The Case For Open Borders: Migration Is A Political Act / John Washington
Author and journalist John Washington returns to the podcast to discuss The Case for Open Borders, the name and subject of his new book from Haymarket Press.
John Washington places the current political rhetoric and policy fixated on the "border crisis" many Western nations are seemingly facing, particularly the United States, within the historical and material context of what the modern nation-state actually is. Borders are as much about building the infrastructure to prohibit and deter migrants and refugees from entering a territory, as it is a rhetorical weapon deployed by cynical politicians and nativist settlers to reify artificial differences among the human species. Stripping down the hyperbolic and nativist language exemplified across political parties, John makes clear what borders really are, and the violent realities this ever expanding infrastructure imposes on human and non-human life.
“Migrants are engaged in an overtly political act when they cross borders, and they are increasingly going to be doing that. They are the ones breaking down the borders by getting around them, and that is going to keep on happening, and increasingly so.
“So, in the coming decades, there will be huge attempts at pushback. But to sort of paraphrase a book title from a friend of mine, Todd Miller, you cannot wall off the storm. And I mean that not in terms of the migration storm, but also that is the way a lot of people, especially anti-immigration restrictionists, look at human beings. They always use these hydrological metaphors; they say, these people are coming, there is a surge, this flood of people. You can’t wall off either storm; you can’t wall off the human tide—human movement—and you can’t wall off the tides and coming storms of climate change.
“And so, we’re going to see a more open world because we will knock down these walls just by the sheer force of the numbers of people who are crossing them. So again, I think the question is: how do we respond?”
Bio:
John Washington is a staff writer at Arizona Luminaria, a community-focused media outlet where he writes about the border, climate change, democracy, and more. His latest book, The Case for Open Borders was published by Haymarket Books in 2024. He is also the author of The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the U.S.-Mexico Border and Beyond, published in 2020 by Verso Books. Washington is also a translator, having co-translated, most recently, The Hollywood Kid by Óscar Martínez and Juan Martínez, and Blood Barrios by Alberto Arce, which won a PEN Translates Award.
Episode Notes:
Purchase a copy of The Case for Open Borders from Bookshop
Subscribe to his newsletter, Lit & Border News
Read his journalistic work for Arizona Luminaria
The song featured is “Deneb” by Nick Vander from the album Kodama (Nowaki’s Selection), used with permission by the artist.
