The Case for Open Borders

by John Washington

Nation building, in other words, is not the cohesive realization of a people inside a territory as a political force, but the setting apart and setting above of a select group of people over another or other groups. The domination and extermination of the other creates a limit—inside of which “the nation” continues to dispossess and define itself against the minority or outsider. (To return to the line from Hegel cited in the preface, “Something only is what it is in its limit and through its limit.”) Historically, nations target and seek to eliminate what they are not. Even the United States, which rhetorically—and sometimes actually—celebrates its diversity, has never been without an other who is severely oppressed, excluded, or worse.

Is this true of all countries? Or only of the countries whose borders you wish to throw open?