The Artificiality of Nations

“Maybe we are all prospective migrants,” wrote Mohsin Hamid, whose 2017 novel Exit West imagines a pair of lovers fleeing a war-torn country through a series of magic doors to the Greek island of Mykonos, then to London, and finally to California. “The lines of national borders on maps are artificial constructs, as unnatural to us as they are to birds flying overhead.”

Many of the world’s national boundaries are remainders of colonial fiat, 40 percent of them imposed by Britain and France. “We have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other,” declared the British prime minister Lord Salisbury in 1890, “only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were.” The Middle East was notoriously carved up by the Sykes–Picot Agreement of 1916, and today’s map of Africa displays old imperial borders that cut lethally across a maze of ethnic and linguistic communities.

As one moves westward from China across the breadth of Asia, any expectation that the borders define discrete peoples is serially confounded. Traveling in 2005, almost a thousand miles within China’s borders, I found myself already in the country of the Uighurs. Farther into my journey, Uzbeks overflowed the Uzbekistan–Afghanistan border deep into Afghanistan’s southwest, and Persian-speaking nomads anticipated the Iranian frontier by hundreds of miles. In Iran itself I was barely beyond Tehran before the language around me was not Farsi but the melodic Turki of a people who extend to the Turkish border. And there, it is not Turks or Iranians who preponderate, but Kurds.

For the journalist John Washington, in The Case for Open Borders, to be born on one side of a border rather than another should bestow no inherent right. Borders are mutable; nations are questionable constructs. Yet the place where one happens to be born “disproportionately determines one’s income, wealth, and longevity,” he writes. “There is more than twenty-five years’ difference in life expectancy between a woman in Somalia and one in Switzerland.”

Almost all peoples, whether recently or long ago, emerged from a past of migration. “You are where you are right now,” Washington notes, “because either you, your parents, or your ancestors migrated there.” Borders were once porous and ill-defined, a state’s power concentrated more at its center than in its weakening outer limits. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War in Europe (with 109 delegations), is sometimes seen as a turning point in the legal defining of nations, legitimizing sovereignty within hardened borders. But if this treaty was foundational (and its primacy is disputed), the borders it established have long since changed or vanished.

As the Orientalist Ernest Renan wrote more than a century ago, nations are shaped by an agreed past: a process of selective remembrance and forgetting. Their communities cohere out of historic flux. Washington adds to this an emphasis on the coercion, and sometimes extermination, of indigenous peoples in the process. The violence done to them and their cultures is the outcome of the attempted creation of homogeneous nations. As recently as the 1990s, indigenous children in Canada were being forced into schools designed, in the words of the country’s first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, to “take the Indian out of the child”: a purpose replicated even now, among indigenous Siberians, by the internat schools of Russia. But in his critique of national misconceptions, Washington concentrates heavily on the United States, and it is on the US that he most trenchantly predicates his argument.

Washington’s first book, The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the US–Mexican Border and Beyond (2020), traced the systematic gutting of protections for asylum seekers in the US, including by the Trump administration.¹ In his new book he presents a passionate and urgent case for open borders. He asserts an “economic argument”—that immigration is, in short, good for the economy—and then a “political argument” that stresses both the futility and inhumanity of border walls and counters the fear of immigrant terrorism. In an “environmental argument” he then addresses the future mass movement northward of poorer peoples from regions of climate catastrophe, and he completes his manifesto by proposing how borders may be opened and what the world would look like afterward.

Recently the US economy, he writes, has been richly nourished by immigration. In both 2016 and 2022, two near-record years for legal immigration, over a million people entered the country, and GDP rose steeply, wage trends remained steady, and unemployment fell. Moreover,

during the COVID-19 pandemic, a congressional study concluded that “foreign-born workers are key contributors to the US economy, making up more than 17 percent of the labor force and creating about one-fourth of new businesses.” Immigrants, that is, provide the labor power and innovation that fuels economic growth, working in both service sector jobs and in health care and research.

Studies of large, sudden migrations, he adds, reveal little to justify the polemics of the anti-immigration right. He targets in particular Republican politicians (including Ron DeSantis and Jim Jordan) for scaremongering about the so-called federal open borders policies. Even the more liberal New York Times journalist Jason DeParle is taken to task for supporting restrictive immigration. Washington points out that the Mariel boatlift, which brought 125,000 Cubans to Miami in 1980, increased the city’s workforce by 7 percent. Wages didn’t go down, he asserts; unemployment didn’t go up; and he cites studies that find the Marielitos, after twenty years, productive in their new world, to which they brought more benefit than harm.

But a potent moral caveat to migration policies—especially selective migration, in which host governments permit entry only to the more able and educated—points to the loss of expertise in the migrants’ abandoned homelands. Washington counters this fear of “brain drain” by citing the importance of immigrants’ remittances back home and the sharing of knowledge and expertise across borders. But he does not mention that many communities in dire need (Palestine, Albania, or Polynesia, for instance) are being constantly shorn of their most qualified and enterprising members. Such migration has also happened internally. The mass exodus of rural Chinese into cities has created ghost villages whose only inhabitants are the old, the infirm, and perhaps the small children whom the migrants, in their cramped urban apartments, cannot accommodate. Washington himself cites the tragic imbalance of medical staff between town and country in Kenya. (Nairobi contains 66 percent of the country’s doctors.)

Washington interjects his argument with three chapters that give wrenching accounts of individual tragedies. A Syrian father, fleeing to Turkey in freezing winter, carries his infant daughter in his arms until she dies; a young Honduran man is haunted by the injured boy he has to abandon while they’re being pursued by US agents near the border with Mexico; a fourteen-year-old girl from Niger sees her mother and sisters perish one by one as they cross the Sahel.

Washington reserves his greatest anger for two US agencies: Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the “infamous” Border Patrol. ICE, he writes, “balks at any whiff of accountability.” Since its creation in 2003 as part of the Homeland Security Act, its imposition of detention and deportation has ranged from force-feeding hunger strikers to brutally separating families. He advocates for ICE to be abolished: “The country survived for centuries without this cutthroat immigration police force, and it can do so again.” As for Border Patrol, Washington points out that its officers “use excessive force, threaten, and sexually abuse those they detain at a higher rate than other law enforcement agencies. And they are rarely held responsible for any of it.”

The ordeal of undocumented migrants continues, if they survive. Worldwide there are more than 2,250 immigration detention centers, of which over two hundred are in the United States, many characterized by poor medical conditions, callous guards, and indeterminate lengths of incarceration. Even so-called guest workers—tens of millions across the globe—are often helplessly mistreated, most notoriously under the kafala system in the Gulf states, which binds migrants to one employer throughout their residence. Such migrants, Washington writes, can come to be seen as merchandise:

In working to convince someone that migrants are not a drag on economies…we risk further commodifying them. And that—commodifying migrants, squeezing them for all their labor power and compensating them as little as possible, bringing them halfway into the fold of the national economy only to exploit them and spit them back out—is one of the principal drivers for closed borders and restrictive immigration enforcement.

The legal rights of such workers are minimal, and migrants who enter countries illegally, of course, can be summarily deported: a “punishment for seeking life, security, dignity,” as Washington puts it. The United States, predictably, has deported far more people than any other country (some 60 million in the past 140 years). The Australian government has stranded its asylum seekers on offshore islands, obviating any constitutional protection for them, and a notorious British plan to deport immigrants to Rwanda was only abandoned with the recent change of government.

Washington’s “political argument” not only highlights the artificiality of nations but questions the supposed threat of terrorism within them. As early as 2016 Donald Trump declared that to let in Syrian immigrants would lead to “the destruction of civilization as we know it.” Yet, Washington writes, a Cato Institute study found that between 1975 and 2017 a mere seven undocumented immigrants to the United States had been convicted of planning terrorism within the country: “Not one of their plots were carried through, and not a single person was killed or injured by any of the convicted men.”

But here, as elsewhere, the concentration of his argument on the United States may be misleading. The evidence that ordinary crime increases with immigration is disputed, but Islamist radicalization has been an anxiety in Europe for decades and has periodically prompted violence throughout the continent. Most notoriously, the 2015 attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the 2005 London suicide bombings that left fifty-two dead were carried out by the sons of immigrants, and radicalization has become a mounting government concern. Still, such high-profile events pall beside the death toll of terrorist attacks within Muslim countries themselves.

Today defensive walls are multiplying. In the Schengen Area of Europe, where traffic flows unchecked between one nation and another, barricades against migrants have been going up along its periphery: between Greece and Turkey, Finland and Russia, Hungary and Serbia. Many such walls are defenses not against hostile powers, as of old, but against an invasion of the powerless. Sometimes collaborative surveillance on either side turns them into “thick” borders (as the political scientist Matthew Longo termed them), creating a new, deeper frontier zone.

Today a border crossing may involve submitting to a process so intrusive—your data (fingerprints, face scan, biography) shared by security agencies—that it seems to render the physical wall obsolete. And in any case, in Washington’s “environmental argument,” no walls will hold. The Global South, racked most urgently by desertification and rising seas, will send its people moving irresistibly northward:

According to prevailing estimates, as many as half a billion people will be forced from their homes by climate crises in the coming decades. Consigning them to refugee camps or slums will not only be dangerous for them—and a disgraceful mark of ignominy on the world—but a grave and politically volatile abdication of basic human decency. Tens of millions of people amassed behind border walls will push us closer to political despair and explosive violence. Borders are as much a solution to the radical changes to come as an umbrella is to a hurricane.

How is it, Washington wonders, that the UN Declaration of Human Rights enshrines the right to leave your country but not to enter another?

The future envisaged by The Case for Open Borders will evolve, in Washington’s heady vision, by an incremental process in which contiguous regions—some already sharing treaties and affiliations—open their doors. Washington charts this potential domino effect with almost jaunty optimism. Schengen will extend to Turkey; then the countries of North Africa—“polyethnic nations with deep historical, cultural, and linguistic ties to Europe”—will be tacked on. Existing free trade zones in Africa and South America offer promising precedents. The largest nations of South America have a common market, and “adding the rest of the continent… is an obvious move,” followed by the incorporation of Central America. Scandinavia and Australasia will be easier. Then India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh must abandon their border controls. But the twin nationalist giants of Russia and China (themselves divided by one of the longest and most heavily fortified borders on Earth) go unmentioned.

Walls, Washington concludes, are not protective but inflammatory. They foment political violence and the miseries of dispossession. His open borders will come about not through any awakened conscience of nations but through sheer necessity. The press of desperate migrants will at last prove unstoppable. In fact the “upheaval is already upon us, and, in coming years, it will touch us all—even those behind fortifications of wealth and privilege.”

For some the dystopian alarm that this arouses conjures the death of liberal democracy, with cultural extinctions and unleashed anarchy. And Washington, in the fervor for his cause, can rush ahead with contradictions. After summoning the specter of a near-apocalyptic future, he scales down such threatening predictions in order to shore up his case against the fear of mass immigration. According to recent polls, he writes, 14 percent of the global population wants to emigrate, but based on a study of Central America, only 3 percent of them actually would.

Yet in the burgeoning field of border studies, The Case for Open Borders will take its place beside the works of Wendy Brown, Jason Riley, and Suketu Mehta as a forceful voice in a deeply accusatory cause. For in the end its power lies less in prompting change (at least in the imminent future) than in advancing a compassionate and almost irrefutable ethical case. While climate change compels the Global South to pour its people northward, it is the North—by far the greater planetary pollutant—that has inflicted this suffering on them yet refuses to open its gates. “The call for open borders is the call,” Washington writes,

to acknowledge that closed borders cannot reconcile the grotesque levels of wealth predicated on human immiseration or the voracious extraction precipitating the cascading climate crisis. It is such gross exploitation and malapert consumption that we should limit, not the freedom of movement.

In both Washington’s book and Lauren Markham’s A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging, the widely circulated image returns of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy whose small body was washed up on the Turkish coast in 2015 after a failed attempt to reach Greece. Both books register the horrified sympathy that the image provoked and how, in the long procession of later news, the memory of it receded.

Markham is also the author of The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life (2017).² She is wary of casting migrants as either victims or criminals. Such shorthand, along with statistics, can obscure the complexity of the individual, she writes, depriving them of a character, a history, and any true agency. Like the celebrated Polish reporter Ryszard Kapuściński, she recoils from disaster journalism—in theory, if not always in practice—and favors investigating an issue after its boiling point is past, providing opportunities for everyday meetings and interviews.

Her new book has a diffuse and meditative structure. Part travelogue, part journalist’s investigation, it echoes Washington’s concerns—the precariousness of a nation’s identity, the illusory potential of maps, the myth that immigration harms the economy—but it is also spurred by something more elusive and personal. Markham, an American of Greek ancestry, is anxious to explore or recover her near-lost heritage, and she finds this inextricably entwined with the focus on migration and borders that has powered her work as a journalist:

Though most of my living family members have never been to Greece, the story of our Greekness is central to our identity. Its significance is teleological: being Greek means something because it is important to us that it mean something…. Many white people in the United States are animated by a similar longing to claim a faraway homeland, even as they support, explicitly or tacitly, the exclusion of contemporary migrants—people making a journey parallel to those their own ancestors made generations ago.

Markham’s great-grandmother Evanthia, at the age of sixteen, made the Atlantic crossing with her own mother in 1914 and found work in Boston, where Greek immigrants were regarded as swarthy and untrustworthy parasites. In time, with her four children, she began to assimilate. She cherished their pale skin and spoke Greek only out of others’ earshot. By the end of her life she was complaining about the new arrivals—Black people—in New Haven.

Her great-granddaughter Lauren’s desire to discover her Greece—to possess an “origin story,” to be “un-lost”—is confusing even to Lauren herself:

The problem with my diasporic condition…one I share with many white people in the United States, is that it can feel as if my roots carry information critical to my identity—and at the same time, because I have no concrete, lived connection with Greece, as if I wear my heritage like a costume.

Markham clearly expects the country to reveal itself almost mystically. She longs to speak its language. She empathizes with the experience of the Greek refugees from Anatolian Turkey, who in 1922 sailed westward still clutching their house keys should they one day return.

But to which Greece is she herself returning? Greece is its own myth. Travelers there are routinely surprised to encounter a people different from those they expected. The writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, who spent most of his adult life in Greece, drew up a playful balance sheet of the nation’s divide between its Europe-orientated Hellenism—cerebral, restrained—and its rustic Romiosyne, whose hardy fatalism, he guessed, has its roots in the struggle against Ottoman oppression. Predictably it is the notion of a classical Greece (sanitized by the European Renaissance) that many Greek politicians, and the all-important tourist industry, have most fervently espoused.

Markham’s Greek journeys are filled with strange unease: “Every moment seemed like it could so easily shape-shift into something else entirely…. Or maybe the magic was of my own conjuring.” Fleeting encounters—a glimpse of copulating snakes, the sudden bite of a donkey, an Athenian woman conversing with a duck—resonate with her expectation that they carry some hidden meaning. She and her husband become spooked by their rented apartment on a wind-racked cliffside on Andros, as if the island were repudiating them. And at last, when she discovers her ancestral village, she finds it decaying and almost deserted.

AMap of Future Ruins focuses most potently on the migrant crisis assailing today’s Greece. Markham’s career has concentrated on borders and migration, in East Africa, Mexico, and Thailand. Between her journeys within Greece she visits the narrow Norway–Russia frontier and the hazardous boundary in Greece’s far northeast. This border with Turkey especially is notorious for “pushbacks”: when the Greek patrolmen capture migrants they may march them brutally back into Turkey. Greece is desperate to deter them, above all by sea. Likewise, Polish guards force migrants back into Belarus.

At the heart of Markham’s book is the infamous Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos. Originally designed to hold 3,500, by 2020 it had a population of 20,000: Afghan Pashtuns and Hazaras, Arabs and Congolese, all crammed into a limbo of sagging tents and box containers, heaped with garbage and rife with disease and frustration. Asylum pleas might take many months, even years, to be adjudicated.

In September 2020 the camp went up in flames. In the close-packed alleys a high wind turned the wood-staved tents and containers into a furnace, and the inmates evacuated into the surrounding roads, where police and right-wing townsmen barred their way. Nobody knew who had set the camp alight. Thousands of the Moria inmates now had to be admitted into mainland Greece and beyond. But to the government in Athens, in the wake of a crippling debt crisis, the refugees were deeply unwelcome. In the aftermath of the fire, six young Afghan scapegoats—all teenagers—were quickly arrested.

Markham, familiar with the camp from an earlier visit, accepted a magazine assignment to explore the case. With the restrictions that surround pending prosecution, the project was endlessly frustrating. The initial trial of the “Moria 6” was farcically prejudiced, the prosecution’s evidence feeble and inconsistent. Yet the four who were now adults received ten-year prison sentences; the two who were still minors received five. Meanwhile the Taliban had taken over their country, and they feared for their families. Only on appeal, as A Map of Future Ruins was being published, were three of the accused released.

Markham has ably charted Moria’s long ordeal. Her overriding concern is not the intractable question of open borders but the humane settlement of migrants who have managed to cross the closed ones. It is a more various and personal account than Washington’s, interwoven with the exploration of her own uncertain heritage. She writes, almost as an aside, that her brother recently took a DNA test and found that their family was not Greek after all. They were Italian and vaguely Balkan—themselves bearing witness to the fallibility of nations and the agelong flux of the world’s peoples.