Can you imagine a world where borders aren’t there to limit compassion and protect primal animal instincts?

Street performance “A Prayer for Pinocchio” with Nikos Konstantakis. Cologne 2016.

Do you know why the countries of the Global North — the United States, Canada, the European Union (EU), Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, the Gulf States, and East Asia — protect themselves against the increasing mobility of people from the Global South?

Are we living in a global apartheid society?

Our civilization is marked by borders. As Michael Clemens of the Center for Global Development notes, “the world is impoverished by the blockade of international migration far more than by any other kind of international policy.”

Economists agree that state borders inflict huge losses on the global economy.

Simply put, more people mean more money, because if people can move freely without being checked and identified at every border crossing, money can flow!

The main argument of border advocates is the issue of security, which is supposedly disrupted by the movement of refugees, even though refugees are the ones who come to the most harm when crossing a border.

Moreover, the World Bank, UN, and Amnesty International estimate that climate change will lead to 143 million new climate refugees by 2050 — so maybe it’s time to take a different stance.

We cannot kill or separate them all.

Our present borders are neither natural nor historical.

Rather, they are a political representation of animal territorial behavior that keeps society in shackles and controls its development by setting limits and restricting everything that does not conform to the political agenda.

The economy also suffers from territorial hysteria.

First, a lot of time, money, and resources are wasted on securing checkpoints. Second, time and resources are money.

Third, if these barriers to free movement were removed, the free flow of capital would create a larger global pool of money that would generate more money and more well-run, long-term businesses with big profits and globally inspiring success stories.

If the borders were opened, economists, both conservative and liberal, predict a huge increase in global gross domestic product, which would rise by about $40 trillion — a 60 percent increase.

Sounds like a solution to me.

Michael Clemens, the senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, where he leads research on migration, displacement, and humanitarian policy, says, “If even one in 20 people currently living in poorer countries could work in richer countries, it would add more value to the global economy as a whole than removing all remaining policy barriers to trade in goods and services, i.e., all tariffs and quotas.”

If we leave aside the economic reason, we can see that the main consequence of the border is to legitimize insensitivity to the humanity of the other.

Border Patrol videos show agents stabbing, kicking, or dumping water bottles left on the paths where migrants regularly die of thirst.

One Border Patrol agent witnessed a veteran training officer knock a water bottle out of the hand of a four-year-old boy who had been lost in the desert for days.

Under what unnatural conditions do you live that you can deny water to a child dying of thirst?

Another Border Patrol agent was exonerated after shooting a teenager ten times from behind the border fence.

The boy was walking on a sidewalk in Mexico and died that night.

More recently, four volunteers were convicted of leaving water on paths where migrants regularly die of thirst.

How did we as a society get to a point where we absolve murder and criminalize humanitarian aid to the letter of the law?

Fortunately, balance is always achieved in nature, whether we are aware of it or not.

And thankfully, there are many free-thinking direct-aid groups like No More Deaths doing the urgent, life-saving work of leaving water in the desert, developing electoral strategy, expanding sanctuary movements, and taking other practical steps to end death and suffering in the Mexico-US borderlands.

Across the ocean, Australian indigenous groups sent a clear signal by offering their own Aboriginal passports to asylum seekers who had been denied status by the Australian state.

Migration is reaching record highs around the world, but its toll is far less visible. Tens of thousands of people die or disappear on their journey, never to be seen again.

In most cases, no one keeps a record.

These people, barely counted while alive, are not recorded when they die, as if they never lived.

If they are not beaten, stolen from, and killed by border police, they drown in the deep waters of the seas and rivers that serve as natural borders.

And if they do manage to cross, they are separated from their children and spouses and put into refugee camps that most resemble concentration camps.

If we opened the borders and became rich worldwide, people would not be forced to board unseaworthy ships piloted by smugglers, cross dangerous rivers to avoid visa restrictions, or trek across remote deserts to escape violent border guards.

In other words: If we gave everyone free passage, we could avoid many deaths and have a younger and stronger society, because it is usually the young people in their prime who try to cross dangerous areas to find a better life for themselves and their families.

According to the Associated Press, nearly 60,000 migrants have died or disappeared worldwide since 2014.

The deaths and disappearances are the results of migration that has increased by 49 percent since the turn of the millennium. According to UNHCR, more than 84 million people worldwide have been forced to flee their homes.

Among them are more than 26.6 million refugees, the highest number ever recorded.

More and more of them have drowned, perished in the desert, or fallen into the hands of human traffickers, leaving their families wondering what happened to them.

At the same time, unknown corpses fill cemeteries around the world, and it is the mother of another who — by bringing flowers to the unknown grave in the hope that another mother would do the same for her missing child — brings a balance back to our unnatural way of life.

Little is known about the dead and missing in South America, where the Venezuelan migration is currently among the largest in the world, and in Asia, the region with the most migrants.

Governments around the world significantly underestimate the costs of migration, which has now become a major political and social issue worldwide.

It is time to think seriously about what a world without borders could look like, where every person can leave his country and enter a new one, freely and without punishment and, moreover, without being forced into the shadow economy or worse.

Humans are a historically migratory species. Along with starlings and cockroaches, we’re among the most widespread animal species of all.

Our movement has even been enshrined as fundamental human freedom: Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.”

In a world divided into nation-states, however, the right to leave a state is only half a right if it’s not accompanied by the right to enter another state.

That’s like saying the First Amendment guarantees the right not to remain silent but doesn’t mention the accompanying right to freedom of speech.

Given the current climate and earth changes, it is more important than ever to rethink the concept of borders and state nations.

Not only do borders negatively impact ecosystems, but they are also a justification for the wasteful and extractive capitalism that causes much of the climate change.

We know how U.S. and Canadian mining companies are harming communities and ecosystems in Central America and the South Pacific.

Similarly, huge amounts of Western waste are dumped in places like Malaysia and Africa, poisoning groundwater.

While rising seas and devastating storms leave ruins in their wake, borders act as moral shields that may very well cost us our lives and bring about the end of a civilization that tests the limits of compassion.

Todd Miller, in his recent book Storming the Wall, traces the connection between climate change and borders, writing,

“With accelerated displacement projected around the world, fortified borders make no sense [and] freedom of movement will be essential as more places become uninhabitable…

So does cross-border cooperation, solidarity, organizing, and ecological restoration. Climate change needs movement and organizing that is transnational, not obstructed.”

The more radical vision of open borders is that there are no borders at all, but this idea requires a rethinking of state-citizen relations — that it is not the mobile person who needs legitimation or permission, but the state itself.

Reece Jones remarks in his book Violent Borders: “By refusing to abide by a wall, a map, a property line, a border, an identity document, or a legal regime, mobile people upset state schemes of exclusion, control, and violence. They do this by simply moving.”

When the newly appointed head of the Boundary Commission, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, was tasked with dividing the British Indian territories of Bengal and Punjab after three and a half centuries of brutal and exploitative interference by the United Kingdom in the region, he had only a few weeks to complete the task.

Radcliffe had no time to lose or think and divided the subcontinent according to religions.

The so-called “Radcliffe Line” separated Hindu-majority India in the middle from Muslim-majority East and West Pakistan in the wings, interspersed with a few independent princely states.

The result was a labyrinthine tangle of over 100 enclaves (a part of one nation lying entirely within another nation), counter-enclaves (an enclave within an enclave), and even a counter-counter-enclave where a small part of India lay within a small part of East Pakistan, which in turn lay within a larger part of India completely enclosed by East Pakistan.

Sound funny? Well, it is not.

Radcliffe returned to the Queen, and the new state went to war, displacing over 14 million people and costing hundreds of thousands of lives — some estimates put the death toll as high as 2 million.

Since then, since 1947, there have been a series of wars between India and Pakistan, a genocide and a civil war that led to the creation of Bangladesh from former East Pakistan, and an ongoing violent standoff between the two nuclear powers, India and Pakistan, over the status of Kashmir-a conflict that threatens to erupt once again into a catastrophic war.

Like many statesmen, Radcliffe has failed to recognize that religion is not territorially defined and that different religions have lived in peaceful neighborhoods and households almost everywhere except in Britain.

Just read about Bosnia and see what happened when Yugoslavia went into civil war if you are concerned about the current political situation in the Balkans, which has not been very kind to its Syrian and Afghan refugees who spent the entire pandemic in bare, cold camps on the outskirts of Bosnian villages.

Like many other cultures around the world, the Balkans were known for their hospitality and humanity. That changed when border hysteria introduced new solutions to its anxiety.

With militarized borders, the closing of ports, deportation centers, detention camps, and the criminalization of mobility around the world, a new form of intervention is taking shape.

Countries of the Global North — the United States, Canada, the European Union (EU), Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, the Gulf States, and East Asia — are protecting themselves against the increasing mobility of people from the Global South.

The new militarized regime of border and mobility control mimics the South African system of racial apartheid that formally ended in 1994.

Like that regime, the instruments of the new global racial containment policy aim to create an exploitable labor force and confine those deemed undesirable to territories, detention centers, or refugee camps far from the borders of the Global North.

Militarized global apartheid is becoming a global norm.