Border Abolition: The Common Sense Position

One big problem with border abolitionists and open borders advocates is a lack of focus on how unradical it actually is. Well, of course it’s radical politically, but the major concerns among restrictionists are cultural, and well, we live in a post-monoculture world. We have for pretty much all my life. Most people don’t understand the country they want to preserve from globalism is the country most responsible for globalism’s existence. One thing I’ve noticed is that communities, even in conservative areas, are not at all fearful of the actually existing immigrants living among them. They will even rally to protect them. The hopeful yet frightening truth is that if the US citizenry wanted to purge itself of its undocumented population it has the capacity and institutions. But as happy as we are to call the police on our neighbors in many circumstances, an extreme minority of the population possess the desire or motivation to make that call to ICE.

What they dread is a meme embedded in their head by the media they consume. Rather than presenting them with the neighbors that have participated and contributed to the life they wish to preserve, the media feeds them representations of some brave new world where what they know is overrun by, at best, strangers from a strange land, and more typically by a horde of amoral third world conquistadors. We too often insist that the natives learn to adjust to this imposition rather than point out this is already the world they live in, and the political movement that would need to wipe away the values and progress of our civilization is actually the closed borders crowd. Without some cataclysm tearing our ways of life asunder, the free flow of the world population is inevitable, and in many ways it is already here.

Problems have and may yet emerge as a consequence of national barriers breaking down, but those problems are often inflicted by the last gasps of a dying world that very few of us have lived in for much of our lives.

So if you wish to go back to that world, then find a community that wants to build up those walls, and leave the billions of us who love this rather familiar world in peace. And to those who wish to fight for the promise of a world that has evolved beyond these glorified gang lines, realize that it is not the forces of reaction against that goal that pose the greatest danger. The threat comes primarily from inaction and a lack of perspective. The likes of ICE and DHS were constructed overnight, not long before this night. They can be demolished at the same pace, as long as we possess the moral and historical clarity to strike at their shallow roots and expose their weakness, their contingency, and the damage they’ve inflicted on every person who wishes to live in a world that’s freer than the one they were born into. It has been over a half century since humanity escaped the gravitational pull of the earth. Let us not accept that the world as we’ve viewed from the heavens, open and united, is beyond our grasp. Anything less than the abolition of this whole state of affairs is uncivilized and beneath every individual upon the surface of this boundaryless rock.