The Case for Open Borders

by John Washington

The motivation behind the Indian removal campaigns of the nineteenth century was not only hatred and fear of the natives (though it was also abundantly that) but a ravenous greed that saw natives’ ancestral land as an opportunity to expand the slave-driven cotton industry. Especially in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, white farmers and their mostly Northern financiers were desperate to plant more acres of the white gold. Politicians—local, state, and national, including President Andrew Jackson—did all they could to break through the recently established borders surrounding Indigenous lands and flood their territory with both slave drivers and their enslaved Black people. To clear those lands, they either outright killed or deported the natives across yet another concocted border, newly conceived just west of the Mississippi River.

Good. Keep your eyes on the real victims of the open borders of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The indigenious peoples.