Do countries need borders?

This is an essay on International Relations that I wrote for the Immerse Education Essay Competition. It was selected to receive a partial scholarship of 10% to take part in the International Relations programme with Immerse Education in 2022.

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield while orbiting Earth felt more connected to people on this planet than ever before! From outer space, our planet is viewed as a single entity, an orb with shades of blue, green, yellow, and grey blending into each other. There are no territories harshly demarcated with jagged lines.

Astronauts observing Earth form an infinitesimal percent of world’s population. But what if this “overview effect” is extended? What if there are no borders?

Let us take a step back. 1947. Sir Cyril Radcliffe finds himself creating a “Radcliffe Line”, separating a mostly Hindu India in the centre from mostly Muslim East and West Pakistan. Chaos ensues. The outcome? 14 million people displaced and 2 million dead.

Radcliffe is no anomaly in the history of border-making. Borders have mostly been formed severely, often to settle scores and extract maximum gain. The current system of borders is just not rational or ethical, and there are several reasons why open borders make more sense.

First, borders reinforce status quo. Why should living on one side of an arbitrary line (for example, in Haiti) consign you to a life of relative hardship, and living on the other (say, in Miami) ensure a prosperous one? With open borders, people would have the opportunity to migrate to places with improved opportunities. The usual argument is that migrants will “steal” the jobs of the natives, however, economists Gihoon Hong and John McLaren found that “immigrants can raise native workers’ real wages, and… [each] immigrant creates 1.2 jobs for local workers.” In 2011, Michael Clemens, an economist at the Centre for Global Development, showed that eliminating barriers to movement would increase global GDP by an estimated 50-150 percent.

Secondly, borders kill. According to the Missing Migrants Project, more than 75,000 migrant deaths have been recorded globally since 1996, which only represents a fraction of total deaths, considering many go unrecorded. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, around 3,000 people died in the Mediterranean Sea in 2017, attempting to reach Europe. If there were open borders, people wouldn’t have to risk their lives braving choppy seas or voyaging through harsh territories.

Borders restrict human mobility, a fundamental human freedom enshrined in Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Today’s “crisis of migration” is merely the uneasy reaction of settler-colonial states to transnational movements of people whose place in the world is supposed to be “fixed”. America’s 1882 Chinese exclusion act, the White Australia policy, or Britain’s 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act have been the crudest filters.

Bounded sovereignty also makes it difficult to combat world’s problems like climate change. The 2014 IPCC report states that historically polluting countries are less negatively affected by climate change and identifies poor Sub-Saharan Africa and small islands as most vulnerable. Perversely, countries that produced majority of the emissions are now building walls and securing borders to prevent the movement of people who are displaced by it!

To conclude, to have a world without borders would be to assimilate cultures, boost economies, save people’s lives, tackle climate change, and break psychological walls. Whenever we see space photographs of Earth, we realise that borders don’t actually exist. So, why have we made them?