99% Invisible - Open Borders

Episode Date: July 1, 2025

An immigration reporter’s chance encounter in the desert reveals how borders shape our actions, our beliefs, and the way we see the world around us.Open Borders Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of 99% Invisible ad-free and a whole week early. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus. 

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. John Washington grew up with his family's stories of migration and escape, from hiding in train compartments and swimming across rivers to the airplane his mother took to leave Romania for the U.S. as a teenager. But these stories of forging out dangerously on your own, they seemed to him like tales from a distant past. But then I remember when I first confronted it personally, and that was in the mid-2000s. John was on a camping trip with a friend

out in the Anza Borrego desert, just east of San Diego. This is 99PI producer Lash Madon, and they're going to take it from here. John and his buddy were driving down a dirt road looking for a place to camp. And we saw a young man step into the road from the shoulder and flag us down. At that point I didn't speak much Spanish at all. We tried to communicate with each other and we understood that he was a migrant and also realized where we were, which was about 15 miles north of the border wall over really

rough terrain. And he was clearly very thirsty and not in great shape. They gave him some water, topped him off a couple times. The man then asked for a ride to the next town. And in that moment, John didn't know what to do. Because we knew that it was illegal, but we didn't really understand the implications of if we were to be caught, of what would happen. John knew that under federal law, it's illegal to help undocumented immigrants into the United States,

and that if he gave this man a ride, there was a chance he'd face a federal offense. So they wished him luck and went on their way, got back in their car and drove off. And then when we got to camp and we started unpacking, I think it hit me, and I was kind of horrified by what we had done. I said, oh my God, we left this young man who was in bad shape on the side of the road. And so we jumped back in the car and we drove back to try to find him,

and we didn't find him, of course we didn't. And in the years and long time since then, there's been this slow, dawning realization that I acted in a really inhumane way. And yet, the entire force of the way that we structure society right now, especially in the United States, but many other places as well, was compelling me to act that way. It was criminalizing me, or would have criminalized me, for offering him the help that he needed.

That day showed him that the border wall had seeped into his head. Yeah, the wall, the logic of the wall, the logic of immigration as we enforce it today, had gotten to my head so much such that I didn't provide help. A border is an idea so powerful that we never even have to see it to believe it, or believe in it. Global borders can be sites of peace and conflict, violence and celebration, opportunity and confinement. And borders as they exist today, which is to say increasingly

militarized and clearly defined, they're actually a relatively recent political invention. It wasn't until the 20th century that strictly controlled national borders started to spread around the world. My own life has been shaped by borders. A violent border formation turned my grandparents into refugees. I myself have immigrated twice. And so, in an attempt to understand the weird and contradictory ways that borders sometimes operate, I wanted to talk to John. John's an immigration reporter, and he's also the author of the book, The Case for Open Borders. In his book, John writes about different borders around the world and how they work. And that's what our episode will be about today.

Our first stop is Berlin, 1961. From 1961 to 1989, the Berlin Wall separated East and West Berlin. So a little bit of more context about the Berlin Wall. The official name of the wall when it was first starting to be built in 1961 is the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart. This famous concrete barrier, topped with barbed wire, guarded with watchtowers and mines, it was built by communist East Germany to protect their territory from the West Germans. And yet, if anyone knows anything about the Berlin Wall, it was really stopping people

from going the other direction. I think that's an interesting thing to note, that walls often have the opposite effect that they are purported to have. And if you look back deep into history, the very first sort of border demarcations weren't to keep people out, but they were to keep people in. The Berlin Wall was no exception. It's become too difficult, simply too dangerous. You see, you don't have to cross one wall, but two,

and in some sections, as many as five. Concrete, three meters high, barbed wire fences, barricades, tripwires. There was also another unintended consequence of the wall. Something that people didn't realize until it was too late. The wall, it turned out, was making people sick. There is a concept that came out of an East German psychologist who coined the term Maurerkrankheit, or wall sickness, which is his understanding of how much this idea of cleaving a society in two creeped into people's heads. And it changed the way that they thought about themselves,

it changed the way that they thought about and saw other people. Those affected with wall sickness were found on both sides of the Berlin Wall. According to psychologists, partially because of the wall, they displayed some combination of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and paranoia. The closer they lived to the wall, the more acute their symptoms. So the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. And I think one of the important things to recognize is how it fell is I think people

started just basically seeing through it. What I mean is they were able to see through the logic of the border. There wasn't a bill that was passed or a new law that was passed. It was just popular discontent and protests. People just started gathering, just started just crossing the border. Thanks in part to mass protest and the increasing instability in East Germany at the time, restrictions at the border eventually loosened. Then, on November 9, 1989, the East German government opened the border, just before midnight. Hundreds of thousands of Germans from both sides immediately flocked to the wall, demanding that it be knocked down. Take a look at them. They've been there since last night.

They are here in the thousands. They are here in the thousands. They are here in the tens of thousands. Occasionally they shout, Die Maue muss weg, the wall must go. At that point, there was around a dozen international border walls throughout the world, and there was a huge celebration of openness. And yet, there's been an enormous retrenchment since then. There are somewhere around 80 border walls today. They're being hardened, ever more militarized. That's more border walls than ever before in human history.

And wall sickness is usually referenced as just that era, but I think that so many other places throughout the world today are infected with wall sickness. Countries worldwide have wrestled with borders. Where to place them, how to guard them. And John writes that borders tend to protect the idea of a country more than the country itself. Maybe it's with barbed wire fencing or a flag, a security checkpoint or a watchtower. Each border comes with its own flavor of pageantry.

Which brings us to our second stop, the Radcliffe line. Here at the border between the towns of Atari India and Vagha Pakistan, there's fences, there's police, there's also ice cream and face paint. You can buy carnival snacks and keychains with little machine guns on them. On either side of the border gate there are two huge stadiums, one for Indians and the other for Pakistanis. Since 1959, soldiers from both countries have staged an elaborate ceremony here, at the same time, every single day. It's a sort of choreographed dance battle. They strut back and forth like birds doing a mating call.

Every day they perform this ceremony. They flex their muscles at each other. They literally growl at each other. They do this sort of goose stepping, like high kicking march towards each other. They shake hands in a very manly fashion. They open the gates. They slam the gates. And there's lots of people who go

to this, mostly locals, I understand, and watch. On a typical day, the stadiums here are full. This is the most popular border crossing in the region, as in it's the one often written about in tourism magazines, but these military performances take place at various points along the long jagged line that separates India and Pakistan. A line which itself has a pretty bizarre history. It's an example of how most national borders were created in pretty random haphazard ways. This was the line of partition that divided these nations after, you know, centuries of imperial rule by the British.

World War II left the British kind of broke, so they decided to abandon a number of their colonial projects, including British India. The plan was to form two new countries in their wake, India and Pakistan. It wasn't just demarcating the two countries, but part of the project that was happening at the same time was trying to divide the two countries specifically by religion. The concept was that the Hindu population of this region would go into India and the Muslim population would go into Pakistan. The British charged one man, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, with the task of drawing the line and creating the two nations.

Radcliffe was a British lawyer. And although he was declared the authority on carving out these two new countries, he knew next to nothing about the region and had never visited. Following nationalist riots in India, the British wanted to speed up their departure in 1947. And so Radcliffe was given just five weeks to draw the new border. That wasn't enough time for him to even get his hands on an updated map. And even though Britain intended to divide the countries along religious lines. Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs had lived for centuries side by side, all throughout the region.

He studied maps and consulted some people, but he was given very short time to do this homework and almost willy-nilly just drew this line. Ultimately, the Radcliffe Line was drawn, and the British declared an independent India and Pakistan. Fearing mass protest, exact information of where the line would be was released to the public two days after the Declaration of Independence. This meant that millions of people celebrated independence without even knowing

which country they were in. Some towns raised both the Pakistani and Indian flags. But once word of the line had spread, millions suddenly became a religious minority, if they were Hindu or Sikh, living in the area that became Pakistan, or if they were Muslim, living in the area that became India. And for many of those people, that celebration quickly turned into horror. The amount of violence that occurred almost instantly was incredible. People were driven out of their homes and were subject to mass communal violence and rioting. I think the highest estimate is around two million people died as a direct result of this partition.

Cyril Radcliffe's line, that smooth stroke of pen, it suddenly put about 15 million people in the wrong place, making it the largest forced migration in the world. This is one of the most stark examples, but there's so many throughout the world. If you look at the current way that the world is divided into nation-states, over 40% of all borders were drawn by Britain and France. They were just drawn on a map and imposed upon the populations. And sometimes that kind of works out or doesn't have a huge effect. But in the case of India and Pakistan, I mean, the effects were devastating and truly, I think, hard to grasp.

It's telling that after drawing the line, Radcliffe burned all of his paperwork. He left India and even declined to receive payment from the British government for the job. Much of the India-Pakistan border is fenced and lit up by the Indian government, 1, 1200 miles of bright floodlights making the line visible from outer space. It's one of the most contested borders in the world. And yet, the Atarivaga border crossing can also be a place to have a picnic and watch some circus-like fun. It's an absolute contradiction.

One that John says isn't so unusual. And much like this border, John says all borders are selectively permeable. They are closed down to certain people, but they are very open to the flows of capital, to the trading of arms, all sorts of other things. So there's always that sort of dissonance and always that clash at every borderline throughout the world. It's in Kashmir where the Radcliffe Line stops.

The British left that disputed territory for India and Pakistan to resolve on their own in 1947. And they immediately went to war over it. Lately, a war over borders is once again at the center of conflict between the two nuclear-armed countries. And for 12 days, the daily theatrical rivalry at this border crossing was put on pause.

The performance has since resumed, but now with some key changes. This time, the gates do not open and there is no handshake. We'll be back after this. We're back with producer Lasha Madon. A border is a line that can shift and bend, and is often a lot less rigid than we might think. John Washington, author of the book The Case for Open Borders, writes that if

history is any guide, national borders are always moving, often conveniently closing shut behind those who enforce them. With that, we've arrived at our third stop, Australia 2001. There's a really momentous case, both in international law and for Australia itself, in 2001. A small fishing boat crammed with 433 asylum seekers was on its way to Australia when the boat's engine failed in international waters. The people aboard, who were mostly from Afghanistan, were rescued by a nearby container ship. The ship's captain was shocked by the health conditions of some people aboard, and he began

to sail to the closest port for safety. And they ended up on Christmas Island, which is an island about a thousand miles off the coast of mainland Australia, but is claimed by the country of Australia. And so when they got to Christmas Island, they were not allowed to dock because Australia was really nervous about the fact that if they touched land, they would be able to levy an asylum claim and they would have to welcome them in, hear out their claims, and then maybe even grant them if they were legitimate. So the asylum seekers waited in limbo.

They remained on board the vessel near Christmas Island while the Australian government argued over their fate. Their conditions grew more and more bleak. Some of the migrants began a hunger strike. People were sick. People were on the verge of dying. The ship's captain kept trying to get Australia's attention. On the fourth desperate day, he started sailing towards mainland Australia.

A high seas standoff with the captain of a Norwegian freighter who picked up more than 400 asylum seekers from a sinking boat and attempted to enter Australian waters. The government refused deploying SAS troops in a show of military force. Besides sending military to prevent the ship from sailing any closer, the Australian government got to work, quickly passing the first of a series of laws, suddenly giving them the power to refuse entry to asylum seekers arriving by boat. And this is an example of what is called a turn back. Australia redirected the asylum seekers to other islands, including a tiny island country called Nauru.

Which is this guano-covered, incredibly hot, isolated island where they detained these asylum seekers. Nauru was once a country rich in natural resources, but after being mined by a series of corrupt governments, it was left desperate for money. And so, when Australia approached them and said, we want to build a detention center on your land, it wasn't really in a position to refuse. Refugees trying to get to Australia would be redirected to Nauru and have their applications for asylum to Australia processed there. And what they decided to do besides deflect their claim is imprison them. Actually, this was the first establishment of a detention center on this, like, offshore island.

And this is a practice that Australia has been doing ever since. What began as a hurried political response to the arrival of that one boat in 2001 grew into a series of permanent immigration policies. Australia called this new set of laws the Pacific Solution. The Pacific Solution involved something else, too. Something kind of extreme. And what they decided to do was actually to excise Christmas Island, as well as a few other islands, from official Australian national territory.

So that way, if any Afghani or any other person made it to Christmas Island in the future, they couldn't ask for asylum. Just like that, the Australian border was changed. The new policy was backdated to two and a half hours before the refugees entered Australian waters. This way, the official memory of the arrival of those people to Australia had been erased. The asylum seekers had never really been in Australia at all, at least not in any way that could be of benefit to them. The broad point is that the way that people who are trying to keep away migrants talk about borders is that they are these immovable, psychosank lines that are deeply rooted in history.

But they're not. They are malleable and they are constantly being moved. And that Australia was willing to move its border to protect its border, I think is a really telling example. After the 2001 incident, a detention center was built on Christmas Island too. It became known as the island on which a hundred million crabs roam free, but refugees live behind bars. In the case for open borders, this is John Washington's argument. People should be able to move and migrate wherever they want and need to.

That instead of criminalizing people for crossing a border, we should instead fear the society in which we deny a desperate person aid, leaving them stranded on the side of a desert road, much like John did with that young man years ago in the Anza Borrego desert. To put it even more simply, John says we should open our borders. Open borders is not no borders. I do think it makes sense to draw some sort of line around a community in which you say that these people are part of this Commonwealth and these people are part of the other. I think that's just, you know, political organizing.

But the presumption would be, in the version of Open Borders I'm talking about, that that line can be crossed and anyone can do it and they don't need a compelling reason to do so. This idea might sound radical now, but it wasn't always that way. Even Ronald Reagan called for what sounds like an open border between the U.S. and Mexico at a Republican presidential primary debate in 1980. Rather than making them or talking about putting up a fence, why don't we work out some recognition of our mutual problems, make it possible for them to come here legally with a

work permit. And then while they're working and earning here, they pay taxes here. And when they go on to go back, they can go back and they can cross and open the border both ways. Not long after, The Wall Street Journal called for a five word amendment to the Constitution. There shall be open borders. And less than a decade ago, Democrats running in their party's presidential primary were competing over who is more pro-immigrant.

But times have changed. I think just reminding people of some of those things shows that it's not as far-fetched as it might seem given our current political climate. John says there are many reasons the spirit of open borders should return. There are ethical reasons. There are also economic reasons. Because immigrants contribute positively to a country's economic growth. Any economist worth their fiscal salt and has looked at this issue knows that

migration is good for receiving communities and they are overall a huge boon to economies both local and regional and of course national as well. In 2017 the National Department of Health and Human Services commissioned a study on the fiscal effects of refugees and asylees in the US. What researchers found wasn't aligned with what the Trump administration was looking for, and the study was buried,

though eventually leaked to the New York Times. The study found that from 2005 to 2014, the US refugee and asylee population paid $63 billion more in taxes than what they received in benefits. Here's the thing. Humans have always migrated. And they likely always will. If you look back far enough, tales of migration are central to so many of our religions, literature, and our family histories.

And John says it's essential to look at migration into the U.S. through this lens as well. That people are always going to want to move, and even more so in the context of climate change. Trying to stop it isn't only inhumane, it's also expensive and a little futile. Just look at the sheer numbers. I mean, since the United States has really put in force all of its most robust and most militarized and most draconian immigration enforcement mechanisms,

the numbers of people crossing have remained steady or have continued to go up. John says that if your ultimate goal is to stop people from moving, well, he doesn't think that's possible. But either way, a border wall isn't going to be so effective at keeping people out. I think walls do slow people down, but most folks can cut through them, can hire someone to cut through them, can walk around them, tunnel under them, or climb a ladder over them. The reason that under the first Trump administration, they strung up hundreds of miles of concertina wire along the wall, the reason Greg Abbott of Texas put out buoys across the Rio Grande with these like razor blades basically between them, was not that it's so effective, but it's

to send a message. On the other hand, the border wall alongside hardened internal immigration policies are actually discouraging people to leave the United States after they enter. That trend of coming and going, it's called circular migration, and it used to be very common in the U.S. Over the last 20 years, as we've really ramped up border and immigration enforcement, the amount of circular migration has plummeted. People would come to the United States not with the intention

of permanently staying here, but they would come, they would try to work a couple years, they'd make some money, and they would leave. But now, because it's so dangerous and so costly to come, that people realize that it's not worth the danger and the money to go and come back more than once. So they get stuck here. Just like with the Berlin Wall, the militarized American border is unintentionally keeping many people in.

Until very recently, we did not talk about borders the way we do today. Before the 1990s, there was almost no physical infrastructure along America's southern border. Now there are about 700 miles of fences and walls stretching along the line that separates Mexico and the U.S. And here's one more fact. The relative age of the U.S.-Mexico border wall right now is about 30 years old. The same age that the Berlin Wall was when it fell. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Lashma Donne and edited by Delaney Hall.

Mixed by Martine Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real. Fact-checking by Graham Hayesha. Special thanks this week to John Washington, author of The Case for Open Borders. Cathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kolstad is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivienne Leigh, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Jacob Medina Gleason, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% of his logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.

We are part of the SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites. We're mostly on Blue Sky, as well as our own Discord server. There's a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.