Do We Really Need National Borders?

If Donald Trump had been able to use anti-black racism in the 2024 campaign the way that George Wallace used it in the 1968 campaign, he probably wouldn’t have said one word about the immigrant ‘invasion’ because the target for his hatred was right here at home.

On the other hand, a phrase like ‘border security’ has a certain resonance to it which goes beyond party lines, if only because we all believe that keeping undesirables out of the country is something the government is supposed to do.

Except I happen to think that the whole notion of defining a country by drawing some arbitrary line on a map and using this line to decide who can, and who cannot cross that line is not only wrong, but has been the reason why perhaps more than 100 million human beings have perished in twentieth-century wars alone.

My mother and her parents came to the United States from Ukraine in 1923. They left their native village after it was burned to the ground by a Cossack band in 1921. My grandmother saw her father shot dead in the street.

Three months after this family got off the steamer at a Brooklyn dock, handed over their entry papers to some immigration official and were taken to an apartment in the borough of Queens, a law went into effect which would have prevented them from legally entering the United States, a law…