The Case for Open Borders

by John Washington

By the mid-1830s, US troops were force-marching Indigenous people in chains across Alabama, hunting starving families from camp to camp in the swamps of Florida, with private mercenaries flocking into the dispossession business, turning—to paraphrase Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz—sacred land into real estate. Much of the speculation and plenty of the political will was sparked by businessmen in New York investing in the clearing of Indian territory to make way for slave-driven cotton farming. Though the infamous Trail of Tears, and much of the rest of the mass deportation and murder, took place in the South, Native Americans were also similarly driven out of states in the North. In Ohio, curious white colonizers watched the forced deportation as if it were a spectacle, gathering around makeshift camps to sightsee as Indians limped past, carrying what few possessions they were permitted to take. (Sometimes they weren’t allowed to take anything.) And it wasn’t only entertainment: as the Seneca Indians were pushed west from Ohio, Saunt writes, “their white neighbors rushed in to dismantle their lodgings, carrying away windows and doors, disassembling and carting off brick and stone chimneys, and prying up and hauling away flooring and fencing. Some simply moved into the freshly vacated houses.” As Dunbar-Ortiz puts it in her book Not a “Nation of Immigrants,” “Only with unlimited counterinsurgent war—destroying Indigenous towns, burning crops and food storage, driving inhabitants into...

The real victims