This book review was written by Eugene Kernes
2) The Rights of Property: Physical, Intellectual, and Other Property Rights, 3) To Cooperate Or To Defect?, 4) The Persecuted and The Persecutors, 5) Why Conflict Occurs And How To Resolve Them?,
“Freedom of movement is a fundamental
human right, not something that can be restricted by a racist or nationalist
government. Borders are not natural
divisions between people or benign lines on a map. They are mechanisms for some groups of people
to claim land, resources, and people, while fundamentally excluding other
people from access to those places. They
create and exacerbate inequalities and they protect the economic, political,
and cultural privileges that have accrued over the past few hundred years
through the spoils of colonialism, capitalism, and most recently economic
globalization.” – Reece Jones, Preface to the Paperback Edition, Page VII
“Under the current system, a refugee fleeing political
persecution is more legitimate than a migrant fleeing a life in a filthy,
crowded, disease-ridden, and dangerous slum where the only option is to work
long hours in a sweatshop for very low wages.
Focusing only on the limited, state-defined term refugee renders
other categories of migrants, who are moving for economic or environmental
reasons, as underserving of help or sympathy.” – Reece Jones, Chapter 1: The
European Union: The World’s Deadliest Border, Pages 22-23
“From the seventeenth century onward, as the connection
between the state and a bounded, defined territory grew stronger, the rulers in
these newly emergent jurisdictional territories in Europe worked to create an
ordered set of knowledge that allowed the land, resources, and people to be
governed. One way to conceive of these
state-ordering practices is through the metaphors of legibility and
vision. In order to govern, the state
needs to be able to see the people, the land, and the resources in its territory
in a legible or nameable way; they must be quantifiable and situated in a
known, locatable place.” – Reece Jones, Chapter 4: The Global Poor, Page 78
Is This An Overview?
There are not that many borders primed for war, as a means
to prevent potential invasion. Most
borders are a method of states to claim land, resources, and people, while
excluding other people from the region.
Various states have used borders to claim territory belonging to other
peoples, and rely on force to support the territorial claim. Borders divided communities, people from their
work, and cause environmental damage.
Borders have become militarized, which increased the number
of casualties of people trying to get across the borders. States have imposed greater difficulties for
migrants to enter the state, as a means of deterrence. But migrants have not been deterred. Migrants do not necessarily have a choice in
their migration, as migrants flee political persecution or economic
intolerance. The response to increased
deterrence and a willingness of people to migrate, migrants have been forced to
take more dangerous methods to cross borders.
Risky ways to move elsewhere, that often comes with dire consequences.
Rather than consider the reason why people want to migrate,
states have blamed human traffickers and smugglers for the migration. As migration threatens a state’s ability to
control resources and populations, states responded by violently enforcing
their authority. Not all migration is
prohibited. Corporations, capital, and
products can move between borders, while the same borders are closed to workers
and regulations. Leading to a dynamic in
which wealthy states lose jobs, while poor states gain unregulated jobs with
terrible working conditions. A
resolution for migration, would be to enable competitive global regulations,
setting appropriate global working conditions, and enabling environmental
protection.
Caveats?
There are biases to what history is presented and how the
events are interpreted. Sharing the
consequences of various contemporary institutions with limited benefits, while
sharing the benefits of some historic institutions without the
consequences. Political institutions and
the conditions of people are more complex than presented.
Although there have been and there are states which use
borders to persecute people, does not support the author’s implicit assumption
that violence occurs because of borders.
Violence and conflict existed and exists with and without borders. The author’s attempt to not reference the
violent nomadic behavior, does not mean that behavior did not exist. Before explicit borders, there have been wars
and conflict over presumed borders.
The solution presented is a want for standardized global
rules to reduce economic pressures for competition. The problems with standardized global rules,
is that the globe is not standard in its geography, resource distribution,
cultural attitudes, tolerance to disagreement, and other factors. Diversity of ways to be that were shaped by
local differences for local problems.
While borders create violence, to get the globe to accept standardized
rules would also require violence. As
even the history presented in the book shows.
