Imagine a World Without Borders - YES! Magazine Solutions Journalism

Walls and fences at national borders enforce inequality, racial divides, and climate catastrophe. But most of them began as invisible lines in the sand.

For decades, Todd Miller has reported on borders and the conflicts they create. In his new book, Build Bridges, Not Walls, Miller invites us to envision a borderless world, one better-equipped for our collective survival. In this excerpt, he describes the militarized U.S.-Mexico border and considers recent history, when the border was more permeable and life on both sides more interconnected.

Below us in Nogales, the agent abruptly halted his lecture and tore up the hill again, spitting gravel from his wheels. I was relieved, because you never know how such a scene might play out. Every day such displays of asymmetrical power take place, small acts of aggression that never make the news. Before long, the agent returned to his perch under the camera post, an elevated spot providing unobstructed views of the surrounding area. This whole scene would not have happened before 1994, when there was only a chain-link fence with big holes through which people would cross back and forth. According to longtime resident and musician Gustavo Lozano, back then the only worry was the occasional presence of a kid at the hole asking for pocket change. When Lozano occasionally got caught by the Border Patrol and thrown back into Mexico, there was no incarceration, no formal deportation on his record. He told me that he would often cross from Mexico into the United States to pay a bill at a department store for his mom, to play basketball with his cousins, to hang out with his family. As late as the 1980s, on holidays such as September 16鈥擬exican Independence Day鈥攐fficials opened the borders completely and a parade zigzagged back and forth as if the international boundary simply didn鈥檛 exist.

Ambos Nogales is one place that exists on both sides of the U.S.- Mexico border. Ambos means 鈥渂oth,鈥� and as the name suggests, communities on both sides of the border share deep familial, community, social, economic, and political ties. They also share common infrastructure. As Ieva Jusionyte writes in her book Threshold: Emergency Responders on the U.S.-Mexico Border, 鈥渆xtending from northern Sonora to southern Arizona, the railway, the highway, even the sewage pipeline facilitate dense ties between the two sides of the border. It becomes impossible to disentangle one town鈥檚 everyday logistics from the other鈥檚.鈥� The border cannot stop the roots of trees and the vast mycelium networks symbiotically entangled with them from reaching across to the other side.

At Ambos Nogales, the border is not designated by a mountain, lake, or river. This border first came into being as an imaginary line in the sand with the Gadsden Purchase in 1853, that is, if a transaction at gunpoint can be considered a 鈥減urchase.鈥� Officials from both countries put up the first permanent fence in 1918 after what was known as the Battle of Ambos Nogales. The battle resulted from spiking tensions after the implementation of passport requirements by the United States, which included limiting the number of times Mexican citizens could cross the border. Repeated shootings by U.S. Customs agents and military, including the killing of two Mexican citizens, precipitated the combat. In his book Violent Borders, geographer Reece Jones argues that borders are implicitly violent, often from their very inception.

It鈥檚 a worthwhile thought experiment to imagine the world without human-imposed borders for working-class people.

Nevertheless, despite these U.S. border wars with Mexico, there is a long history of cross-border cooperation and mutual aid among the people. For example, fire units on both sides have crossed back and forth for decades in mutual assistance. Louie Chaboya, who served as the director of emergency services in Arizona鈥檚 Santa Cruz County, where Nogales is located, noted to Jusionyte this underlying sense of connection uniting the communities on both sides of the divide. 鈥淚n Nogales,鈥� he said, referring to this cross-border cooperation, 鈥渨e are not associates. We are not business partners. We are not even friends. We are family.鈥�

In that spirit, anthropologist Josiah Heyman posed a broader question in his 1999 essay 鈥淎 Border that Divides, A Border that Joins.鈥� 鈥淲hat if we think of Mexico and the United States as one country, unified, rather than divided by the border?鈥� Heyman asks. 鈥淚ssues often framed as contrasting the United States with Mexico are better understood as the allied elites and finances of both countries (plus Canada) versus divided and somewhat anxious commoners of the entire continent.鈥�

It could also be understood in another way: For the cross-border networks of allied elites, borders are open, but for a purposely discombobulated working class on the Mexican side, borders are all but closed. The working class in the United States is told that the Mexican working class is dragging its wages down, while the allied elites move good jobs across the border without impediment.

It鈥檚 a worthwhile thought experiment to imagine the world without human-imposed borders for working-class people. The Earth has existed for 4.5 billion years, humans and ancestors of humans for 6 million years, and civilization as we know it for only 6,000 years. Perhaps the world鈥檚 astronauts sensed this as they contemplated the sweeping view of the planet and experienced a sense of interconnected global consciousness. There is a reason they cannot see the borders, mostly because human-drawn international political boundaries are artificial and new, and do not register as topography, unlike bodies of water, rivers, and mountain ranges. The border in Nogales, for example, was drawn in 1853 without any agreement from the original inhabitants of this land, the Tohono O鈥檕dham. Colonial European powers sliced up Africa during the 1883 Berlin Conference, effectively creating the borders of its modern nation-states, without consulting any African people. The Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 divvied up the Middle East to the logic of the British and French, and not, say, the Palestinians. These artificial borders and their enforcement apparatuses are relatively new鈥攂order militarization, for example, has accelerated in the last 25 years鈥攁nd often imposed by faraway allied elites. In the grand scheme of things, borders now largely serve as a neocolonial scaffolding for a planet divided into exploiting and exploitable countries and peoples. They are untouchable. As an example, on one occasion Moroccan military and security personnel surrounded me and briefly confiscated my phone for simply taking pictures outside the border wall separating Morocco and the autonomous Spanish city of Ceuta. But even as they surrounded me鈥攖hey were paid by the European Union to provide 鈥渟ecurity鈥濃€擨 realized this was the universal conditioning around borders. You are on the 鈥渟acred ground鈥� of the nation-state, the border is its ultimate monument, humanity be damned.

So to continue the thought experiment, what if we were to allow ourselves to imagine a world without borders? What if we were to see borders not as shields, but as shackles keeping the planet in an unsustainable status quo of inequality, racial divide, and climate catastrophe?

Perhaps philosopher Michael Marder was contemplating these questions when he wrote an op-ed for The New York Times on March 3, 2020, titled 鈥淭he Coronavirus Is Us.鈥� In his op-ed, Marder describes his version of wall sickness: 鈥淲ell before the current outbreak, a global tendency to build walls and seal off national borders鈥ad taken hold. The resurgent nationalism instigating this tendency nourishes itself on the fear of migrants and social contagion, while cherishing the impossible ideal of purity within the walled polity.鈥�

Concerned with how such tendencies would complicate solving the coronavirus crisis, Marder continues the metaphor to encompass the global lockdown in which people are further divided by class. 鈥淎s panic sets in,鈥� he wrote, 鈥渋n some quarters, personal border closure imitates the knee-jerk political gesture: Food and medical supplies are hoarded, while the wealthiest few prepare their luxury doomsday bunkers.鈥� Marder arrives at the border鈥檚 eternal paradox: 鈥淏orders are porous by definition; no matter how fortified, they are more like living membranes than inorganic walls. An individual or a state that effectively manages to cut itself off from the outside will be as good as dead.鈥�

In April 2020, political cartoonist Matt Wuerker published a cartoon of a stern general looking out from a missile-laden border barrier, as his minion spots a coronavirus floating over the wall with his binoculars. For better and worse, the virus reveals humanity鈥檚 interconnection, and the inability of borders to truly partition us, even when sealed as tightly as possible. In this sense, the coronavirus becomes not only a catastrophe but also a lyrical messenger.

For Marder, it delivers a prescient message for the post-pandemic future: The coronavirus speaks to the inability of walled countries to respond to global issues such as climate catastrophe鈥攖he pandemic being but one aspect of it鈥攁nd advocates for us to 鈥渓earn to live in a world that is interconnected.鈥� Contemplated as one might contemplate a poem, the pandemic could be seen as a deep call to action, part of the 鈥済reat turning,鈥� as deep ecology scholar Joanna Macy has written, from an industrial-growth society that relies on borders, to a more sustainable civilization for which borders are an impediment. 鈥淭he most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth,鈥� says Macy, 鈥渋s not that we are on the way to destroying the world鈥攚e鈥檝e actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves, and each other.鈥�

In this sense, we can only hope that the director for the International Institute for Environment and Development, Andrew Norton, is right to state that the lessons drawn from COVID-19 could apply also to climate change. 鈥淪trengthening recognition of our interdependence鈥攖hat everyone鈥檚 health is everyone else鈥檚 business鈥攃ould strengthen the understanding that compassion and empathy are functional traits for humanity,鈥� he writes. 鈥淭he virus may lead to a deeper understanding of the ties that bind us all on a global scale.鈥� Coronavirus is thus an offering for us to reimagine borders, what they are, who they are for, who they are not for, and how humanity and the Earth will be better served without them.

This excerpt from Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders (City Lights Books, 2021) by Todd Miller appears with permission of the publisher.

Read an interview with Todd Miller about his book here.

Todd Miller is the author of the books Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security; Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration and Homeland Security; Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World; and most recently Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders.