You’ve been lied to about borders your whole life
Justifications for nativism and xenophobia simply don’t hold up to scrutiny
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This article was originally published at Vox Ummah, a Muslim publication focused on perspectives from the Global South. They have been kind enough to allow PWS to reprint it here. It will become available for free subscribers in 5 days.
I met Ahmed in the Darien Gap, the lawless and dangerous jungle crossing that connects South and Central America, in July of 2024. A recent college graduate in his mid-twenties, he had travelled from Kismayo, a port in southern Somalia, to Peru, and then by land through Ecuador and Colombia to the entrance of the Darien — near the Panamanian border.
He was fleeing rising violence in Somalia and in search of a better life. When we spoke, he had already been denied asylum in three countries. He was headed to the United States in the hope of making a fresh start.
He managed to cross the Darien and Central America before getting stuck in Mexico for a few months after being detained by migration authorities, and then being sent back to Tapachula, a town in the south of the country near the Guatemalan border.
“The jungle was scary,” he told me by phone at the time, “but Mexico is terrifying. We have no idea what is going to happen next.”
Ahmed had been robbed twice during his journey, once by Ecuadorian police and once by men preying on migrants in Mexico. He had also made friends with a young man from Bangladesh who was briefly kidnapped outside of Tapachula, until his family could raise a ransom to pay his captors
Ahmed finally managed to cross Mexico, however, and arrived at the U.S. in late October 2024, shortly before the election victory of Donald Trump. He was lucky, he managed to secure an appointment for an asylum hearing despite other migrants being forced to wait in Mexico for months after the previous U.S. President Joe Biden imposed new restrictions on the process that migrant experts described as an “asylum ban”.
He lives, for the moment, in Minneapolis, in a vibrant Somali community as his asylum process winds its way through the courts at glacial speed. He crossed half the world, jungles, deserts, and multiple continents, in search of security, stability, and economic opportunity.
And it isn’t just the U.S. that has been throwing up legal and physical walls against migrants. Most of the wealthy nations in the world are in the midst of a spiraling descent into nationalism and xenophobia — as evidenced by growing reactionary tendencies in European policies, as well as violence and demonstrations against migrants themselves in the U.K., France, Germany, Poland, and the Netherlands.
This system of closed and militarized borders seems standard to us. How could it not? We grew up in an age where the movement of humans was restricted and criminalized. This dynamic isn’t normal, however. It is new, and exactly the opposite of how the world worked for most of human history.
Passports, which at the time most countries didn’t use, were regularized during the First World War by the League of Nations as part of efforts to make migration for war refugees easier. Their creation was intended to be a temporary measure that facilitated migration. Prominent world leaders and some European nations were still calling for their “total abolition” as late as 1947.
The United Nations’ first point of debate that year was a return to pre-war immigration standards, though the measure narrowly failed. The die had been cast.
Passports gave states enormous power to control those who entered their borders as well as power over their citizens. Perhaps more importantly, however, they also allowed wealthy nations to extract value and resources from poor ones by trapping workers via artificially constructed barriers, preventing them from taking the real value of their labor to global markets in fair competition.
A worker trapped in Colombia, earning a minimum wage of $323/month USD, produces goods or services for companies in Europe or North America, who sell those goods or services in markets with far higher values at great profit.
That worker is prevented from simply competing fairly in those same labor markets.
Our global system, where money crosses borders effortlessly while human beings remain effectively caged, is simply put, wage slavery. This is the opposite of what the inventors of regularized passports envisioned — but it is the world that neo-liberal policy has invented, working in the service of capital.
Ironically, anti-migration policies hurt the vast majority of people who live in wealthy nations. Despite the claims of nativists, study after study on the economic effects of immigrants on both workers and economies in receiving countries is overwhelmingly positive.
Despite the claims by dishonest (or simply racist) politicians, migrants don’t “steal jobs”; they create them via economic growth and increases in both supply and demand sides of the economy.
And as demand for labor rises in response to economic growth, most studies on migration show that migrants, when allowed to participate in labor markets freely, increase wages rather than drive them down.
Only the very few elites at the top of the economic period in wealthy countries benefit from our current system of cages and a lack of market competition.
I point out these facts, not because I particularly care about them. Freedom of movement is a fundamental human right. My argument is moral. No one should die so that dishonest politicians and exploitative industry leaders with already unimaginable resources can achieve even more power and wealth.
I bring them up, rather, because most of the arguments people make to rationalize our current system are based on nothing more than myth and bigotry. After a decade of writing from, and even at times living on, borders across the Americas, I have heard all the arguments that attempt to rationalize our current system of violence and oppression. They are myths.
“Migrants come here to commit crime” is an ancient refrain still repeated today, centuries after it was first utilized by openly racist organizations and movements. Yet we have hundreds of studies from dozens of countries that show migrants commit crimes, particularly violent crimes, at a much lower rate than natural-born citizens.
That is to say, migrants lower the per-capita crime rate in receiving countries.
“They are a drain on resources. We should focus on our own people,” is another. Even if we grant this claim wide berth by ignoring the economic stimulus migration provides, growing the economy for everyone, migrants in the vast majority of countries pay far more in taxes than they receive in government services. This is true even of undocumented migrants.
My time in the trenches of the ugliest and most dangerous parts of borders — places where the wealthy elite have never and will never visit — has taught me only one thing.
Our modern border system kills.
Borders are strange places. They dehumanize by definition. They are man-made constructs created to restrict the passage of people. They are gathering points for humans at their most desperate and magnets for miscreants seeking to exploit those at their most vulnerable.
Goods are trafficked across them by the ton every day— both legally and illicitly — and money crosses them easily.
They are populated by stern officials, travelers, refugees, scammers, thieves, merchants, locals, simple migrants, and smugglers. Borders also underline the human need to classify some people as others. They are the invisible walls we create to separate societies, the outer limits of the “tribe.”
They are also where violence most often occurs between nations.
Most people from wealthy countries don’t have to think much about land borders. The majority of us fly over them when we bother to leave our country at all, and once we arrive, our passport insulates us from the majority of the discrimination that they impose upon the rest of the world.
Official border points in most of the Americas are controlled by corrupt officials. The unofficial ones are controlled by illegal armed groups, or the narcotraffickers and smugglers who benefit from their existence. Borders are not pleasant places. They dehumanize.
At the Darien Gap, armed groups prey upon migrants through extortion, robbery, sexual violence, and even murder. At every border between Colombia and the United States, migrants are victimized by both officials and criminals.
This is an intentional result of the policy imposed on poor nations by wealthy ones. Politicians, “left”, “right” and “centrist”, have long openly admitted as much. “Deterrence” policies are meant to make migration as deadly as possible in the hopes that fewer people attempt it.
It doesn’t work. Migration is like water. It will naturally flow to the path of least resistance. Deterrence policies don’t stop migration; they simply force migrants into ever more dangerous routes and conditions, greatly empowering criminal groups and smugglers in the process.
Ahmed still writes to me. He is worried that President Trump’s promises to deport millions of migrants will derail his asylum process and leave him, once again, a man without a country. He works in a restaurant for now and rents a room from a Somali family. He is constantly impressed by how cold Minnesota gets.
When I think about all he has overcome and the bravery it took to do so, I am inspired by his actions. But I am also angry that due to the desire for power of a wealthy few, he had to risk his very life for a simple human right that much of the world takes for granted. The selfish whims of a few powerful men are a poor justification for having to do so.
We would be lucky to count him as a neighbor, and wealthier in every sense of the word.
Eternally relevant post! I want to add that when migrants are able to make it through the very narrow legal pathways granted to them, their residency status is tied to their work at all times, creating the threat of losing the lives they have built if they are not perfect workers, accepting low wages and abuse.