Libertarianism has nothing to do with national interests. Libertarianism is about individual liberty. The liberty to live your own life, to pursue your own livelihood, and to come and go as you please to anywhere that’s open to you or anywhere you’re invited to go. The implications for immigration policy are obvious: Everyone – not just Americans, not just “citizens,” not just people with government permission slips, but everyone – has rights. Against All Nations and Borders
Modern states try to turn movement into a right that is granted or denied according to economic and political power. Elites and ‘first world’ citizens with purchasing power can travel and settle where they want, while the poor are controlled and criminalised. Some may be let through because they are deemed to be useful to the economy, or because they are classed as ‘genuine refugees’. Categories like refugee, asylum seeker, economic migrant and illegal immigrant are used to divide and control. This is why we use the term ‘migrant’ for all. A No Borders manifesto
The current battle over national borders — the effort to maintain an increasingly elusive and illusory national identity — is one case in point. Here, the displaced and the displacers, and those effected by both, all wrestle to define who has a right to a home in the alleged homeland. Whether fought with rocks or bullets, suicide bombers or ballot boxes, this is less a turf fight between or within states than it is about who belongs to “my people.” It is a struggle over who counts as “us” versus “them” based on various and variously contrived criteria of authenticity such as race, religion, or historical injustices. It is a war without winners that alleges, like George W., that there are those who do good (us) and those who do evil (them), and no coexistence between such opposites is possible. Border Crossings
Nationalism, being one of the most violent modern battlegrounds of tribalism, is defined by its endemic othering. Borders are a place of resistance, the hybrid space between imagined communities and inflated sites of value. Borderlands infect dehumanization with empathy to the extent that movement and sharing across difference is possible. This vulnerability to power and mythos is precisely why nationalists seek to violently repress connectedness across borders. Interconnectedness is a memetic virus that liberates us from our faulty wiring, and every step that ratchets that freedom closer is an exponential expression of hope for the future of the human race and its place in the ecological landscape of the universe. Open borders are the difference between a sociopathic prisoner’s dilemma stuck in recursive loops for the rest of ours species’ miserable hell of an existence and a dimension of wonders beyond what we’re capable of even considering. Open Borders are Our Only Hope also see: Closed Borders and Black Market Economics
No One is Illegal: Asylum and Immigration Control, Past and Present
Creating a map that shows the age of all the world’s borders seems like an impossible feat, but Reddit user, PisseGuri82, was up to the challenge. PisseGuri82, acknowledging the extreme complexity of the undertaking, outlined some caveats to consider:
– The map looks at the date a border was officially set to its current form (excluding minute changes).
– The dates are derived from publicly available border treaties and documents.
– Exact dates are difficult to pin down as ratification, surveying, and physical marking can take place over a number of years.
These issues aside, the final product is a fascinating look at how we’ve divided the world up into nations..