The Discourse on Border Policy Boils Down to Cultural Pluralism vs. Cultural Purity

Note 1: This essay is an update for a post written in 2019 on the Mad Sociologist Blog. Click Here.

Note 2: While I was working on this essay, Fabio Rojas from Temple of Sociology uploaded a Podcast and Substack Post advocating Open Borders. They are both worth a look and listen.

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The Perils of Playing Devil’s Advocate

Like most people, I took the notion of firm, protected borders as a common-sense notion. Of course, a nation has to protect its borders. To enter a country legally, of course there’s going to be some rationalized bureaucratic system one must go through. Yes, this bureaucracy might be cumbersome and time-consuming, but there has to be some kind of process. The best we can hope for is improvements to the system to make it run more efficiently and better serve the needs of the desperate.

I’m rather ashamed of myself for embracing the common-sense notion. If Sociology as a discipline has a function it is to examine what we accept as “common-sense” objectively and bust it if it turns out that, despite being common, the notion is not at all sensible.

The thing about the Sociological Imagination, however, is that it does tend to slap one in the face at unexpected moments. On this matter, I got slapped while I was playing Devil’s Advocate for a discussion on immigration in my Principles of Sociology class many years ago. The fact was that I found it very easy to challenge arguments in favor of a secure border. Too easy. By the end of the discussion, I had convinced myself that the most sensible position was on the side of open or, at the very least, very porous borders. Why wasn’t this an option in American debate? Mentioning the prospect of open borders was discursively delegimized.

During the course of this discussion, it didn’t take long to realize that the arguments in favor of strict defense of and even militarization of the borders was really an argument in favor of cultural purity as opposed to multiculturalism or cultural pluralism. The real discourse, once examined, had little to do with jobs, or crime. More often, it was premised on the assumption that too many “those people” being around would make “us people” somehow lesser than we are. In other words, this position is premised on archaic notions of cultural and even biological superiority. Concepts that should have been consigned to the bin of historically bad ideas. Yet even advocates for multiculturalism and pluralism have been contained within an Overton Window that accepts as given that borders require some level of fortification. Advocating open borders is reified as so radical as to be beyond discussion.

In the name of Mad Sociology, let’s discuss it anyway.

The Human Argument

If there is a defining feature of humanity, it is migration. The Human Species evolved from a multi-branched tree of upright, brainy primates living in East Africa about 300,000 years ago. It could be argued that human beings, with our upright posture, those crazy opposable thumbs, forward vision and deep curiosity were biologically predisposed to asking, “what’s over there,” picking up our stuff, and going over there to find out. Our ancient ancestors evolved to travel.

Consequently, it didn’t take long before they started to look for the greener grasslands. The earliest evidence of mass human migration may have taken place as early as 200,000 years ago. We do know that the first successful mass migration “Out of Africa” took place around 60,000 years ago. Since then, multiple waves of migration from the genus Sapiens of the Homo species resulted in this particular brainy primate occupying every continent on Earth, giving birth to a beautiful tapestry of thousands of cultures and, ultimately, to civilization itself somewhere around six thousand years ago.

In fact, the greatest ancient civilizations arose in areas that had quality land and resources on which to settle, but also access to natural transportation routes by which humans could interact, and trade resources with other cultures, the Mesopotamian Basin, Egypt, the Indus Valley, the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers, the Mekong, etc. In these places, multiple cultures interacted, shared ideas and values, traded goods, and innovated their knowledge. The great cities in the center of these civilizations were always multicultural polises that were fertile ground for human social, scientific, and technological advancement.

Indeed, in the natural history of humanity, borders were nothing more than physical obstacles to be breached, mountain ranges, rivers, deserts, oceans. Even as empires grew and imposed military dominion over identifiable lands in the earliest ages of conquest, the borders between where, say, Babylon ended and Medes began was nebulous in the best of times. Human beings could travel with few restrictions between settlements and even major cities. They were constrained mostly by differences in language and custom, by in-group/out-group dynamics, more than some sanctity of borders.

Since the beginning, human beings have traveled for much the same reasons. They were looking for something better. Climactic and environmental changes were major drivers of human migration. Later, as humans had greater impact on biological and social ecologies, human beings were pushed to migrate by wars, oppression, overcrowding, disease, or droughts. Often, economic incentives created pull factors as people sought resources and opportunity. In other more brutal cases, humans were forced into migration through slavery, conscription, expulsion, and ethnic cleansing.

The history of human civilization itself can be examined as the fruit of human migration, the advancement of which was driven by technologies making travel and communication over a distance easier. Where rivers and ports and mountain passes converged, cities grew. Where cities grew, roads emerged. Where roads emerged, cultures were tied together in cosmopolitan centers of economic, political, philosophical, and cultural evolution. From the Silk Road to flight paths at 50,000 ft, the human story is a migration story. Today, a migrant can travel from Beijing to New York City in about a day, and send a message back that the family will receive almost instantaneous with their arrival. We’ve bound the world together with migration technologies to the point where we are considering migrating to the Moon, to Mars…and beyond. This is a migration story, inspiring migration dreams of the stars.

The natural and written history of humanity as a migrating species is also a story of different cultures facing the challenges, risks, and benefits of contact. Those features concomitant to migration such as cultural mixing, assimilation, absorption, and innovation, what we call multiculturalism, traveled along humanity’s highways. The two features go hand-in-hand. Humans from one culture migrate to another culture, creating a two-way street of interaction requiring reason, tolerance, and empathy to navigate. Consequently, migration and multiculturalism are different sides of the same coin. Those who oppose multiculturalism must, of course, seek to constrain natural human migration.

Ultimately, that’s what this argument is all about. It’s not an argument about borders, the migrating side of the coin. It’s about the multicultural side of the coin. Among those who see social change and innovation as a threat to established ways of being, to the values they hold, who are driven by fear of the other, who hold their own cultural identities as not just sacred, but superior to all others, preserving the purity of their own traditions is primary. Keeping “those people” out is tantamount to ethnic hygiene.

Toward that end, the concept of secure borders is a useful fiction. It is based on the assumption that borders are some sacred birthright. If you are born on that side of the imaginary line, you can’t come to this side of the imaginary line without performing the requisite sacred rituals by which to purify yourself. The less tolerant or more fearful the receiving culture, the more arduous those sacred purification rituals. In many such sanctifying cultures, there are those deemed less pure and more subject to ritual purification than others. Also, there are those who are perceived as intrinsically profane, incapable of purification. In modern capitalist societies, this purity is often reflected in the size of one’s bank account.

In societies with a history of racial segregation, purity is often represented by racial distinctions, such as the color of one’s skin.

That’s not to say that borders do not serve a useful function. They do. However, the fiction of a sacred invisible line necessary for preserving the national character is a gross distortion of the function of national borders. Being constrained by invisible lines is antithetical to the natural human impulse to migrate.

The Function of Borders to the Nation-State

Our contemporary notion of borders as intrinsic to the nation state is, in terms of human experience, a new addition to which I would argue human beings are not naturally attuned. Borders are a technology of the nation-state that evolved from the consolidation of feudal kingdoms no more than a few hundred years ago. In 1983, Benedict Anderson described nations as “imagined communities.” Geographic boundaries are the measurable limits to that abstract imagined community. According to Anderson, “The territorial stretch of the nation is imagined, and its frontiers—though sometimes mapped with scientific precision—remain historically contingent.”¹

It turns out, some time beforeI was playing Devil’s Advocate in this discussion, Bernie Sanders, during an interview with Ezra Klein, had made the claim that the notion of Open Borders was a Koch Brothers invention. According to Sanders, advocating for Open Borders was akin to, “…doing away with the concept of a nation state.”²

There are a couple of arguments to be made in response to Bernie’s claim.

The first is, “so what?” Why should we care about the existence of nation-states? Yeah, we are used to nation-states. We take them for granted as being an integral part of our lives, to the point where the notion of the nation-state is virtually invisible to our everyday lives. However, nation-states didn’t always exist and will likely fade to the contingencies of history like all other human constructs. Future students will, invariably, suffer through the chapter on the “Age of Nation-States” in their history books—or rather virtual reality history programs.

That response is a bit of a departure from this essay’s thesis, however. For our purposes, we are better served to evaluate the validity of Bernie’s claim. Is the very existence of a nation-state contingent upon borders secure from natural human migration?

The answer is no.

What is a nation-state? A nation-state is, again, a political fiction in Benedict Anderson’s thesis. It consists of a population that identifies itself as having a shared identity bounded by clear territorial definitions over which a sovereign exerts legitimate authority. It’s a political identity. A reference group.³

For instance, I live in Florida.⁴ Florida consists of a population that identifies itself as being “Floridian.” Floridians define the long peninsula jutting between the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico⁵ into the Caribbean Sea as their “home.” Florida has a sovereign government located in Tallahassee which is perceived as being the legitimate authority over this geographical region. Technically, it’s not a “Nation-State” per se, but it is a political arrangement comparable in size to Taiwan, and economically to Spain. Florida is big enough to be a nation-state.

Yet the border between Florida and Georgia is wide open. Anyone in Florida can walk right into Georgia with nary a second look. By Bernie’s standard, Florida shouldn’t exist.

That’s when students pointed out that Florida and Georgia are not, in fact, nation-states. They are smaller political divisions within a federalized nation-state. I wasn’t sure why that mattered, but my students assured me that it did.

So, is there an example of an identifiable nation-state that continued to exist despite open borders?

It turns out, there is. Not only did this nation continue to exist despite open borders, it thrived, growing to be the dominant nation in the world.

That nation is…

…The United States of America!

This is my Great-Grandfather, Gaetano Andoscia.⁶ He came to the United States in 1892 from Pietravairano, Italy. What did he have to go through to get here? It turns out that the year he came to the United States, the federal government had just taken control of the process via the Immigration Act of 1891.

So, if the federal government was involved, he must have gone through hell.

Not really. He mostly just paid for his ticket, got on the boat (The Cachemire in his case), and arrived at Ellis Island. He was subject to an interview and a brief medical exam, then shuttled to the island, “Welcome to America.” Only about 2% of arrivals were denied access to the United States at that time.

And that was after federal intervention. Before 1892, immigrants didn’t even go through that much. In fact, for the first hundred years of U.S. history as a nation-state there were no laws restricting immigration into the county. The borders were open. It wasn’t until 1875 that we see the first legal restrictions, but these were limited in scope.⁷ In 1882 The Chinese Exclusion Act was issued, being the first law to specifically exclude an entire nationality from immigrating to the United States.

Thanks for building that railroad ‘n all, but you’re really not welcome here!

If you weren’t Chinese, the border was almost entirely open to you.⁸ It wasn’t until 1924 that the United States implemented a visa system with sweeping quotas based on national origin and specifically excluded almost all immigration from Asia. This was when the first Border Patrol was created through the Labor Appropriations Act of 1924.

So, from 1776 or 1789, wherever you want to start, until 1924, the American Border was for all practical purposes, wide open. Especially for brown people down south. Migrants traveled freely over the Southern Border, often following the picking seasons.

That’s almost 150 years of open borders! Yet, somehow, miraculously, the United States continued to be a nation-state. In fact, during this time, the United States thrived. It emerged from being a middling Atlantic backwater into a continent spanning global powerhouse even as it allowed “those people,” like Great Grandpa Gaetano, open access to our country.

Now, the argument could be made that “things were different back then.” However, one would be hard pressed to explain exactly how those differences mattered. In many ways, things were much worse between nations in the 19th and early 20th century.

Mexico is a case in point. The United States and Mexico, since that whole Mexican American War thing transferred more than half of sovereign Mexican territory to the United States, were not friends. That loss was a jagged pill for Mexico to swallow. After the war, Mexico remained unstable, experiencing multiple revolutionary upheavals. Mexico and the United States faced off in numerous conflicts, not the least of which were Pancho Villa’s raids over the Southern Border. An army under General John Pershing was dispatched into Mexico in 1916 in an almost year-long military campaign to subdue the revolutionary “bandito.”⁹ The United States and Mexico were literally engaged in pitched battles, including the Battle of Ambos Nogales, and almost went to war when President Wilson, under ridiculous claims of provocation, seized the city of Veracruz in 1914. In 1917, a cable was intercepted from Germany intended to incite Mexico into invading the United States. This cable, the Zimmerman Telegram precipitated America’s participation in World War I.

The bottom line is that relations between the United States and Mexico were hardly amicable during this time. Yet the borders remained open and migrants traveled peacefully across the Rio Grande following the workflows.

And yet, the United States continued to exist and thrive.

Clearly, this was due to Jesus’s intervention…

(Not Jesus as in Hay Suse, but Jesus as in Jee Zuss! It’s important to clarify!)

…Or it could be that the function of borders has nothing to do with keeping “those people” out of the country.¹⁰

Clear borders are important. Nations with clear and well-respected boundaries are more likely to be at peace with their nation-state neighbors. This requires that the border, that imaginary line drawn on a map somewhere, is recognized and accepted by all those touching it. Where these lines are contested, nation-states tend to be in conflict. These conflicts are often bloody affairs. The Kashmir between Pakistan and India, Israel and Palestine, Morocco and Sahrawi are just some examples.

Well defined borders are important to the existence of the nation-state because it is through this recognition that each state defines its sovereignty. In other words, borders define the limits of a nation’s jurisdiction. If I buy a roast beef sandwich in Nogales, Arizona, I understand that that sandwich is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. If I walk just a few yards south and buy a burrito in Nogales, Sonora, that burrito is regulated by the Comisión Federal para la Protección contra Riesgos Sanitarios. That I can also buy a burrito in Nogales, Arizona, regulated by the FDA, is a testament to the beauty of multiculturalism.

But that’s pretty much the defining feature of borders. It defines which legal entity is responsible for framing and enforcing the laws.

This is the answer to the question of crime. If we have open borders, how do we keep the criminals out?

The answer may be unsatisfying. We don’t. Any large enough group of people is going to include criminals, and the receiving jurisdiction is tasked with figuring out how to deal with it. What we don’t do is stop thousands of non-criminals from stepping over the border because there might be a couple criminals in the mix. I mean, we can do it, but it’s morally dubious.

For instance, the violent crime rate in Georgia (326/100k) is significantly higher than the violent crime rate in Florida (267/100k). By the “fighting crime” logic, Florida should place strict limits on people coming from Georgia. But we don’t. Instead, if someone from Georgia comes to Florida and commits a crime, we have a criminal justice system designed to deal with that. Georgia has the same set-up. In the meantime, the overwhelming majority of people from Georgia coming to Florida just want to go to Disney World or whatever.

Same standards apply to the United States as a nation-state. If someone from another country comes to the United States and commits a crime, they are subject to the same laws as everyone else within the border of this nation. Those who do not commit crimes are subject to the same rights guaranteed by our laws. There’s no reason to treat migrants differently from anyone else. Yes, if millions of people come from a place, some of those people are likely to commit crimes. That’s why we have a criminal justice system and a process for dealing with such contingencies.

To claim that we must secure the border to prevent criminals from coming precipitates the false claims of biological and cultural superiority made by the right that “those people” are disproportionately dangerous. There was nothing new stated when that guy came down the escalator and said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Migrants must be constructed as inherent criminals, positing the “assumption” that some are good people. That this is not and never has been true has been demonstrated empirically for so long now that it is ridiculous to rehash the counterargument here.

My Great Grandfather was considered by the contemporary equivalent of the Red Hatted Mouthfrothers, the Know Nothings, as an “undesirable immigrant, prone to violence and secret assassination.” He was assumed to be a man who “lived by the stiletto.” “The South Italian is excitable, impulsive, highly emotional, and given to crimes of personal violence.”¹¹

Um…he was a cobbler. He specialized in making shoes for people who had deformities and foot complications. Every year he donated shoes to priests and nuns of the local church.

Did some of those “South Italians” on the Cachimere end up committing crimes? Sure. A small handful of Italians created one of the most notorious criminal organizations of all time, the gold standard for evaluating every criminal organization since—the Mafia. The other millions of Italians that came to the United States in a demographic wave at the same time as Gaetano did exactly what my Great Grandfather did. They worked hard, established businesses, had children and contributed to American culture. And yet, Michael Corleone remains the stereotypical icon of the Italian American.

This is illustrative of America’s relationship with “those people.” To make a few bucks, Italian American author Mario Puzo played up America’s fascination with Italian organized crime by writing The Godfather, one of the nation’s great crime novels. The book was turned into a movie directed by an Italian American who transformed American moviemaking forever. He later went on to become one of America’s great vintners…in Napa valley, an region shaped by Italian winemakers, changing the winemaking landscape for the entire world. The careers of two of America’s most transformative actors, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, emerged from this movie and its sequel. Yet this movie was informed by and reified Italians as mobsters rather than writers, moviemakers, vintners, and actors. This is a microcosm of American tunnel vision when it comes to immigrants.

The overwhelming majority of people coming to the United States are just looking for the resources, economic, political, social, that they lack wherever it is that they live. That was true for my Great Grandfather. That’s true for the Jamaican nurse’s assistant tending to your elderly relative. That’s true for the guy who repaired your roof after the hurricane so you can shelter your children. That’s true for those who picked the vegetables and processed the meats that you eat every single day. That’s true for the armies of migrants who clean houses and office spaces, making it possible to work efficiently all over the country.

We need people to do this arduous, often dangerous work. Ultimately, we benefit from people bringing different perspectives and values and ideas and imaginations here, for us to enjoy. From food, to music, to scientific exploration, everyone benefits from those who look at the world through diverse lenses.

When it comes to the sociology of Open Borders, the discourse breaks down into a debate between cultural pluralism and cultural purity. The advocates for closed borders believe that there’s nothing more important than preserving the cultural purity of the nation, to keep the “blood” from being “thinned.” They are wrong. Empirically wrong.¹² Nations with the most complex cultural influences tend to be the most innovative, most creative, most scientifically inventive societies in history. The United States is only the most immediate example. We can look at the Golden Age of Islam, or Renaissance Italy as opposed to the stagnation of Tokugawa Japan, or Afghanistan under the Taliban.

The verdict of history is clear. If you care about the cultural health of the nation-state, you make it easier for diverse identities to come and to contribute. Open Borders, or at the very least, more easily porous borders are the health of the state, incubators for cultural expression, and the architects of a beautiful social tapestry.

The sociology in support of Open Borders is more than enough to justify a more reasoned, open, and tolerant approach to immigration and border policy. Indeed, there is exactly zero justification for militarized immigration policing in f*cking Minnesota! However, advocates for cultural purity also make an economic argument. Like the sociological argument, the economic claim is also hard to defend under examination. The next essay will look at the economics of open borders.

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Footnotes

1. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. ↩︎
2. My students were shocked…shocked…when I, a known leftist, stated openly in class that, “just because Bernie says something, doesn’t make it true.” This is the difference between accepting knowledge based on democratic principles of evaluating what is known on its merits, and authoritarian knowledge that accepts knowledge as revealed by those in power. For more, see my initial summary at my website, Dangerous Knowledge. ↩︎
3. There are cultural elements, but all nations contain some combination of cultures. Cultural purist ideologies often emphasize the greater nation, which includes those who share a primary language. This was Hitler’s excuse for invading the Sudetenland. Putin has also used this notion of the greater nation as his rational for invading Ukraine. ↩︎
4. An unfortunate life condition that I’ve been trying to remedy for many years! ↩︎
5. That’s right! M.E.X.I.C.O! ↩︎
6. There is some debate as to whether or not it is spelled An D oscia or An T oscia. I’m choosing my D spelling because…it’s my WordPress. Mnyeh. If you are an Antoscia reading this post…start your own WordPress! ↩︎
7. The Page Act of 1875. ↩︎
8. In 1907, Theodore Roosevelt negotiated a “Gentleman’s Agreement” between the United States and Japan effectively limiting Japanese laborers from getting passports. ↩︎
9. Interesting footnote. This was the first use of combat aircraft on the part of the United States military. It didn’t work. Pancho Villa remained at large. ↩︎
10. I should note that Bernie Sanders’ argument had to do with protecting American labor from wage depression. That’s distinct from the Right-Wing argument of maintaining cultural purity and the thickness of our blood…whatever that means? ↩︎
11. U.S. Immigration Commission (Dillingham Commission). 1911. Reports of the Immigration Commission: Dictionary of Races or Peoples. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. Volume 5, “Italians,” pp. 81–85. ↩︎
12. A quick scan of sources on this topic is included below:
    
    Florida, Richard. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books.
    
    Page, Scott E. 2007. The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
    
    Peri, Giovanni. 2012. “Immigrants, Skills, and Productivity: Evidence from U.S. Cities.” Journal of Economic Geography 12(1):1–31.
    
    Easterly, William, Ariell Reshef, and Julia Schwenkenberg. 2011. “The Power of Diversity.” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 16934.
    
    Moretti, Enrico. 2012. The New Geography of Jobs. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
    
    Mokyr, Joel. 1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. New York: Oxford University Press.
    
    Mokyr, Joel. 2016. A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
    
    Hidalgo, César A., and Ricardo Hausmann. 2011. The Atlas of Economic Complexity: Mapping Paths to Prosperity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    
    Saliba, George. 2007. Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    
    Brotton, Jerry. 2002. The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    
    Sassen, Saskia. 2001. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ↩︎

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If you want a more intimate look at immigration, especially Italian immigration at the turn of the twentieth century, go out and get yourself a copy of Stone is not Forever. This novel describes the process of immigrating to the United States, from the scammers and con men of Naples taking advantage of provincial migrants, to the travails of steerage passengers clustered in the hold of class segregated cruise ships, to standing in line at Ellis Island hope to get through the queue with one’s family.