When is larger scale genuinely necessary?” takes over the next question. If people, goods and services can move between communities, there are still functions for which a smaller unit cannot reach sufficient scale even with good cooperation. When, then, is larger scale genuinely necessary?