I like borders. Borders are places of connection, clash, and blend. They define cultures — languages, arts, cuisines, habits — by exhibiting, testing, mingling and breaking their distinctiveness and insularity. Borders are where humans trade in goods, ideas and beliefs. They are places of ingenuity, mezcla, neologism and entrepôt. Borders mark difference and possibility: As sites of beauty and definition, alloy and creation, they spark vibrant and unexpected harmony. “Something only is what it is,” as the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel put it, “in its limit and through its limit.”
Infamously, however, regimes of crushing violence and dispiriting exploitation sully the creative and polyphonic potential of borders. As we deny, cast out and crack down, we have turned our thresholds into barricades.
Given the proliferation of such walling off of human beings, of human decency and of human potential, how do we respond?
A LOT OF PEOPLE living in the world’s borderlands experience what scholars refer to as a human rights encounter. In such an encounter, you meet someone who has crossed the border despite being legally barred from doing so, in which moment you’re presented with a choice: You can help the person with water, shelter or a ride — but if you do so, you risk being arrested, prosecuted, and even imprisoned. Where I live, in Arizona within an hour of the U.S.-Mexico border, offering such help may constitute a class 1 misdemeanor (or a felony) carrying a fine of up to $1,000 and possibly months in prison. Or: You can obey the law, do nothing, and take no risk. You decide. Not deciding isn’t an option.
Instead of encounters, it makes more sense to call these moments confrontations: humanity confronting law.
My first such confrontation (I’ve since had plenty of others) took place in the mid-2000s when I met with a young border crosser in distress in Southern California. A friend and I were driving down an empty road in the Anza-Borrego desert, about 80 miles east of San Diego and 15 miles north of the border. The valley we were cutting through lies between the peninsular mountain range to the west, from which on clear days you could catch distant flashes of the Pacific, and the flat expanse of the Imperial Valley to the east. The desert is slowly undulating scrubland with shocks of gullied badlands and occasional palm oases. Our plan was to cook over a fire, drink some whiskey, sleep under the open sky. We were only a few miles from where we’d intended to camp — a primitive site close to a series of winding canyons — when we saw a figure standing by the road.
This was before I spoke Spanish, before I knew much about the border or migration, apart from my mother’s stories of her flight from Romania. I pulled to a stop. The figure — a kid, seemingly in his late teens — stepped into the road.
He was wearing a thin black hooded jacket, heavily dusted jeans, and a broken-billed hat. There were pimples on his cheeks. He carried an empty gallon bottle. His eyes looked recently sparked back to life.
Borders are where humans trade in goods, ideas and beliefs. They are places of ingenuity, mezcla, neologism and entrepôt.
Across the language divide — Agua, he said, and, instead of miming drinking, gripped his neck, as if something there had gone wrong — he let us know he was pained and thirsty, that he’d walked a long time, and that he wanted a ride to the next town. My friend and I looked at each other, then back at the kid. We handed him some water, still not sure what to do. I tried to tell him that the next town was far, that there were Border Patrol agents around. We gave him a half bag of oranges and topped him off on water. I mumbled through an apology, wished him luck, and then we drove on.
Twenty minutes later, as we were hefting supplies out of the car, I stopped. What the hell had we been thinking? How could we have left him on the side of the road? We jumped in the car and sped back toward where we had seen him. He wasn’t there. We drove back and forth, walked the shoulder, called out. There was no sign of him, no trace. We weren’t even sure exactly where — in the stretches of bush and cactus, wash and hummock — we had first seen him.
That night we drank our whiskey, crawled into sleeping bags, and slept rough. As I woke up the next morning to dawn’s brilliance, and a slight headache, I took a long pull from my water bottle before starting on the coffee. Where had that young man, that boy, slept? How much water did he have left? Had he finished the oranges? Had he walked all night through the thornbushes, hiding in arroyos, risking his life and freedom walking the unlit road?
I committed a violent act that day — a violent act of omission. The Germans once used the term Mauerkrankheit, or “wall sickness.” It is a violence, a sickness — the wall creeping into the head — that is one of the most dangerous developments in the world today, imperiling millions of people who are forced from their homes by war, economic despoilment, or climate crises, and then barred (both by law and by the everyday practice of people like me who refuse to act with decency and humanity) from finding homes elsewhere.
My actions that day in the Anza-Borrego were my fault. But to take responsibility for a wrong doesn’t mean that you can’t also point a finger at others, that you can’t call out the system that trains and expects you to favor and protect those on the inside of the wall and to disfavor and neglect those outside of it.
Looking back at that experience in the Southern California desert, what strikes me is how ignorant I was. Not only was I ignorant of the border crosser’s legal situation (and mine), how likely either of us were to be caught if I had given him a ride, or what the exact charges or penalties would have been. And not only was I ignorant of his situation — where he had come from (most likely Southern Mexico or Central America), the history of his homeland and the current reality and struggles there, or of my country’s stance toward and history with his country: despoiling and destabilizing it, invading and exploiting its people. But I was also ignorant of his most elemental situation as a human. I was ignorant of, and empty of, empathy.
I didn’t see his most basic and obvious plight: tired, hungry, thirsty, in danger. Instead of seeing that and having compassion, I was scared. Scared for myself despite all my surrounding comforts: the food, water and whiskey packed in my trunk, my apartment waiting for me back in the city, and my ready ability to forget his struggle. I was ignorant of his most basic state even while I looked right at it. And that is a profound and deeply rooted ignorance.
But I know something now, in a way that feels like the deepest sense of knowing there is: I should have helped that kid.
That the force of the border could have blinded me to that glaringly obvious and simple truth reveals, in turn, something else: Its tentacles had me so tightly gripped that I couldn’t see its power.
“Walls cut deep into us,” writes political philosopher Wendy Brown, “into our psyche, our souls.” And I know, too, that I don’t want something so deep inside me that so profoundly alters — that so poisons — who I am and how I am toward other people.
In the ensuing decade and a half, I’ve started trying to fill in some of my gaps of ignorance (plenty of them persist), to cure myself of the wall sickness. After these years of listening and reporting on migration and borders (including crossing them frequently, for both research and leisure), this is what I have come to: People should be able to move and migrate where they need or want to.
We should fear not the act of crossing a line but the society that compels anyone to deny a desperate person basic aid.
It is the abandonment of people on the side of the road that we should prosecute (in whatever constructive way we can). We should fear not the act of crossing a line but the society that compels anyone to deny a desperate person basic aid, to leave them stranded on the side of a desert road.
But not everyone lives in the Borderlands. Not everybody is forced into a human rights encounter, to choose between helping or not helping someone desperately thirsty, hungry and tired. And yet, we are all confronted.
As members of society on “this” side of the wall (even as many who physically live on “this” side are relegated to “that” side by paper walls, or by state marginalization and oppression), as taxpayers contributing to border agencies whose officers hunt down, whip, shackle, detain and deport people trying to cross those walls, we are all, somehow and in some way, daily confronted. Each one of us decides.
This perspective is excerpted from The Case for Open Borders, copyright 2024, by John Washington, out now from Haymarket Books Inc. and used by permission. All rights reserved.
John Washington is a journalist and translator. A staff writer at Arizona Luminaria, he is also the author of The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum and the US-Mexican Border and Beyond (2020).
We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
This article appeared in the April 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “A border need not be a wall.”
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
