On Borders and Strength: What Really Matters, Ese?

As we enter another national election cycle, borders are once again a key issue. It may be helpful to frame the debate so individuals are not blamed for macro-factors beyond their control and also to agree illegal demand for entry connotes strength, not weakness. Indeed, the stronger the nation, the more its citizens demand closed borders during declining economic growth. This phenomenon—open for human investment when GDP rises, closed when GDP falls—ought to help voters point their political compass; sadly, trade deficits and security agreements between neighboring countries are not readily adaptable to television screens and podcasts. [Except, perhaps, Benicio Del Toro's Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018).] As borders become digital as well as physical, rules no longer favor the country with the biggest hardware. Will the winnowing away of norms set by a few countries post-WWII finally force voters to see the big picture? Probably not, but that shouldn’t stop us from establishing a baseline for moral discussion.

First, we tend to forget borders are boundaries. Human beings instinctively dislike boundaries, particularly politically-motivated ones (cough, gerrymandering, cough) that minimize opportunities or maximize unfair randomness. Yet, as the nation-state took precedence over religion, monarchy, race, and ethnicity, borders became essential to social cohesion. If you can’t unite people under a prophet, king, or führer, then geography, citizenship, and shared language are must-haves in your political toolbox. At the same time, every Jehovah’s Witness who steps into a Kingdom Hall understands nations and tangible flags are finite, whereas an intangible idea is infinite.ᴬ How, then, can a nation-state ask residents to follow its temporal, man-made and therefore lesser rules instead of existing ones already shared by the community?ᴮ In the modern era, the answer has been borders, which create the foundation for enforceable contracts between residents and states and which limit the individual in exchange for benefits.ᶜ Like it or not, a border means the military, a judge, every TSA agent having a bad day, and CBPᴰ control your movements.ᴱ Such multi-layered control isn’t compatible with maximal freedom, but Americans post-9/11 have accepted the pendulum of more security for less freedom. 

Second, we forget borders are artificial. Ask most high school students to find Baja California on an unmarked map of North and Central America, and you’ll see what I mean. ¡Qué risa! But if we admit borders are artificial, then what about languages? Religion? Interest rates? Outside the Wachowskis’ Matrix, you realize very quickly that our lives revolve around so many abstract political inventions, we need something tangible to ground us. In England, they have the NHS. In Scotland, they have nature. In Canada, they have winter. In America, we have gumption and borders, and sometimes, law and order.

Third, modern borders are inventions of the powerful, who can be fickle and/or profit-seeking. According to respected scholar Daniel Yergin in The Prize (1990), one man, Calouste Gulbenkian, drew a red line on a map demarcating the boundaries of several countries. The goal? To render oil exploration and oil rights to a select few. (See “Red Line Agreement”) Additionally, The Christian Science Monitor reported that

Standing before Britain’s top leaders, Sir Mark Sykes slashed his finger across his map of the region and, according to James Barr’s book “A Line in the Sand,” said, “I should like to draw a line from the ‘e’ in Acre [in then-Palestine, on the Mediterranean] to the ‘k’ in Kirkuk [in what would become Iraq].”ᶠ

Is it any wonder areas in which borders were imposed hastily continue to suffer serious problems? Unclear borders mean the law and the state are weak, and I don’t mean to imply all borders are suspect. Sometimes, borders are deserved. Why does Norway have oil and a trillion dollars in reserves while Sweden does not? Norway fought the Nazis in WWII while Sweden chose neutrality.ᴳ After WWII ended, lines were drawn specifically to benefit Norway over Sweden. Deserved or not, we often forget we speak a particular language and hold a particular passport based on the actions of a few men decades ago, some of whom placed corporations and trade above individuals and social cohesion.

Finally, mass immigration is not new—people have always migrated to where jobs exist or are advertised: “Taksin encouraged Chinese immigration to revive the economy… One million immigrated [to Bangkok]  between 1882 and 1910, of whom 370,000 remained permanently. After the surge, about half of Bangkok’s population was Chinese.” [From Chris Baker’s A History of Thailand, “Expanding Market Economy,” “Rice Trade and Early Manufacturing.”] Such supply and demand of labor shaped manufacturing output, which, in the days of analog and manual farming, determined power.

Now imagine politics as the art of powerful nations maligning and isolating weaker nations who refuse to play by their rules, and war the way to settle which nations get to draw the lines. I’ve just argued, using very polite language, that your flag, your anthem, and even your language is bunkum. What matters are not the lines allowing your nation-state to draft the terms and conditions of its contract with you, the citizen; what matters are the terms and conditions themselves, the processes that make them, and whether such terms are enforced consistently and reasonably. Have you read your fine print lately? 

© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (October 2023) 

Dedicated to Cambridge University’s Chris Baker.

A. The Catholics, believing they could have the best of all possible worlds, decided to invent the Trinity to make their kingdom(s) tangible and more easily malleable. Jehovah’s Witnesses reject the doctrine of the Trinity.

B. Would you agree shared language, shared geography, and shared laws (aka citizenship), in and of themselves, are non-competitive compared to angels, beautiful hadiths, wise proverbs, and the hereafter? 

C. From Journal of Air Law and Commerce, Volume 80, Issue 4, "Freedom to Fly: An Analysis of the Constitutional Right to Air Travel,” (2015) by Lindsay Ray Altmeyer: “the courts have established a constitutional right to interstate travel, although not a right to the most convenient form of travel; they have recognized not only a right to international travel, but more recently a right to international air travel. In each case that has addressed the issue, however, the courts have stopped short of establishing a right to interstate air travel, i.e., a right to fly domestically.”

D. See Operation Whistle Pig. 

E. When John Lennon, an immigrant, sang, “Imagine there’s no countries,” he meant “and no borders too.” The United States could not get rid of John Lennon by locking him up, so they used borders to try to deport him. 

F. See Sykes-Picot agreement.

G. As Espen Eidum's Blodsporet (aka The Blood Track) explains, Sweden's so-called “neutrality” during WWII meant it facilitated everyone’s wartime efforts, including Nazi Germany’s, profiting from both sides.