Editor’s note: Arizona Luminaria reporter John Washington has a new book about border policies. Luminaria reporter Carolina Cuellar interviewed him for this story. Both journalists have extensive reporting experience covering borderlands and border politics. Their conversation has been edited for clarity.
The 2000-mile United States-México border is home to an estimated 15 million people. Shaped by both nature, Indigenous communities and historical colonialism, it serves as a complex intersection where two nations with intertwined cultural, commercial, and familial connections coexist. The area has been increasingly militarized, primarily to regulate migration, contributing to its intense politicization.
With his book, “The Case for Open Borders,” journalist John Washington analyzes complex policies in a nation where strict border controls are the standard.
In this Q&A we ask him about his experiences and his book’s perspective on national identities and global immigration.
Cuellar: First of all, I want to ask: what was your objective with this book?
Washington: I think that, despite what may sound like an incendiary title or provocative title to a lot of people, my intention actually was the opposite: it was to bring some sanity to the conversation, to bring some clarity to the conversation and to define the terms.
So many people claim that currently we have open borders and, talking to a fellow reporter who has done border reporting, we very well know that we do not have open borders. The current administration has either expelled, deported or pushed back across the border more than 3 million people. The CBP and ICE together have a combined budget of about $25 billion this fiscal year.
These are just some basic facts that I think somehow get pushed aside or forgotten. And one of the things I wanted to do was bring them to the front, as well as historicize and contextualize the current situation of global migration, to decenter the United States a little bit.
This book is largely for a U.S. audience but I really take an international perspective and I think it’s critical if we have any hope of solving this problem, let alone understanding this problem, to realize that it’s not a U.S. problem. It is a regional problem. It is a global problem.
I’m curious to know whether that term, “open borders,” or the concept of an open border, has always been as controversial as it is today and if you were able to find a point in time when it started to become more stigmatized and why?
Hear Washington talk about his book
- Virtual event with the Borderlands Literature and Film Circle on Feb. 14, 10 a.m. Register.
- Antigone Books in Tucson on April 6.
I think the term open borders has definitely proliferated in recent years. Whether or not a border is open or closed obviously implies the existence of a border and, actually, borders haven’t existed for that long. I mean, if you look at the trajectory of the rise of human civilization, borders are a pretty recent phenomenon.
There were some walls that people point to and say the Great Wall of China or Hadrian’s Wall in modern-day England but those walls served a very different purpose. Those walls in large part kept people in and were used as fortifications to wage war and battles. So the rise of the border as we understand it today really didn’t start happening until the early 20th century.
We did not talk about borders the way we do today until very recently. The United States-México border was not militarized and fortified the way that it is today until as recently as the 1990s. ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, didn’t exist until 2003.
And then I think when Trump lost, and another administration with, at least rhetorically, a different stance on borders came into power, the use of the term “open borders” really shot up and that was a way to just criticize the current border infrastructure.
What is your personal experience with immigration? What got you interested in the topic?
I grew up in an immigrant community, Romanian American community, and heard stories of border crossings and migration, undocumented migration, throughout my life. But until I sort of came of age politically and sort of began understanding the reality — because I grew up in Ohio — understanding the reality of the U.S.-México border and the many other borders in the world, I thought those stories were something of the past. They sounded to me like Cold War relics, like, wow, things were so hard and scary and difficult back then. And then I realized that oh, things are just as hard and scary and difficult and dangerous and deadly along our current border right now.
How does writing a non-fiction book differ from writing a news article?
One of the things that I love about book writing and I love about some of the stories we get at Arizona Luminaria is the room to stretch out a little bit. This is a very, very complicated topic.
To really understand it, you have to understand the rise of nation states. You have to understand the rise of bordering. You have to understand the rise of capitalism, of neocolonialism, imperialism, exploitative labor markets, you know, so-called root causes, country conditions, migration conditions. I think that if you don’t really have a decent sense of pretty much all those aspects, you’re missing an important piece of the picture and you can’t really do sophisticated enough calculus to achieve any sort of solution.
So I think what I am able to do with the book is really provide a lot of that context, and really go deep into history.
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