Borders Are Drawn to Protect Stolen Wealth. They Are a Process, Not a Place.

Five rich men disappeared in a tourist submersible, and the rich world was obsessed with them. In the same week, 750 poor people were crammed onto a fishing boat called the Adriana that the rich world let sink.

On the sub were two billionaires, two millionaires and a millionaire’s son. One of the millionaires and his son were from Pakistan, the same country from which many of the migrants on the Adriana had come, looking for refuge in Europe. On the sub they sought adventure, a quick trip down to the wreckage of the Titanic, where, famously, the rich people got the lifeboats and the poor were left to drown. On the Adriana they sought a different life, a risky voyage that they hoped would finally pay off with safety at the end. They had already left everything behind. One hundred and four of them were saved. The rest lost at sea.

The rescue operation for the sub was international, pricey, expansive. By contrast, Mohammed, a survivor of the Adriana, said that helicopters and ships passed them by as their overfilled boat stalled, their distress calls ignored, and that when the Greek coast guard finally arrived, “they were right next to us when it capsized. In the moment it sank, they moved away from us. They deliberately made us sink.” (The Greek government denied this.) The Washington Post, in a detailed investigation, suggested that “the deadliest Mediterranean shipwreck in years was a preventable tragedy.” An anonymous former Mediterranean coast guard official told the Post, “It’s an open secret that no country wants to take them.”

The sinking of the Adriana was possibly “the worst tragedy ever” in that sea, according to one EU official, yet it was also not rare. Protesters in Thessaloniki, in response to the sinking, marched to the port with a massive banner reading, “Tourists enjoy your cruise in Europe’s biggest migrant’s cemetery,” words echoing those of Pope Francis before his 2021 visit to migrant camps in Greece.

Carola Rackete, a German ship captain, called them “ghost boats,” the various rickety vessels or rafts that carry desperate migrants across the sea, that too often do not survive the journey. Rackete’s time leading rescues on the Sea-Watch 3 coincided with the growing shift toward criminalizing this desperate passage. It was June 2019 when her ship rescued 53 people from a raft floating between Libya and Lampedusa, an island in the Mediterranean, part of Italy, where the relatively new government included the hard-right anti-migrant party, the Lega. Its loudest voice, Matteo Salvini, was the interior minister. Some of the people who boarded the Sea-Watch 3 from the raft were sick, some injured, some pregnant, some young children. Rackete was forbidden from landing her vessel at Lampedusa, but after days in limbo, she did so anyway.

Other countries refused or ignored distress calls from Rackete’s ship. She would face charges for “promoting illegal immigration,” but rescuing people in distress at sea, she noted, is an obligation under Article 98 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. She pointed out that simply banning the boats would not stop them: “No one signs up for something like this for the sake of adventure, or on some insubstantial whim. You can’t scare people into staying at home when their lives were already at risk there.” No one leaves home unless / home is the mouth of a shark, British Somali poet Warsan Shire wrote. Yet, when and if they make it to a European port, migrants are required to tell their stories over and over so that comfortable officials can parse meaning and weigh desperation, gauging whether the reasons a person has left her home are good enough, by which we mean sufficiently horrifying, to give them leave to stay.

Rackete was released, eventually; a judge ruled that her actions in docking at Lampedusa were justified. By 2021, the last charges against her had been dropped, and Salvini faced charges of his own over his refusal to allow migrants to land in Italian ports.

The border is a process as much as a place, a decision to rescue a boat drifting at sea, or to slash a bottle left by volunteers in the desert.

But the borders have not softened. Rather, they keep expanding. Like U.S. border patrol agencies, Frontex — the European border patrol — has grown more and more powerful as politicians get louder about migrants, painting them as a security threat rather than as humans moving from place to place for a variety of reasons, as Europeans themselves have done with impunity for centuries. “De facto, the asylum system already doesn’t work or the Geneva Convention isn’t applied anymore,” Rackete said. “Not in the U.S. nor in Europe, nor in Australia. It’s already kind of dead, and we are still keeping it alive a little bit with our efforts.”

It is easier, Rackete noted, to create a court case against someone like her for something they did or to claim that migrants are breaking the law by moving. It is harder to prosecute someone for what they failed to do, for neglect, for leaving boats drifting in the waves for hours, days, weeks, while pretending not to have heard distress calls. In 2019, Salvini in Italy felt like an outlier, but in 2023, she said, “It just seems like the fascist tendency right now is far, far greater and far more notable across Europe.” Center-left parties, in hopes of capturing back some of the vote from the right, capitulate on immigration, making scapegoats of those who take to the seas.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., Donald Trump built his political career on the promise of a wall at the border, a wall that would somehow make impervious the U.S. body politic.

The wall, journalist Daniel Denvir has noted, “is a structure of political feeling.”

“Every time I talk about the border to people who are not from the Southwest, I say, my grandmother was alive when the border was drawn,” Viktoria Zerda, now an immigration lawyer in Philadelphia but a child of the borderlands, told me. The border was drawn right through her family, which now exists on both sides of the line between Texas and Mexico. For many years, they crossed back and forth easily, and then slowly the border tightened, the journey became illegal and the family sliced in two. The United States had won Texas and surrounding lands from Mexico in a war sparked by settlers who opposed Mexico’s decision to outlaw slavery. The enslavers won, and along the way tens of thousands of Mexicans became Americans. Or, as the protest chant goes, the border crossed us.

What the changing nature of the border should remind us is that the border produces the migrant. Borders are anything but natural even when they are bodies of water, rivers and seas; countries negotiate and split hairs over which portion of a river is theirs, how far into the sea their territory extends. And the migrant constructs the nation in turn: their image is, as Robin D.G. Kelley wrote, used to define who belongs, to justify “inclusion, exclusion, and outright criminalization.”

The border is a process as much as a place, a decision to rescue a boat drifting at sea, or to slash a bottle left by volunteers in the desert, to crush and piss on stashes of food and clothing, to wave someone through and search another car, to ask a job applicant or a person stopped for speeding to produce citizenship documents. Policies change, politicians pound the table and pontificate, but day after day the processes at the border, of the border, go on. This posturing, like so much else, obscures the actual humans from the picture. “I don’t think people understand just how violent border policies are,” Zerda said. Thousands, tens of thousands die in the borderlands; mass graves have been uncovered across Texas. For those who survive the trek, violent assault, dehydration, heatstroke, injuries, and the looming threat of arrest and deportation, the trip having been all for nothing, await.

What the borders are mostly protecting is stolen wealth and stolen land and the insecurity that comes with knowing that the theft was unjust.

“The border” as an imaginary space has room for none of that. But the border has a history, one of land grabs and skirmishes and wars, one of organized abandonment and criminalization, and most of all, one of great profit. Colonial powers imagined a world with no borders they were bound to respect beyond those that other colonial powers could enforce at the point of a gun. Nations like the Tohono O’odham, whose land was sliced through by the U.S. border, had and have no power to keep out the forces of the bigger, better-armed state. Nearly 80 million Europeans colonized the Americas and Oceania, bringing indentured and enslaved laborers from Asia and Africa with them, and now as then, imagined themselves besieged by the people they had overrun.

The border is a global communications technology. It divides not just two places but people into hierarchies that are both strict and flowing, mobile, reshuffled at times. Today’s world of passports was shaped by centuries-long processes of enclosure and seizure, the colonies a laboratory for experimentation and categorization.

Colonized people are expected to stay at home unless they were picked up and moved by European ship to be slaves or indentured workers. Their goods and artworks would be taken back to Europe, but the people in the former colonial possessions today need visas to visit the treasures looted from them in shining museums.

The passport, journalist Anna Lekas Miller explained in her book, Love Across Borders: Passports, Papers, and Romance in a Divided World, was from its beginnings a way to differentiate by status: Romans had documents to prove they were citizens and not enslaved. The name “passport” likely comes, she added, from documents used in medieval France “to keep vagrants and vagabonds from the countryside from coming into the cities, protecting the elite from who they saw as riff-raff and peasants.” The modern passport, focused on nationality rather than class status, was formalized during and after World War I. There was a moment, Lekas Miller wrote, when, determining the shape of the peace in 1920, the European powers considered restoring freedom of movement. They decided against it.

The United States linked citizenship and race from its earliest days. The institution of chattel slavery with its doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem (that which is brought forth follows the womb) required discrimination at the point of entry: Were you an immigrant or a slave? A “free white person” could be a citizen, according to the Naturalization Act of 1790; Chinese immigration was specifically banned in 1882, and national origin quotas would be imposed in the 1920s. Women, whose rights and labor status differed from that of men, could lose citizenship if they married the wrong immigrant, while men could more easily naturalize a foreign-born wife.

The colonial lines on the map would not last, nor would the violence imposed on the colonized stay out of the metropole. By the Second World War, many Europeans had to flee invasion and occupation; the Nazis had, in the words of Frantz Fanon, turned Europe “into a genuine colony.” Jews fleeing Nazi persecution were turned away at the U.S. border: 908 refugees on the SS St. Louis were rejected, sent back to Europe because the quotas (for German and Austrian migrants) had already been filled. In the war’s aftermath, the world’s borders would be redrawn. The Cold War would come to shape a world split by the so-called Iron Curtain, and decolonizing nations would struggle to be free of the burdens of the so-called developed world. The United States would repeal the quota system, part of a broader political makeover, an embrace of the “nation of immigrants” ideal, never real — the southern border tightened at the same time — but a nice story to tell that burnished the nation’s public face.

Colonialism might have been formally dismantled, but it left its power structures behind. A new form of plunder would take the place of the old; capitalism reorganized but did not depart. “Structural adjustment” would once again bend the economies of the Global South to the will of the North, but this time ostensibly they submitted of their own volition, to receive as a “loan” some of the wealth they had created. Migrants would leave to support families back home; they would leave to flee destabilization and war; they would leave behind lovers, friends, cousins, parents, and send money back each month, a flow of remittances to keep the economy going.

Some 3.5 percent of the world’s population are migrants or refugees, displaced from their homes by violence or financial need or love or some other loss. They are demonized in the rich countries where they go, where there is little interest in their stories beyond checking to see whether the details add up, where they pick and pack and serve food, nurse the sick, drive taxis and trucks, clean and care for children, pack purchases in warehouses, start businesses, write books. They are split into binaries: refugee or migrant, legal or illegal, good or bad. Black and brown or white. “The mass production and social organization of difference,” Harsha Walia wrote, “is at the heart of border-craft.”

Only certain immigrants constitute a border threat: the U.S. border where the wall was to be built was of course the southern one, not the one with Canada, where half my family crossed not all that long ago. Free movement within Europe is sustained by the patrols of Frontex and the countries’ forces to keep out those who do not belong.

Borders, in other words, are relationships. They separate but also connect. They are one-way much of the time: Americans can drop into any number of countries for a beach holiday or an adventure, but the reverse is harder to do. People from the Global South are treated as suspects rather than adventurers, tourists, guests. The acceptable migrant determined by political currents — Zerda noted that Cuban exiles would find welcome in the States, while those fleeing violence often instigated by the United States in other parts of Latin America are pushed back, deported, detained. Borders are designed to keep people out, and the story they create in doing so is that what is inside is precious and magical and needs protecting from the unreasonable foreign hordes.

But what the borders are mostly protecting is stolen wealth and stolen land and the insecurity that comes with knowing that the theft was unjust. “If you have to militarize a whole border with billions and billions of dollars, is this land really yours?” Zerda asked. The United States isn’t the only place where the seduction of the wall holds sway: fences and walls have recently been built between Spain and Morocco, between Greece and Turkey, Turkey and Syria, Hungary and Serbia and Croatia. Israel has surrounded itself with walls that even reach underground. The wall is a structure of political feeling, so too is the border at all.