Open Borders

A border is an idea so powerful that we never even have to see it to believe it. Or believe in it. Global borders can be sites of peace and conflict, violence and celebration, opportunity and confinement. And borders as they exist today – which is to say, increasingly militarized and clearly defined – are actually a relatively recent political invention. It wasn’t until the 20th century that strictly controlled national borders started to spread around the world.

John Washington grew up with his family’s stories of migration and escape – from hiding in train compartments and swimming across rivers, to the airplane his mother took to leave Romania for the US as a teenager. These stories of forging out dangerously on your own to cross a border seemed to him like tales from a distant past.

But then, in the mid 2000s, John was on a camping trip with a friend out in the Anza Borrego desert, about 15 miles north of the US-Mexico border wall, when he saw a young man on the side of the road, asking them for help. The man was thirsty, and had clearly just traversed across the border. He asked for a ride to the next town.

John knew that under federal law, he could have been criminalized for offering this man the help that he needed. So they apologized, wished him luck, and went on their way. In the decades since that interaction, John says his decision not to help that man that day showed him how much the border wall had seeped into his head. That the entire force of the way immigration policies are structured was incentivizing him to leave that man on the side of the road.

These days, John is an immigration reporter, and he’s also the author of the book The Case for Open Borders. In his book, John writes about different borders around the world and how they work.

The Wall Sickness

From 1961 to 1989, the Berlin Wall separated East and West Berlin. This famous concrete barrier, topped with barbed wire, guarded with watchtowers and mines, was built by Communist East Germany to protect their territory from the West Germans.

The Berlin Wall had a major unintended consequence – something that people didn’t realize until it was too late. It turned out the wall was making people sick. An East German psychiatrist who was treating many patients on both sides of the Berlin Wall coined the term Mauerkronkite, or wall sickness, which was his understanding of how much the Berlin Wall had seeped into people’s heads and impacted their psyches. Partially because of the wall, patients displayed some combination of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and paranoia. The closer they lived to the wall, the more acute their symptoms.

Thanks in part to mass protest and the increasing instability in East Germany at the time, restrictions at the border eventually loosened.

Then, on November 9, 1989, the East German government opened the border, just before midnight. Hundreds of thousands of Germans from both sides immediately flocked to the wall, demanding that it be knocked down.

At that point, there were around a dozen international border walls throughout the world, and there was a huge celebration of openness.

And yet today, there are somewhere around 80 border walls worldwide. That’s more border walls than ever before in human history.

The Radcliffe Line

Countries worldwide have wrestled with borders: where to place them; how to guard them. And, John writes that borders tend to protect the idea of a country more than the country itself. Maybe it’s with barbed wire fencing or a flag, a security checkpoint or a watchtower… Each border comes with its own flavor of pageantry.

At the border between the towns of Attari, India & Wagah, Pakistan, there’s fences and police. There’s ice cream and face paint. You can buy carnival snacks and keychains with little machine guns on them. On either side of the border gate there are two huge stadiums, one for Indians, and the other for Pakistanis.

Since 1959, soldiers from both countries have staged an elaborate ceremony here at the same time every single day. It’s a sort of choreographed dance battle. They strut back and forth like birds doing a mating call.

On a typical day, the stadiums here are full. This is the most popular border crossing in the region – as in, it’s the one often written about in tourism magazines – but these military performances take place at various points along the long, jagged line that separates India and Pakistan.

The line between India and Pakistan itself – the line of Partition – has a pretty bizarre history. It’s an example of how most national borders were created in pretty random, haphazard ways.

WW2 left the British kind of broke, so after almost 200 years of imperial rule, they decided to abandon their colonization of India. The plan was to form two new, independent countries in their wake: India and Pakistan.

Part of the project that was happening at the same time was trying to divide the two countries specifically by religion. The concept was that the Hindu population of this region would go into India and the Muslim population would go into Pakistan.

The British charged one man, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, with the task of drawing the line and creating the two nations. Radcliffe was a British lawyer. And although he was declared the authority on carving out these two new countries, he knew next to nothing about the region and had never visited. Following nationalist riots in India, the British wanted to speed up their departure in 1947. And so, Radcliffe was given just 5 weeks to draw the new border. That wasn’t enough time for him to even get his hands on an updated map. And even though Britain intended to divide the countries along religious lines, Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs had lived for centuries side by side, all throughout the region.

Ultimately, the Radcliffe line was drawn and the British declared an independent India and Pakistan. Fearing mass protest, exact information of where the line would be was released to the public two days after the Declaration of Independence. This meant that millions of people celebrated independence without even knowing which country they were in. Some towns raised both the Pakistani and Indian flags. But once word of the line had spread, millions suddenly became a religious minority if they were Hindu or Sikh living in the area that became Pakistan, or if they were Muslim living in the area that became India. And for many of those people, that celebration quickly turned into horror.

People were driven out of their homes and were subject to mass communal violence and rioting. Cyril Radcliffe’s line, that smooth stroke of pen – it suddenly put about 15 million people in the wrong place, making it the largest forced migration in the world. It’s telling that after drawing the line, Radcliffe burned all of his paperwork. He left India and even declined to receive payment from the British Government for the job.

Much of the India-Pakistan border is fenced and lit up by the Indian government, 1,200 miles of bright floodlights making the line visible from outer space.

It’s one of the most contested borders in the world. And yet, the Attari-Wagah border crossing can also be a place to have a picnic and watch some circus-like fun. It’s an absolute contradiction. One that John says isn’t so unusual. And much like this border, John says all borders are selectively permeable.

It’s in Kashmir where the Radcliffe Line stops. The British left that disputed territory for India and Pakistan to resolve on their own in 1947, and they immediately went to war over it. 

Lately, a war over borders is once again at the center of conflict between the two nuclear armed countries. And for 12 days, the daily theatrical rivalry at this border crossing was put on pause. The performance has since resumed, but now with some key changes. This time the gates do not open, and there is no handshake.

The Pacific Solution

A border is a line that can shift and bend, and is often a lot less rigid than we might think. John Washington writes that if history is any guide, national borders are always moving, often conveniently closing shut behind those who enforce them.

In 2001, a small fishing boat crammed with 433 asylum seekers was on its way to Australia, when the boat’s engine failed in international waters. The people aboard – who were mostly from Afghanistan – were rescued by a nearby container ship. The ship’s captain was shocked by the conditions of the people aboard, and he began to sail to the closest port for safety.

And they ended up on Christmas Island, which is an island about a thousand miles off the coast of mainland Australia, but is claimed by the country of Australia. But when they got to Christmas Island, they were not allowed to dock because Australia was really nervous about the fact that if they touched land, they would be able to levy an asylum claim.

So the asylum seekers waited in limbo. They remained on board the vessel near Christmas Island while the Australian government argued over their fate. Their conditions grew more and more bleak. Some of the migrants began a hunger strike.

The ship’s captain kept trying to get Australia’s attention. On the fourth, desperate day, he started sailing towards mainland Australia. The Australian government sent in the military to prevent the ship from sailing any closer. The government also quickly passed a series of laws that suddenly gave them the power to refuse entry to asylum seekers arriving by boat.

Australia re-directed the asylum seekers to other islands. Including a tiny island country called Nauru. Nauru was once a country rich in natural resources. But after being mined by a series of corrupt governments, it was left desperate for money. And so, when Australia approached them and said – we wanna build a detention centre on your land – it wasn’t really in a position to refuse. Refugees trying to get to Australia would be redirected to Nauru and have their applications for asylum to Australia processed there. While waiting for the applications to be processed, asylees would be imprisoned on Australia’s offshore detention centre on Nauru.

What began as a hurried political response to the arrival of that one boat in 2001 grew into a series of permanent immigration policies. Australia called this new set of laws The Pacific Solution.

The Pacific Solution involved something else, too. The Australian government excised Christmas Island from official Australian national territory. This way, no future asylee arriving there could ask for asylum.

Just like that, the Australian border was changed. The new policy was backdated to 2.5 hours before the refugees entered Australian waters. This way, the official memory of the arrival of those people to Australia had been erased. The asylum seekers had never really been in Australia at all, at least not in any way that could be of benefit to them.

Just like how Australia moved its border in the name of protecting its border, John says that all borders are malleable.

After the 2001 incident, a detention center was built on Christmas Island, too. It became known as the island on which 100 million crabs roam free, but refugees live behind bars.

There Shall Be Open Borders

In The Case for Open Borders, this is John Washington’s argument: people should be able to move and migrate wherever they want and need to. That instead of criminalizing people for crossing a border, we should instead fear the society in which we deny a desperate person aid, leaving them stranded on the side of a desert road, much like John did with that young migrant years ago in the Anza Borrego Desert. To put it even more simply, John says we should open our borders.

This idea might sound radical now, but it wasn’t always that way. Even Ronald Reagan called for what sounds like an open border between the US and Mexico at a Republican presidential primary debate in 1980.

Not long after, the Wall Street Journal called for a five word amendment to the constitution, “There shall be open borders.” And, less than a decade ago, Democrats running in their party’s presidential primary were competing over who was more pro immigrant. But, times have changed.

John says there are many reasons the spirit of open borders should return. There are ethical reasons… There are also economic reasons. Because immigrants contribute positively to a country’s economic growth.

In 2017, The National Department of Health and Human Services commissioned a study on the fiscal effects of refugees and asylees in the US. What researchers found wasn’t aligned with what the Trump administration was looking for and the study was buried — though eventually leaked to the New York Times. The study found that from 2005-2014, the US refugee and asylee population paid $63 billion more in taxes than what they received in benefits.

Here’s the thing — humans have always migrated. And they likely always will. If you look back far enough, tales of migration are central to so many of our religions, literature, and our family histories. And John says it’s essential to look at migration into the US through this lens as well. That people are always going to want to move – and even more so in the context of climate change. Trying to stop it isn’t only inhumane. It’s also expensive and a little futile.

John says that if your ultimate goal is to stop people from moving…well he doesn’t think that’s possible. But either way, a border wall isn’t going to be so effective at keeping people out.

On the other hand, the border wall, alongside hardened internal immigration policies, are actually discouraging people to leave the United States after they enter. That trend of coming and going is called circular migration. It used to be very common in the US., but over the last 20 years, the amount of circular migration has plummeted. Just like with the Berlin Wall, the militarized American border is unintentionally keeping many people in.

Until very recently, we did not talk about borders the way we do today. Before the 1990s, there was almost no physical infrastructure along America’s Southern border. Now, there are about 700 miles of fences and walls stretching along the line that separates Mexico and the US. Here’s one more fact: the relative age of the US-Mexico border wall right now is about 30 years old. That’s the same age that the Berlin Wall was when it fell.