I don’t get it. I understand that we have borders as a way to have different sets of laws and separate different governments from each other. But why are people so obsessed with making the borders keep people out, or restrict what can come in, tax goods moving between them, etc.
Borders aren’t real. At least not physically. If I cross state lines I don’t see a literal giant black line dividing, say, North Dakota from South Dakota. In fact I wouldn’t know there was a difference if not for the sign saying “Welcome to South Dakota”
For some reason humans can’t conceive of a world where we all live on the same chunk of land and we somehow have to separate each other.
Shouldn’t humans have a basic right to live where they have the best chance of survival? It seems like borders are just an excuse to exploit people along arbitrary lines by making up more rules to control humans who were born in the “wrong place”.
I must be missing something. All of this effort around nations and patriotism over “I live here so I’m better than you” or “those humans suck because they live on THAT chunk of land instead of this one”… we’re all the same species and yet we collectively seek out ways to divide ourselves and place people far away “beneath” us. All for some lines on a map.
Thanks for reading my Monday rant.
Highly recommend Harsha Walia’s Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism.
The securitization and militarization of borders functions as a valve to control the flow of labour and capital. By destabilizing the economies of the Global South, the North is able to secure capital flow into their countries, while limiting capital flow out. At the same time, the militarization of the border creates a tiered system of labour that fixes labourers into the destablized economies of the South, where they can be hyperexploited, while also ensuring the precarity of migrants in the North to serve as a domestic force of hyperexploitable labour.
Basically, by controlling who is allowed to move where, capital can ensure desperate labourers are available to work for a pittance in special economic zones, while also having a ready supply of domestic labour that is reliant on their visas (or fear of deportation through undocumented status) to suppress wages in the core.
Borders have had other meanings in the past (though still mostly economic), but this is by far the main point of modern nation-state border securitization. An argument can be made about jurisdictional limits being important (and they are, because it allows for differing rules and regulations and creating different tiers of labour based on citizenship), but if that was what mattered most the actual militarization and securitization of the border wouldn’t really help with that.