Travel

Why Free Movement Is Essential to a Free Society

Reason's 2025 travel issue takes seriously the idea that the right to roam is inseparable from the right to speak, to work, to love, and to associate freely.

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ednote_LEAD | Photo: High Acres Farm
(Photo: High Acres Farm)

I was alone on a wide swath of soft grass near Shelburne, Vermont. A weekend away, phone off, brain quiet. I thought I'd listen to the wind rustling the cedar trees, but what I heard instead was the entire world. The rumble of a plane at 30,000 feet, whisking honeymooners to Mykonos or accountants to Minneapolis. The gentle hooting of the Ethan Allen Express, schlepping rail passengers from Burlington to New York. The crunch of tires on gravel. The lapping waters of Lake Champlain push boaters through a system of canals and locks to the Hudson River.

This is the music of a connected world, a world where motion is the default and stillness the exception. Even when we pretend otherwise, the evidence of our interdependence insists on being heard. And it's beautiful.

This special summer double issue of Reason is dedicated to travel. We've got everything from a humble trip for the tulips of Holland, Michigan, to a full-fledged mission to the International Space Station. We'll take you to Adam Smith's stomping grounds in Edinburgh, the Canadian boomtown of Iqaluit, a libertarian university in Guatemala City, and dozens of other places where you can find freedom.

Travel is not merely an industry or a leisure activity. It is a human imperative, a manifestation of liberty. It is to claim membership in the great, messy project of humanity. It makes bureaucrats with stamp fetishes nervous, for good reason.

In his memoir Labels, Evelyn Waugh, that most elegant and misanthropic of English travelers, described the strange joy and self-discovery made possible by arriving in a place where nothing makes immediate sense: "I soon found my fellow passengers and their behaviour in the different places we visited a far more absorbing study than the places themselves." Waugh's travel writing is peppered with complaints, to be sure—about delays, discomfort, fellow passengers, and the prevalence of garlic—but beneath the surface there's something else: curiosity, humility, and a recognition that being a stranger can be a deeply moral experience.

Philosophers from John Stuart Mill to Amartya Sen have praised travel for its power to expand the moral imagination. Your brain rewires a little when you're the foreigner, when you're the one who doesn't understand the customs or speak the language. That rewiring is essential in a free society—one that requires pluralism not just as a tolerance but as a virtue. It's hard to maintain rigid tribalism when you've consumed ayahuasca with Romanians and Trinis in a maloca in Peru, opened wide for a Mexican dentist, or joined the crowds at Jerusalem's Festival of Light.

The expanding circle is the idea that moral progress comes from including more kinds of people in the sphere of those whose rights and dignity we respect, popularized by Peter Singer in his 1981 book of the same name, but visible throughout history once you know where to look. Travel accelerates that expansion. It turns abstractions into lived experience. A guy once designated as a "foreigner" is now your Georgian toastmaster, your temporary Portuguese co-parent, your new Cincinnati beer-drinking buddy.

Sometimes, people visit and want to stay. Travel and immigration are not different moral categories. They are points on a continuum. The act—moving from one place to another, in search of something better, in search of home—is the same. Only the labels change: vacationer, expat, migrant, refugee. But governments insist on slicing and dicing these identities into distinct legal statuses, complete with their own visa types, interview protocols, and deportation triggers.

Why should a student on a J-1 visa be treated differently from a coder on an H-1B, or a tourist on a B-2, or a man fleeing violence with no papers at all? These distinctions are as artificial as the lines on a map. Yet they are enforced with a level of fervor otherwise reserved for violent crime. As this issue went to press, total bans on travel from 12 countries and heavy restrictions on seven more were abruptly announced.

The result is predictable: lost potential, ruined plans, stranded lovers, wasted talent. Restrictions on the free movement of people are not just economic blunders (though they are that too); they are acts of cultural vandalism and personal cruelty.

This obsession with control bleeds back into travel itself. You can feel it at the airport, in the endless security lines and biometric scans. (Though a nice airport lounge can help.) The very idea of free movement is too often treated as subversive, something to be managed and monitored rather than celebrated.

At Reason, we see things differently. We believe people should be able to move—across borders, between jobs, toward new lives—without begging for permission. We believe the right to roam is inseparable from the right to speak, to work, to love, and to associate freely. We believe that every person standing at a customs checkpoint is not a threat but a traveler.

So go. Get on the train, the boat, the bike. Use the visa. Get lost. Get found. Take a trip for no reason at all except to be reminded that the world is bigger than your corner of it. That other people exist. Listen closely. Even in the quietest places, the world is whispering: We are all in motion, together.

Reason's 2025 summer travel issue:

This article originally appeared in print under the headline "Free to Move."