Lately, we’ve been thinking a lot about borders - what it takes to create them, enforce them, and cross them.
- Wars are currently raging across Earth over a border’s rightful place - between Israel & Palestine, India & Pakistan, Ukraine & Russia, Guyana & Suriname, Morocco & Sahrawi, and more.
- In the USA, President Trump just gave the Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) department a whopping $45 Billion budget to enforce draconian anti-immigration policies. That’s only for one department and it’s more than almost all other national military budgets.
- European countries patrol the Mediterranean Sea with Israeli drones to ensure no refugees from Africa or the Middle East make it to their shores, despite many fleeing conditions created by European intervention in the first place.
- Millions migrate everyday in search of better opportunities than what they can find at home, often risking their life to cross borders.
It’s difficult to imagine a world not dominated by walls, whether they’re physical (US-Mexico border, Palestine-Israel border), societal (systemic racism, access to money and citizenship), or digital (China’s Great Firewall, social media algorithms that confine us into echo chambers). But why is it this way? And does it have to stay this way? The way that we think of borders today, as firm boundaries that are violently enforced, is a relatively new thing, and we would argue it doesn’t serve humanity’s best interests. While “strong borders” are often argued as a necessity for our security, we think they limit humanity’s potential as a global community.
