BORDERLESSNESS
The Atlantic magazine carried an article called "The Case For Getting Rid of Borders – Completely." I really wanted to hear something spelled out in detail, something more than the vague proto-humanitarian quips I hear in the news or on the street.
My own bias is that I think immigration, and even just international travel, should be much better than it is presently. For sure. I also don't feel that immigration or borders are things you can actually be for or against. Borders and immigration are features of the world, like fire or water. And so, yes, you could be anti-tsunami, as anyone living on an island or near the coast is by default, but no one can be opposed to water any more than they can be for it, in any real sense. You are a thing of and in water, like it or not. And then calling for the elimination of borders seems to me like a firm “anti-immigration” (anti-sun or anti-rain) stance. Like, I hear what you're saying, I think, only I don't feel it makes any sense. It just cannot be that all, most, or even many borders are arbitrary. (Yes, we could perhaps pull down many walls and so much razor wire. Sure. But “borders” are much more than fences or lines on a silly map.)
It seems the argument for allowing all humans everywhere to freely roam the globe “uncaged by the arbitrary lines known as borders” has an economic and moral basis. (Though economists and corporate leaders seem to be the main backers of a borderless world, to me the economics feels less than compelling and a curious focus. But, given that the Atlantic article was written by a professor of economics, we'll forgive this hammer for finding himself a nail.) To start with, the piece states that every place is not equally well-suited to mass economic activity and opportunity: that “nature's bounty is divided unevenly.” This is a plain fact and not an argument for or against immigration as far as I can tell. Sure. Fair. Great. It's true that not all regions of the globe are identical, but what kind of claim is that?
This premise seems to come from the feeling that all humans are at bottom blank slates, identical in every way, and that the variation we see between individuals, across the population, or between nations, comes down to resource distribution. That's not so. Anyone born into a family or who has gone to school or who has done any travelling knows this isn't a holistic view of the human (or narwhal or weevil or spruce) condition. So how does such an idea persist? The sense that borders need to disappear if people are going to have economic opportunity, or something approaching equal opportunity, or that these notions (borders, economic opportunity, equality) are simple universal conceptions held identically by all folks everywhere (never mind whether they're in theory or practice good ideas) seems to me weirdly elitist and most certainly antiquated. Doesn't this presuppose that six figure (USD) salaries are what everyone globally aspires toward, and that access to the traditional zones of wealth creation (and those face-to-face networking and mentorship opportunities therein) are as essential today as they were a generation ago? And doesn't this argument, in fact, suggest tomorrow will be the same as yesterday and a decade from now everything will be no different? Seems like it. But who agrees with any of that? I do hear people arguing similarly all the time: that it's a lack of money that's keeping the masses down. It is true that it tends to take a certain amount of cash to start a traditional business, and that a lack of money can be the biggest barrier; but it's just foolishness to pretend that you and I would be the next Larry Page and Sergey Brin, or even just a vaguely successful entrepreneurs, if only we had access to half a million bucks and a plane ticket to New York or San Francisco. The chances of that are probably less than you winning the lottery twice.
What we do know is that, starting with the invention of the printing press and growing ever more so since, who you are and where you are has had progressively less and less influence on who and what you have access to, particularly in terms of information and economic opportunity. And, of course, the substance, distribution, and impact of all this grew tremendously with the arrival of electricity, and then exponentially more with the spread of the internet – and then exploded beyond imagining, becoming almost totally untethered from space and time, by way of satellites and mobile phones. For example, just this week I received a photo, via mobile phone, from someone on the border of Uganda and South Sudan – a truly remote corner of that remote continent – where phones, SIM cards, and data plans are accessible even to someone earning two dollars a day. (Like $15-45 for a phone, $1.00 for a SIM card, and $2.00 for a 1GB of data – all of which costs not twice as much but up to 25x that here in the densest urban centres of Canada.) And, too, I've spent time with folks on the edge of the Congo and others from the mountain tops of West Papua where you are as likely to find folks wielding stone adzes as mobile phones. These folks plough fields of yams and cassava while checking the news on Twitter and chatting with their friends on WhatsApp on their smartphone while sending and receiving electronic cash on their second phone, their flip-phone, using MobileMoney, M-Pesa, and WorldRemit. This wireless digitization and widespread, non-local access has meant that mass economic activity (like the democratization of once-privileged, high-quality information in the form of books) grows progressively ordinary and is no longer available to only a minority of elites. But, of course, here in the West these things don't just cost more: most of us don't even have the banking and payment options farmers in rural East Africa or Southeast Asia have.
Along with this, economic activity of all sorts is both more accessible and rewarding in these places, in the “global south”, than in any city I've lived in or travelled to in the “developed” world. In my experience, not only are goods and services far easier to come by, and less costly relative to income, (even food being grown more readily and consumed more freely, in a manner unimaginable in the wealthier and more northern climates of the West) but employment, investment, and business creation is immediately available to virtually everyone and across every segment of society while also being uncommonly gainful in a manner not found in places like New York or Silicon Valley, Toronto or Vancouver. And it's impossible to imagine how this circumstance – barring a global catastrophe – isn't going to become more pronounced over decades to come.
But the author of this article presses on, assuring us uneven access to abundance exists and is made worse by governments who inflame all forms of intolerance and bigotry. He goes even further, telling us that our own governments care nothing about humans but instead arbitrarily crush the dreams of “the overwhelming majority of would-be immigrants [who] want little more than to make a better life for themselves and their families by moving to economic opportunity and participating in peaceful, voluntary trade” and that they do this by way of “state-sanctioned violence – forced repatriation, involuntary detention, or worse – often while paying lip service to 'huddled masses yearning to breathe free.'”
Well, I disagree with this part of the assessment too. Again, people are not blank slates. Place matters as does peoples' experiences. Yes, Syrians most certainly needed safe passage out of their homeland and also permission to land somewhere stable when chaos erupted. But how little do you care about these people? No different than yourself, few Syrians want to arrive or remain in just any old place. Proximity matters, climate is a factor, culture is not irrelevant, and neither is language, education, politics, or religion. So, for many Syrians, Turkey would be a better place to arrive than Greece, though Greece may be better than Russia, while Russia may be far preferable to Northeastern China, say, or the Falkland Islands. Obviously. Right? I mean, if strife effectively wiped BC off the map my first choice, even in a total panic, isn't going to flee to Dubai or Brunei. Why? Climate, language, culture, politics, religion, to name a few... What, you think Germany, Norway, Australia, and Canada are devoid of culture or politics and are just blank slates themselves which anyone from anywhere should just innately understand, appreciate, and seek to integrate into? Absurd. Or do you think that Western democracies are uniquely malleable in every conceivable way to accommodate any number of people from anywhere under any circumstance? Why? Surely anyone with an ounce of compassion will acknowledge that someone from the equator, whose used to spending their life out of doors, living closely among large groups of people and with a vibrant nightlife, has their whole life consumed fresh fruits and vegetables all year round, and is used to being able to travel around easily and at little cost is probably more likely to die from culture and climate shock than they are to thrive on Tasmania, Gotland, or Vancouver Island.
(As for those iconic lines found inscribed on a plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty, from Emma Lazerus' sonnet The New Colossus, "Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free", well, this poem is just that: a poem and not a legal document, or a policy statement from the US department of immigration. And the Statue of Liberty itself, as we all know, was not an American project but a gift to America from the people of France. So this idea and symbol is at most aspirational, nothing like consent to unrestricted immigration – as it seems presented in this piece. US immigration policy “failing” to blindly let in everyone who shows up is, as far as I can see, a feature of the system, not a bug needing a hot fix. Seeing this otherwise is, frankly, confounding.)
To continue with the non-sequitors, the author explains:
Wage differences are a revealing metric of border discrimination. When a worker from a poorer country moves to a richer one, her wages might double, triple, or rise even tenfold. These extreme wage differences reflect restrictions as stifling as the laws that separated white and black South Africans at the height of Apartheid. Geographical differences in wages also signal opportunity—for financially empowering the migrants, of course, but also for increasing total world output.
As I suggested above, if someone from Rwanda or El Salvador moves to Ireland or New Zealand, yes, their wages may increase, and maybe dramatically so; however, they're almost certain to experience lower economic opportunity, if that term has any meaning at all, as well as diminished social and familial opportunities than they're very likely accustomed. That's because their basic expenses (from rent, taxes, and phone bills to food and transportation) is guaranteed to move disproportionate to their income rise. Obviously.
To examine those specifics just a second, living in Bolivia on minimum wage ($2.60 CAD/hr) and then moving to Canada and making $12 per hour is only an increase in income and economic opportunity if you pay no rent and have no bills or personal expenses. How else? If you've never considered the math or experienced the social impact of transitioning to a new culture then just talk to the next immigrant you come across. They'll be happy to spell out all the ways they used to be able to live and raise a family on one income back home and how now everyone has to work, three or four family members, maybe working multiple jobs and putting in unsustainable hours, just to cover the rent and feed themselves; how there's value in political stability for sure, but freezing ten months of the year and never having enough money to do anything or go anywhere or saving to do so one day (when taking the bus or renting a car or getting on a plane costs fifty or a thousand times what it did back home) hardly seems worth it. I've had this same conversation with Sri Lankans and Bangladeshis and Indonesians, Somalis and Ethiopians and Tanzanians, with students and teachers and cabbies and farmhands – and done so on four continents. And here we're just talking about immigrants. The situation of temporary migrants, those who come over the border to work seasonally and send money back home, isn't any better even within the EU. Labourers from Romania, say, working on asparagus farms in the UK, earn a little more money than they would at home but tend to sacrifice more than it's worth in terms of their quality of life and their mental health, while performing a laborious, underpaid, dead-end, seasonal, low skill job no Briton wants. And that's exactly why economists are the major proponents of "no borders."
More than all of the above, I think humans are different. I think people actually have different languages, ideas, beliefs, and practices. And I think that's a good thing. That's not a kind of error or something disgusting we should aim to dilute or eradicate. I mean, why travel to Norway or Zimbabwe but to discover there sights and sounds, crafts and cuisine, people and experiences you can't find in at home? Further, and even more obvious, I think people living together need to collaborate and so must have shared aims at the very least. It's not enough to simply share space.
Despite all that, still none of this drills down to the substance and meaning of the word “borders”. The cells of living organisms have defined, discriminatory boundaries; bodies have immune systems and are covered in skin and hair and mucous; houses have walls and roofs, doors and windows; and the earth has its atmosphere, magnetosphere, and ozone layer. Nations are no different. And why would they be? You want and need borders because you want and need to be able to discriminate against who and what gets in (pathogen, invasive species, nosey neighbour, or meteorite.) And this restriction is not some kind of blind violence toward an otherwise benevolent world but the very prescription for thriving in it. As far as I can tell, anyone opposed to borders should also be anti-vaccination and anti-condom, opposed to health inspection and the wearing of gloves by food service workers, they should have no lock or doors on their home (and allow me to invite anyone I like into their home), and also be actively seeking the widening of the ozone hole and dispersal of the atmosphere. That's what I hear people arguing for when I hear opposition to borders. It seems as silly to me as being anti-immigration.
