Open Borders to Create New Connections to Home and Kin

Open U.S. borders to whoever wants to enter, for as long as they want to stay. Let the presence of people from around the world be a daily reminder of the work that must be undertaken to rebuild our domestic economies, our homes, and our homelands to value care for life. We need climate migration as an antidote to short memories and quick complacency. We need to shake up our communities with the reminder that change is not only coming but is already here. Such an approach to migration forwards an economy of care that rejects the harmful, racist boundaries of the white supremist nation-state. Opening borders is a way to build an ethic of solidarity and concern for nonrelations; it may sound counterintuitive but learning to care about the lives of nonkin will help life flourish, including our own.

In June 2021, Kamala Harris flew to Guatemala. The visit, during which she would present her plan for migration, was greatly anticipated across North America. The number of people arriving from Central America to the southern U.S./Mexico border had “soared in recent months.”1 The fact the Trump administration stopped asylum procedures and that the Biden administration had been slow to change course was not dissuading people from leaving home. By the time of Harris’s speech, U.S. officials had documented roughly one million “enforcement encounters”2—as they officially term apprehensions or arrests—at the Southwest land border.

“Do not come, do not come,” Harris implored her Guatemalan audience at the widely publicized press conference, adding, “The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our border.”3 She explained that her trip to was meant to address the “root causes” of migration, naming food insecurity, violence, and corruption in Guatemala as challenges causing people to leave. “The goal of our work is to help Guatemalans find hope at home,” she said. The message was clear: Migrants present a burden to U.S. citizens and their government, and they are not welcome in the United States.

Yet Harris is wrong to take this approach. The United States needs people with experience living outside the country more than ever to help overturn the brutal forces of white supremacy that threaten us all. Encouraging migration is a way to build communities founded upon an equitable distribution of care. Many of the people coming to the United States are fleeing homelands made uninhabitable by U.S. action, including global warming, for which the United States bears the lion’s share of responsibility. In Guatemala, where I have been carrying out fieldwork for the past twenty years, stories of people fleeing communities ravaged by climatic destruction are increasingly common. Drought, flooding, landslides, hurricanes, pestilence—all associated with rising temperatures and the erratic weather patterns that result—have forced people away from lands on which their families have lived for thousands of years.

As much as people leaving Guatemala need a safe haven, life within the United States is also in peril. Record heatwaves have killed hundreds of people in the summer of 2021. More than 3.2 million acres of land burned in seventy-seven large wildfires in the United States that year, destroying homes and displacing people.4 Elsewhere in the United States, floods and hurricanes increasingly upend people’s lives. The United States holds global responsibility for the dangerous warming of the planet, but the U.S. government is slow to act and many people refuse to believe—despite the evidence around us—that climate change is driven by human activity, or that there are ways to turn it around.

Opening the political borders of the United States and redistributing care across and between nations must become an urgent political priority in the fight against global warming. Opening borders offers a means to facilitate more livable lives for people fleeing climate change. U.S. citizens should care for others because it is the decent way to be in the world and the U.S. government should make reparations for past harm it has done. But borders should also be opened because they serve as a fundamental infrastructure for forces of white supremacy that harm people on all sides. Opening borders would not just redistribute care from those with privilege to those in peril. It would also have a broad benefit of building communities based upon solidarity and sustainability, not the oppressive, settler-first politics of bounded territories. It would encourage a much-needed flourishing of life, not racism and fear.

That it is a challenge to write about the history of the place from which I write is no accident.5 I believe I live on land once inhabited by Kiksht-, Numu-, and Ichishkíin-speaking peoples, many of whom were forcibly removed to the confederated tribes of Warm Springs. The details of this past have been actively erased from public memory. I live close to a site where Indigenous people have gathered for centuries—neighborhood children frequently find arrowheads in the dirt—but the only public acknowledgment of their presence is a nearly invisible sign hidden off the highway in the woods that misspells the Indigenous names.

Meanwhile, memorials to the settler-past, such as preserved covered wagons, are displayed prominently. Many of these settlers fled the U.S. South as slavery became illegal, establishing Oregon in 1859 as a “white homeland” through deeply exclusionary laws, including the public flogging of Black people. As historian Walidah Imarisha recounts, Oregon was “founded in a white nationalist fantasy of creating a white utopia void of any people of color.”6 Imarisha clarifies that Black people, as with Native, Chinese, Japanese, and Pacific Island people, were always present, but the white fantasy facilitated exclusionary laws, such as those preventing Black people from owning real estate or making contracts, which kept them economically and politically marginalized. White nationalist state laws sought to ensure that care—enabled through access to wealth—would be unevenly distributed.

I have located myself through the statehood title of Oregon, though plenty of my neighbors have been calling for the dissolution of the state as we know it, instead claiming “greater Idaho” as their home.7 Greater Idaho, uniting the most conservative counties in the area, is their new utopia—a new white state where people have the freedom to homeschool their children to protect them from learning history, openly carry firearms, and entirely ignore the discipline of public health. The language people use on social media to speak about Mexican and Central American immigrants exposes deep, fierce racism. “Go home,” they write, clinging to the idea of border walls as a means to protect their way of life. 

I live in a small cluster of houses in the woods, surrounded by dense forest in all directions. Oregon is known for rain, but 2021 was one of the driest years on record since government scientists began to track temperatures well over a hundred years ago. The ground is cracking, streambeds—and even lake beds—are dry and dusty. Meteorologists warn that we are looking at a megadrought.8 Armed and angry groups of anti-government extremists that include law enforcement officers have banded together to threaten violence against any conservation actions to protect the little water remaining. “Stand for freedom” says one of their posters.9 “I would rather die than be caged” reads another10—a tribute to a rancher killed in another anti-government standoff in Oregon a few years back.

Before settlers arrived, Indigenous people in the region had sophisticated fire-wise practices that successfully kept massive fires at bay.11 Settlers across the political spectrum dismissed these tactics. In recent summers, unprecedented heat has combined with unprecedented drought to turn the Cascade Mountain range of Oregon into a tinder box. New fires are burning over recent fire scars—a sign of ecosystem transformation from thick temperate forest to a shrub chaparral habitat.12

In 2021, the International Panel on Climate Change released a report warning that human activity is having an unquestionable impact on the temperature of the planet, causing ice to melt, ocean temperatures to rise, and erratic weather patterns to bring about unpredictable flooding and drought.13 The report clarifies that there are a few years remaining to curb carbon dioxide emissions, but it is also clear that not enough action is being taken and time is running out. Many of the same people organizing public protests against mask and vaccine mandates in Oregon scoff at reports like these. They call global warming a conspiracy or hoax and refuse any action to respond. Public health is a dirty word. “Individual liberty,” “personal freedom,” people declare, expressing indifference to how their actions affect the lives of others. A white man in the community summed up the sentiment, declaring: “I’ll go wherever I please, I’ll do whatever I want.” 

In Economy of Force, Patricia Owens critiques the academic field for leaving the household as an undertheorized actor in economic and political systems.14 Noting that the Greek word oikonomia meant “household governance,” she points out that households are at the “root of the language of modern economics with familial relations being the basis of theories of governance,” though they are often ignored. She is critical of how the work of caregiving has been separated from the work of commerce, but her analysis is not a joyous reclaiming of home economics. Instead, she points out that domesticity shares a derivative with “dominate” to argue that violent household orders have come to shape violent political orders. To quote her directly: “We might even say that all traditions of political thought that assume rulership or sovereignty as the essence of government and politics find their origins in the practices of household rule.”15

Owens helps us understand how settler me-first or family-first structures, based on patriarchal leadership, have legitimized political formations such as the “Department of Homeland Security,” with its focus on violently shoring up the boundaries of the nation-state. Owens’s work draws our attention to a widespread, pervasive climate of cruelty in U.S. life, where nationalism, much like love of family, is widely held to be an obvious good. A family-first attitude serves as the basis for settlers’ “survival of the fittest” mentality, teaching white Americans that it is okay to care for themselves and their family above all others. Health, including saving money for a medical crisis, is a family’s responsibility and not the job of the collective. Wealth is admired; poverty—and the poor—are scorned. 

Sociologist Jonathan Metzl, who conducted years of ethnographic research in the U.S. South, furthers our understanding of a climate of cruelty, showing how white supremacy hurts people across the spectrum of violence—from victims to perpetrators. Dying of Whiteness describes white communities protesting a range of policies that could improve their health, including health insurance expansion, gun restrictions, and increased support for public education. One reason they give is “the defense of white ‘ways of life.’”16 He finds that white people would rather die than improve the lives of Black and Brown people. Metzl writes that this culture of white supremacy is “killing America’s heartland.”

We can extend Metzl’s analysis of health insurance, gun control legislation, and educational austerity to U.S. border policy. The closure of the border seemingly promotes the defense of a white homeland; on the surface, it appears that tightening border regulation harms people on the other side—those asking to enter. In fact, the closure harms people on the United States side of the border as well. It normalizes cruelty, reproducing a cultural system with harmful effects for all. Closed borders fan the flames of white antipathy, destroying planetary networks that we need to survive. One of Metzl’s most important findings was that conventional liberal humanitarian responses to racism focusing on educating racists about the harms of their racism were misdirected since this harm was explicitly desired. We must instead take concrete political actions to bring about white supremacy’s end.17 Embracing forms of distribution that allow care to flow to those who need it when they need it will help to a create vision for kinship not based in the cruelty of racism, hatred, and fear but in global solidarity and community care. A caring economy that rejects family-first, race-first, nation-first understandings of how care should be allocated is an economy that will help us all.

Before 2020, the argument for opening U.S. borders was widely held to be a political nonstarter. Policymakers recognize that the U.S. border is porous and fluid—in many places, there is nothing there at all and people can just walk past. But the myth of impermeable borders helps shore up racial superiority and national exclusivity upon which U.S. capitalism is based.18 A 2018 Pew Research center poll suggested that 66 percent of U.S. voters thought immigration should be kept at its present level or decreased and only 32 percent said it should be increased.19 But the question of whether borders should be eliminated altogether was, apparently, too audacious for the polling agency to ask.

This chapter challenges the taken-for-granted inevitably of border walls, presenting border abolition as a reasonable antidote to many of the problems facing the United States today. Admittedly, I do not tackle how to dismantle and discard the border. My focus is rather on the need to change the conventional narrative, seizing the opportunity to elaborate an economy of care to energize a long-standing, if underrecognized, movement to welcome all people into the United States and grant them full political autonomy and respect.20 The narrative need not be based primarily on either moral beneficence or the justice of political reparation, but on the recognition that the violence of white supremacy is harmful and the people of the United States need help.

Remaking world orders to undo the violence of the nation-state is not only possible, but many of the people held out or marginalized by border walls are skilled in how to go about this work. For example, people in the communities where I’ve lived in Guatemala have valuable knowledge of how to rebuild life in the wake of catastrophe and trauma. From conquest, to armed conflict, to genocide, many who leave for the United States have deep experience in making and then remaking their lives again and again. In 2020, two successive hurricanes caused massive landslides that buried entire towns, washing away farmland and food supplies for the coming year. When the state offered no relief services, people formed networks of mutual aid, rebuilding roads, offering provisions to those without, and providing shelter to help replace the thousands of dwellings destroyed in the storms. Guatemalans ravaged by climate apartheid know how fragile life is and how fierce, and full of care, the work to guard and nourish it must be.21

Recently, however, the devastation wrought by growing hunger and instability has been insurmountable for many. As Diego Petzey notes, the state’s absence in the face of the hurricanes marks systematic “policies of extermination.”22 With fields and crops irreparably damaged, many have set out north. The travel is dangerous and when, or if, people arrive at the U.S. border, they find it closed and U.S. citizens unwelcoming. Kamala Harris’s words, “do not come,” echo a pervasive sentiment in the United States. Yet this message fails to recognize that U.S. citizens need people from other countries to overturn the rugged selfishness of white nationalism and to radically remake U.S. ways of life.

I could list more lessons to be learned from Guatemala, including sustainable food and fire technologies, or mechanisms for caring for water, soil, or air. What people in the United States have to gain, however, is beyond technical knowledge. Borders should also be opened because of a more fundamental need to remake our conceptual understanding of homeland and home, celebrating our capacity to nurture ourselves, to attend to the integrity of those who are not kin, and to facilitate diverse lifeways and sustainable environmental practices. The United States has failed to care for most people who live within it in addition to those globally affected by its brand of disaster capitalism.23 To survive the changes in climate that are coming, we must refuse the fantasy of territory and homeland offered by a closed border, remaking the contours of U.S. nationalism and citizenship. Border walls will not save us from climate catastrophe. We must change to survive. Refusing the false and dangerous logic of isolation and exclusion by opening borders is a powerful place to start a redistribution of care.