Walls haven’t stopped immigration. Is society ready to explore open borders?

An estimated 281 million people were international migrants worldwide in 2020, according to the most recent data. In the past decade, over 61,000 people have lost their lives migrating to another country.

When it comes to the subject of immigration, there is one option few are willing to consider: opening the borders entirely. In “The Case for Open Borders,” journalist John Washington lays out the moral, economic, and political arguments for doing just that. He interweaves his case with the stories of those whose lives have been shaped and scarred by borders. “To try to stop humans from moving is to try to stop humans from being human,” writes Mr. Washington. He spoke earlier this year with the Monitor. The interview has been edited for length.

What made you want to write this book?

It was a dawning realization after covering border immigration politics for quite a while. I kept on seeing failure after failure. When you try to set up borders, especially in our contemporary world that is beset by climate catastrophe and ongoing upheaval, people are going to run into those borders, and if we don’t let them in, some are going to die. What we see is crackdown, followed by bigger crackdown, followed by mega-crackdown. Walls [become] higher, longer, wider, more fortified, more guards. And people keep on migrating. This is not just in the United States, but also in Europe and a number of different areas in Southeast Asia. Politically, it’s a mess. So what do we do? What’s a more humane approach to this?

Where do you normally begin when talking about open borders?

The argument that I like to go to is the human argument. We have different laws for different people. Some people are allowed to go pretty much wherever they want because they have a certain passport. That’s not anything they did or earned. Other people are stuck in places with extreme precarity, hunger, and persecution. They can’t move, just because of where they were born. And I think that is fundamentally unfair. If someone’s really concerned about the economics of it, or they’re far from the border, perhaps you can talk about, actually, [immigrants] don’t steal your jobs. They don’t undercut wages. They’re not a threat to your culture. They’re not going to make a run for your schools and your hospitals. That sometimes can be effective in just starting to soften the hearts of people who are really scared, or against migration.

How has migration shaped our societies?

I don’t think we realized how much we have always moved, how important movement is, and how inevitable it is. This wasn’t really termed “migration” until people tried to stop it. Pretty much as far back as we can find in human society, there’s always been some practice of welcoming the stranger or welcoming the wayfarer, of giving refuge. ... This is codified in a lot of the world religions. But it’s then forgotten when we turn into the realm of politics. 

How do people react to the term “open borders”?

It’s really exasperating to hear people talk about the “open borders” we have right now. I spend a fair amount of time reporting on the current conditions at this border. And they are not open. The Biden administration is currently building more wall despite repeated, insistent campaign promises not to build another foot. Right now, people are evading Border Patrol and jumping the wall, trying to make it to freedom or to safety or to reunite with families. And they’re in mortal peril because of a closed border. One of the projects with the book is to take the term back. No, we don’t have open borders, but maybe we should.

What’s the difference between “open borders” and “no borders”?

I think no borders implies the absolute abolition of the nation-state or of a country itself. I don’t advocate for no borders. I don’t think it’s feasible. With open borders, however, the United States could remain the United States, and yet people could come here and become citizens through a registry. That’s similar to what happens when you cross from state to state here already. You just need a way of registering people and helping them fit into society where it makes sense for them to be, paying into the [collective] pot so they can receive basic services. That doesn’t need to be exclusionary.

You write that most people want to stay where they are. Why is that?

People move, and they always have. But they often don’t want to move – or don’t want to move far. [The majority] of African refugees right now are living in Africa. Overwhelmingly, the largest number of Venezuelans who have had to leave that country have gone to Colombia, Ecuador, Peru. Even if we were to open borders more or further liberalize immigration policies, people probably would stay close because they have cultural ties, family ties, and economic ties there. One of the absolutely essential corollaries to opening borders is also fighting for the right to remain.

What do you hope readers will take away?

I hope readers will feel, and this is something I wish politicians and anyone who thinks about border politics felt, that these policies have effects. We can’t try to separate or compartmentalize these rarefied policy decisions from the human beings who are right now crossing rivers, crossing the jungle in Panama, crossing the sea in the Mediterranean. Cultures are always changing. People constantly move. And even the folks who want to stop people from moving, they themselves often move. This is about freedom, about basic ideas around justice, about keeping human beings safe.