… It takes

Time, lots of people’s time, to organize

The world this way. & violence. It takes more

Violence. Violence no one can confuse for

Anything but violence. So much violence

—Wendy Trevino, “Brazilian Is Not a Race #16”

“Europe is a garden … most of the rest of the world is a jungle,” European Union Foreign Minister Josep Borrell proclaimed in October 2022, “and the jungle could invade the garden.”

Borders are killing machines. Borders murder, maim, and torture poor people on the move; separate families and communities; plunder Indigenous land and sovereignty; create disposable and hyper-exploitable labor forces; disfigure and weaponize land- and seascapes that long predate the militarized, aspirational sovereignties of modern nation-states. Borders fuel nativist, white supremacist fantasies that underscore much of the civilizational “border talk”—like that of Borrell’s—that dominates United States and European politics today.

Borders, to borrow from prison abolitionist Dan Berger, are rarely just borders. They do much more than just demarcate where one nation ends and another begins. The imperialist gardeners and their walls determine who belongs and who doesn’t, who belongs in cages and who can freely move, who may die and who can live. Borders are what drowned two-year-old Alan Kurdi off the coast of Turkey, killed 18-month-old Iman Leila on the Syrian-Turkish border, and forced 14-year old Shafa to watch the agonizing deaths of two sisters and her mother in the Saharan desert. “I buried all of them myself,” she said. “We want this situation to end,” Abu Yassin, Iman’s father, told John Washington.

The “bordering” of everyday life is a defining characteristic of the 21st century. From the sort of biometric data and technology applied to individual bodies to the imperial drones that police the world, “we are defined by borders.” Since the mid-1970s, nations have built at least 63 border walls and more than 2,000 concentration camps euphemistically called immigrant detention centers. This system of global apartheid aims to prevent poor people from the global South from moving north, a movement premised on escaping decades of economic, political, and environmental devastation produced by the very global North governments who seek to block their flight. And yet these global North governments have the audacity to say, per US Vice President Kamala Harris, “do not come.”

Borders thus encapsulate the inner contradiction of our globalized, late capitalism world: the unfettered circulation of commodities and capital accumulation for the few matched by the proliferation of border walls, border police, and border prisons for the many reveal how power works today and exposes its actual fragility. As Wendy Brown argues, the current rise of border walls represents a reactive anxiety over waning state sovereignty relative to global capital—not strength. Similarly, historian Greg Grandin reads Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful wall” as a formerly expansive imperial project turned inward, unable to geographically displace racial and class conflict onto frontiers, thus cannibalizing itself. “The furies,” Grandin writes, “have nowhere left to go.” The colonial boomerang has returned home.

Paradoxically, then, borders illustrate the “line in the sand” between actually existing domination in the present and future possibilities of liberation. A socialism or barbarism for our age. Liberation will require recognizing that borders are not fixed features of human organization, and that border crossings and transgressions are both a fact of life and sites of more liberatory futures. Indeed, don’t borders invite crossing by their very existence? What might a politics rooted in the reality and possibilities of the crossing teach us?

The Case for Open Borders explores this very vision of a borderless world, making abundantly clear both the morality and political possibility of abolishing borders as they actually exist. Authored by Arizona Luminaria journalist and translator John Washington, the book evocatively suggests that modern state borders are not immutable lines of separation that have existed since time immemorial. They have a history—usually a violent one, at times with imperialist or settler colonial origin stories—and as such they can be undone, at least in their current murderous configurations. Opening closed militarized borders, though, is only the first step toward making a more just world, but a necessary one. “Opening borders doesn’t give migrants a chance at life (since migrants find and make life where they are),” Washington writes, “but ends the active and inhumane campaigns waged against them.”

His intervention could not come at a more opportune time. The recent executive order issued by President Joe Biden that allegedly closes the US-Mexico border and renders asylum a de facto impossibility reveals the long existing bipartisan consensus on murderous “border security” policy. Against this consensus forged on top of thousands of dead and brutalized migrants, Washington offers a radical politics of justice and solidarity unconstrained by lethal borders.

Simply bring down the walls and open the gates. Washington’s task throughout the book is to convince readers that his alternative is both reasonable and attainable. Drawing on years of expertise as a journalist in US border regions, he radically marshals history, economics, environmental catastrophe, and politics, to present open borders as the most feasible and just solution for our current time of monsters. Historically, he unravels the long colonial and imperial roots of the current global apartheid system faced by migrants. Economically, he argues against the tired, dishonest tropes of migrants stealing jobs, forcing down wages, and exhausting the US’s “generous” social welfare benefits. In a burning planet, he shows how global North nations spend billions on building defensive fortresses anticipating the mass displacement of people whose homes were rendered uninhabitable by the capitalist political economies of those very nations. Yet despite the border fortresses, people are still moving.

Politically, Washington offers a positive vision for unfettered cross-border mobility based on migrant workers’ terms, contending that such a shift would also undermine persistent crises of labor exploitation for workers within the US. The current system, which profits from keeping undocumented workers in without labor rights and protections, divides and harms a broader working class. Border abolition, in other words, is a requirement for a more expansive transformation of oppressive and unequal social relations, not only for those who cross but for all workers of the world struggling against capitalist violence.

Finally, Washington exposes how a never-ending, reactionary politics of “securing” the border ultimately thrives on the border’s fundamental ineffectiveness. Borders, he shows, constantly fail according to their own stated metrics. The building of ever more walls, surveillance infrastructure, and deployments of militarized border police does not change the fact that “people move and will not stop moving.” This failure, at least in the United States, then becomes a sort of lethal tautology: the more “secure” the border becomes materially, the more “insecure” and “open” it becomes in political discourse and policy. Since the early 1990s, more than 10,000 dead migrants lie in the wake of that failure: dead “floaters” or “tonks” in the lexicon of Border Patrol agents known to joke about killing migrant children. Perhaps that lethal failure is the point. If so, how else to understand the function of borders than as a noxious and violent infrastructure meant to enrich politicians and corporate border wall entrepreneurs through the state-sanctioned murder of innocent people?

In contrast, Washington presents readers with a positive argument for a different type of border—open, free, just, modeled on a long history of human mobility and dynamic cultural exchange—as both necessary and possible. The war on migrants generates more migrants—and more racist antimigrant hatred. And this war, lucrative for both politicians and border-industrial complexes but harmful to oppressed people everywhere, is only intensifying and expanding. Opening the border gates, Washington convincingly posits, offers a more realistic and hopeful engagement with the reality that people will always be in motion, and that they deserve to move without fear of punishment or sanction.

Migrants in particular have something to teach us about this, if we are willing to pay heed. As active historical and political agents, they hint at that better world through their dangerous struggles for mobility. For Washington, migrants are radical “freedom fighters” who threaten global systems of oppression and apartheid “in their mere movement” by exposing how those systems work in practice, devoid of legal hypocrisies or historical chicanery. Through such mobility, migrants offer the beginnings of a critical diagnosis of all that is rotten today. Moreover, their coerced decisions to escape the ravages of capital-induced climate change or different forms of violence affirm the right to life with dignity when another right—the right to stay home—has been taken. In contrast, closed borders (like prisons) represent punitive quick fixes, “catchall solutions to social problems,” to borrow from geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore. As such, Washington writes, “they bedevil—and redevil—other looming injustices.”

Borders have a history—usually a violent one, at times with imperialist or settler colonial origin stories—and as such they can be undone, at least in their current murderous configurations.

Washington knows his (mostly) US audience, across the political spectrum. He knows that “open borders” is an ideologically loaded term used by racists and politicians for decades to demonize migrants and fear-monger about impending national collapse at the hands of invading “hordes.” For instance, the title for a Los Angeles Times article from June 4, 1978, announced “Illegal Aliens Win a Beachhead for the Third World.” Some academics have joined in, albeit with more rhetorical decorum and using scholarly “objectivity” as a shield. Who could forget political scientist Samuel Huntington’s infamous “The Hispanic Challenge” (2004) Foreign Policy article?

So Washington essentially reclaims the term to advance a positive argument, to go beyond counterarguments with bad faith articulators and generally make the case that a world without murderous borders is both possible and “would be more egalitarian … where sustainability and justice take precedence over extraction and exploitation.” He concludes with a helpful activist manual of sorts: 21 quick, punchy arguments that range from the economic benefits of unfettered migration and the murderous stupidity of “smart walls” to the urgency of linking the right to migrate to the right to stay home. “Nobody should be forced to migrate,” he writes.

The work of creating a better world for all thus starts with the opening of gates for all. The Case for Open Borders echoes the Zapatista axiom “everything for everyone.”

Let us return to EU minister Borrell’s speech. He acknowledged that walls, no matter how high, will fail to keep out the “jungle” due to its “strong growth capacity.” Instead, he ominously suggested that “in order to protect the garden … The gardeners have to go to the jungle.” This approach has led to the militarization of the Mediterranean Sea, patrolled by Israeli-made drones that aid Libyan coast guards paid by the EU to locate and capture migrant boats. Thousands of migrants have drowned. Many endured a panoply of violence—including rape and slavery—while detained in Libyan concentration camps. Moroccan and Spanish border police have brutalized refugees trying to access Spanish colonial enclaves in North Africa. Perhaps this is the sort of revanchist policy that led Colombian president Gustavo Petro to warn about the political impacts of climate change–induced migration in the global North, connecting it to the genocide in Gaza. “Hitler is knocking on the European and American middle-class homes’ doors and many are letting him in,” Petro told the crowd at the COP 28 Summit in December 2023. “The exodus will be responded to with a lot of violence and barbarism. What we are seeing in Gaza is a rehearsal of the future.”

A barbaric future, perhaps even exceeding the bleak dystopian future of cages and walls anticipated in films like Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006). But as comrade Nick Estes told Washington, it doesn’t have to be this way.

Washington offers us a hopeful vision, at once utopian and practical, urgent and sensible: Everyone deserves to have a home. A home for all. And for that we need to open the borders. “The world, which is the private property of a few, suffers from amnesia. It is not an innocent amnesia,” the late Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano said in an interview. “The owners prefer not to remember that the world was born yearning to be a home for everyone.”

A home, for everyone.