Someone drew a line in the sand. Then people fought over it for centuries, where it should go and who should be able to cross it, who could change it and who would guard it.
Borders bring more destruction than peace. Humanity’s history of territorial disputes and warfare makes that clear, as do deadly border crossings today.
Five years ago, the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration estimated 40,000 people — and likely more — had died attempting to cross a national border in search of a better life. More than 34,000 people, many of them asylum seekers fleeing violence, have died trying to gain entrance to Europe alone in the last 30 years, according to The Guardian.
In my estimation, even one life lost over an invisible line in the sand is one too many.
We’re so concerned with keeping people out of the plot of land we’ve staked as “ours” that we don’t care if they die outside the gates. The problem is, our claim to exclusive ownership is more tenuous than we would like to think.
The land that is currently the United States was fought over and occupied at various points by the Dutch, French, Spanish and English, who took it from the myriad tribes and indigenous nations who occupied it prior to the 16th century, who had inherited it from the earliest human civilizations in North America. Whose land is it really — the latest in a line of people to say “mine”? Who are we to keep others out?
The Chicano people in the American Southwest, many of whom established settlements there while the territory was controlled by Mexico, have a saying: “We didn’t cross the border. The border crossed us.” This, along with many other instances throughout history, shows how borders and notions of who belongs in a given place are arbitrary.
In addition to being dangerous, physical borders are increasingly inconvenient and out of place in a globalized world. Modern telecommunications and travel technology mean people and information flow across borders every day, by the million. It’s no longer possible to live in a world system of nation states that exist in complete isolation to each other, contrary to what North Korea might think.
The shift away from lock-down security and toward open borders has long been underway. Europe, for example, has the 1985 Schengen agreement, a treaty that largely abolishes internal border checks like the requirement to carry a passport. That’s important on a continent that contains 51 countries in a land area similar to that of the entire contiguous U.S.
Still, the process to gain entrance to live in a country other than your own is staggeringly difficult. In my own quest to study abroad for the school year in Spain, I have filled out a veritable mountain of paperwork and had to produce proof of a clean criminal background check, medical clearance, university admission, personal funds and more.
If we are going to make a world where we treat each other with human decency and we embrace the free flow of ideas and commerce, the borders don’t just need to be opened. They need to be erased.
