A beautifully-written,
broadly accessible, and forthright argument for a solution to the
migration crisis: open the gates.
Because of
restrictive borders, human beings suffer and die. Closed borders
force migrants seeking safety and dignity to journey across seas,
trudge through deserts, and clamber over barbed wire. In the last
five years alone, at least 60,000 people have died or gone missing
while attempting to cross a border. As we deny, cast out, and crack
down, we have stripped borders of their creative potential — as
lines of contact, catalyst, and blend — turning our thresholds into
barricades.
Brilliant and provocative, The
Case for Open Borders deflates the mythology of
national security through border lockdowns by revisiting their
historical origins; it counters the conspiracies of immigration’s
economic consequences; it urgently considers the challenges of
climate change beyond the boundaries of narrow national
identities.
This book grounds its argument in the
experiences and thinking of those on the frontlines of the crisis,
spanning the world to do so. In each chapter, through detailed
reporting, journalist and translator John Washington profiles a
character impacted by borders. He adds to those portraits provocative
analyses of the economics and ethics of bordering, concluding that if
we are to seek justice or sustainability we must fight for open
borders.
In recent years, important thinkers have begun to
urge a profoundly different approach to migration, but no book has
made the argument as accessible or as compelling. Washington’s case
shines with the multitudinous voices of people on the move, a
portrait in miniature of what a world with open borders will give to
our common future.