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For the inhabitants of the first world – the increasingly cosmopolitan, extraterritorial world of global businessmen, global culture managers or global academics, state borders are levelled down, as they are dismantled for the world’s commodities, capital and finances. For the inhabitant of the second world, the walls built of immigration controls, of residence laws and of ‘clean streets’ and ‘zero tolerance’ policies, grow taller; the moats separating them from the sites of their desire and of dreamed-of redemption grow deeper, while all bridges, at the first attempt to cross them, prove to be drawbridges. The first travel at will, get much fun from their travel (particularly if travelling first class or using private aircraft), are cajoled or bribed to travel and welcomed with smiles and open arms when they do. The second travel surreptitiously, often illegally, sometimes paying more for the crowded steerage of a stinking unseaworthy boat than others pay for business-class gilded luxuries – and are frowned upon, and, if unlucky, arrested and promptly deported, when they arrive.

— Globalization by Zygmunt Bauman

The wish of the hungry to go where food is plentiful is what one would naturally expect from rational human beings; letting them act on their wishes is also what conscience would suggest is the right, moral thing to do. It is because of its undeniable rationality and ethical correctness that the rational and ethically conscious world feels so crestfallen in the face of the prospect of the mass migration of the poor and hungry; it is so difficult, without feeling guilty, to deny the poor and hungry their right to go where food is more plentiful; and it is virtually impossible to advance convincing rational arguments proving that their migration would be, for them, an unreasonable decision to take. The challenge is truly awesome: one needs to deny the others the self-same right to freedom of movement which one eulogizes as the topmost achievement of the globalizing world and the warrant of its growing prosperity …

— Globalization by Zygmunt Bauman

The city, built originally for the sake of security – to protect residents inside the city walls against malevolent invaders always coming from outside – in our times ‘has become associated more with danger than with safety’ – so says Nan Elin. In our postmodern times ‘the fear factor has certainly grown, as indicated by the growth in locked car and house doors and security systems, the popularity of “gated” and “secure” communities for all age and income groups, and the increasing surveillance of public spaces, not to mention the unending reports of danger emitted by the mass media.’ Contemporary fears, the typically ‘urban fears’, unlike those fears which led once to the construction of cities, focus on the ‘enemy inside’. This kind of fear prompts less concern with the integrity and fortitude of the city as a whole – as a collective property and a collective warrant of individual safety – as it does with the isolation and fortification of one’s own homestead inside the city. The walls built once around the city now crisscross the city itself, and in a multitude of directions. Watched neighbourhoods, closely surveilled public spaces with selective admission, heavily armed guards at the gate and electronically operated doors – are all now aimed against the unwanted co-citizens, rather than foreign armies or highway robbers, marauders and other largely unknown dangers lying in ambush on the other side of the city gates.

— Globalization by Zygmunt Bauman

The experience of American towns analysed by Sennett points to one well-nigh universal regularity: the suspicion against others, the intolerance of difference, the resentment of strangers, and the demands to separate and banish them, as well as the hysterical, paranoiac concern with ‘law and order’, all tend to climb to their highest pitch in the most uniform, the most racially, ethnically and class-wise segregated, homogeneous local communities. No wonder: in such localities the support for the ‘we-feeling’ tends to be sought in the illusion of equality, secured by the monotonous similarity of everyone within sight. The guarantee of security tends to be adumbrated in the absence of differently thinking, differently acting and differently looking neighbours. Uniformity breeds conformity, and conformity’s other face is intolerance. In a homogeneous locality it is exceedingly difficult to acquire the qualities of character and the skills needed to cope with human difference and situations of uncertainty; and in the absence of such skills and qualities it is all too easy to fear the other, simply for reason of being an-other – bizarre and different perhaps, but first and foremost unfamiliar, not-readily-comprehensible, not-fully-fathomed, unpredictable.

— Globalization by Zygmunt Bauman