What are borders actually for?: The Story
The invisible line
Describe a border crossing to someone who has never seen one. A line, usually invisible, sometimes marked by a river or a fence or a man in a booth. On one side, a set of laws. On the other, a different set. Step across and your hourly wage changes, your rights change, the language on hospital forms changes. The line itself is nothing — a surveyor’s abstraction, a treaty artifact. And yet people die trying to cross it.
In February 2025, the Wall Street Journal analyzed what would happen if mass deportation were carried out in Florida. Construction sites would lose roughly half their workforce. Agriculture would seize. The same political leaders promising enforcement depended on the workers they were promising to remove. The border, in that light, is a sorting mechanism that keeps labor accessible and workers deportable.
Four readings
A pickup truck on a Dominican highway — soldiers heading toward the Haitian border on a morning school run. Not a superpower performing imperial theater. A developing nation that decided sovereignty required a visible, daily, military presence. The sovereignty-first camp scales that truck: a nation that cannot decide who enters cannot decide anything else.
Meanwhile, American expats in Costa Rica describe relocation in language identical to immigrants everywhere: lower costs, better life, a chance to start over. The open borders camp notices the vocabulary shifts with the passport color. When a retired American moves to Oaxaca, it is lifestyle migration. When a Honduran moves to Houston, it is an invasion.
The functional borders camp sees people fighting about a light switch when the world already runs on dimmers. Schengen eliminated checks among twenty-seven countries while hardening the perimeter. Different permeability for different functions.
The communitarians ask the question the other three skip: what does a place owe the people already in it? Protests in Milan and Dara’s question about fentanyl both point to the same fracture: the stated purpose of the border and its operational reality have been diverging for decades.
Perspectives:
- Sovereignty-first
- Open borders
- Functional borders
- Communitarians