Borders: Exclude or Relate?

Abstract

Executive Summary

US political discourse characterizes the US-Mexico border as a site of threat and, of necessity, exclusion. This frame ignores the importance of borders to economies, families, and culture in our increasingly interconnected world. Moreover, it leads to policies that place people at risk of victimization and death. In conceiving of the border solely in terms of exclusion, nations forego the opportunity to strengthen relationships across borders. This paper argues that the politics of humane migration require a vision of borders as sites of encounter, engagement, and relationship, rather than solely exclusion.

This reconceptualization of the US-Mexico border, in particular, would strengthen relationships across borders, and prioritize cooperation between Latin America/the Caribbean and the United States, starting with regulated legal flows. It would also respond to the shared contexts of migration, including contraband in arms and drugs, criminal violence, and climate change. It articulates an alternative vision of borders as a “commons” in which mutual needs can be addressed (a commons is an issue or resource in which every one has access and involvement).

Migration itself provides a perfect example of such a need. It takes place in a political climate partially but powerfully shaped by racism and classism. Thus, it has become a polarized “issue” that appears insolvable. In fact, it may not be a problem at all. Rather, in our current demographic-economic situation, as well as for our cultural well-being, migration should be treated as an asset. Insofar as it needs to be addressed, this paper delineates many possibilities. The options are not perfect and magical — the challenges are hard and diverse — but they an advance a vision of a shared cross-border space on migration. That might be a crucial move, not only for migration, but along a path that recognizes relationships and commitments of many kinds across the hemisphere and world. Recognition is not enough; real change in resources and power needs to follow. But a vision of connection rather than exclusion provides the political starting point needed for change to happen. In every political instance in which borders are used to frame migration in terms of who, how, and how much to exclude, connectedness loses ground. A politics of humane migration can only emerge if rooted in a positive vision of borders as sites of engagement and encounter.

Introduction

The articles in this issue carefully document deaths at the U.S.-Mexico border. Reading them has great impact. Why would that be? People are coming from outside the country, and dying shortly after they enter. The impact might be because we feel abstractly that all people, outside or inside, have a basic right to life. It might come from a more emotional identification with people as fellow human beings, akin to ourselves, vulnerable to suffering and death. It might be motivated by non-religious ideas of human universals, or religious ideas of human value. It might likewise come from a more parochial identification (e.g., ethnic and religious) with particular kinds of migrants. Finally, it might reflect connectedness with some particular immigrants once inside national boundaries. These sorts of identification are not well documented and analyzed, as opposed to quantitative studies of public opinion about immigration.

I raise this issue of how and why we might care about migrant deaths in part to pose a contrast with lack of concern or indifference. Each potential kind of identification listed above might be absent or even actively rejected. The lack of identification also demands study. One explanation may be lack of information about and publicity around that information. Better knowledge, then, could change perspectives. However, decades of experience lead me to believe that it is not enough. Policy change requires wider change in collective feelings and political organizing that permits and encourages change. An important factor in absence of concern, I will suggest, is the powerful ability of borders to exclude recognition of relationships.

Deaths that are permitted, even caused, by collective decision (policy) deny the humanity of some people. Why and how do borders enable this denial? Does the boundary truncate concern for others — those who cross borders or remain on their other side? Lack of concern about the well-being of migrants is not unique to borders; there are painful and important ways in which migrants are neglected and even imperiled inside national boundaries (Ordóñez 2015; Horton 2016) and after being deported (Slack 2019). However, the deadliest element of unauthorized migration is literal border crossing, and the thrust of restrictive migration policy is to make borders harder and more expensive to cross — and thus deadlier (Martínez et al. 2014; Boyce, Chambers, and Launius 2019). If we wish to invert this dynamic and provide a vision to motivate and justify anti-death, pro-migrant reform, we should ask: can we extend concern at and across borders?

Several philosophical thinkers inform these questions. Agamben (1998) distinguishes between the life of the citizen (using this term in a wider sense than simply legal citizenship, as any kind of societally included person) and bare life, just the biological organism. Agamben’s work developed from an inquiry about concentration camps in Europe and can readily apply to the gap between concern for full people and deadly disregard for bare life, although a middle, humanitarian position has been rescuing biological beings without then addressing their full societal status or agency. Likewise, Mbembe (2019) points to politics and policy deciding not only whose health and well-being should be promoted but also whose should be neglected or actively selected for harm. Agamben and Mbembe’s work is not about borders and migration specifically, though it applies to border deaths, as many scholars have developed (e.g., De León 2015; Díaz-Barriga and Dorsey 2020).

Do borders always and inherently cause death? Should we entirely reject them for that reason? In the contemporary world, these thoughts are inescapable, and the drivers of death at borders must be addressed. But I hold that this view recognizes only one side of borders. They also have useful roles in organizing spatial areas for the governance of collective decisions and public goods, such as health care and schooling (Heyman 2022). The fatal flaw behind current border policies, rather, is whether or not a sense of connectedness (Sirin, Valentino, and Villalobos 2021) extends across them. Borders are not as such symbols of disregard; the presence of a border may actually indicate intensity of interaction. They may be understood and enacted as the places where connections are negotiated and enacted (Heyman 2013). Hence what we face is, in a schematic and conceptual form, a struggle between exclusion and relationship, most powerfully (but not uniquely) focused on borders. In every political instance that borders frame migration issues as matters of how and how much to exclude, connectedness loses ground. The politics of humane migration need to be grounded in a positive vision of borders as sites of relationship (see also the positive vision of immigration and the future of work in Kerwin (2020)). The practical struggle for a less lethal, more humane border thus needs a conceptual surround, in which borders are connectors. This vision is partly utopian — as any vision must be — but it also draws on lived realities, which offer us a base, “good borders” (Megoran 2017, 259; Heyman 2022) from which to draw inspiration. The paper proceeds here, then, through two moves. First, it delineates the key ideas about borders as sites of definitive exclusion, responsible for many border deaths and injuries. Then I turn to borders as sites of exchange, sharing, and negotiation — borders as commons (a commons is an issue or resource in which every one has access and involvement). Commons are hard to govern mutually, but also necessary (Ostrom 1990). My vision of them is not Panglossian (everything is always good), but embraces their presence in bringing the world together around difficult, shared matters.

Exclusionary Concepts

An exclusionary vision of borders divides in and out, here and there, self, and other. It not only distinguishes, but also separates, actively pushing the sides apart. Walls and enforcement, then, are materializations of this divisive thinking. Thinking of borders as devices marking distinctions is not completely wrong; having bounded areas of responsibility is needed in practical public service and governance (Megoran 2017). But drawing lines can exclude everything outside that line, with two consequences, simplification, and denial of relatedness. Border lines slice apart gradation, making apparently clear and evident that which actually blends across society and space. Border lines also clarify — and in important ways deny — ambiguity, the simultaneity of differences and opposites. Yet, the world is gradated and ambiguous, and exclusionary border thinking can easily oversimplify.

Signs, such as the border as a political symbol, pair something that performs representation (the signifier), such as the physical presence of a wall or fence, and the conventionally agreed meanings that are represented (the signified), exclusion of external dangers. Such combinations are fundamental to how we formulate and communicate thoughts. Signs often are complex and multi-layered, going beyond literal, one-to-one representations. Powerful signs, such as nation-state borders, condense many different meanings at the same time. They combine intense emotions, such as self and other, with cold information, such as formal boundaries. This process of condensation of meanings has notable effects. Diverse meanings slip into each other; clarity of distinction weakens and unconscious substitutions and combinations take place. Borders are powerful agents transferring ideas and feelings between loosely related or unrelated geographies, social groups, and issues. The U.S.-Mexico border often attracts negative connotations, drawing rumors, suspicions, and dark interpretations (scary terrorists or criminals are readily associated with entry at this border, when the reality is quite different [see, Nowrasteh 2018; Orrenius and Zavodny 2018; Light, He, and Robey 2020 on crime; see, Light and Thomas 2021; Uribe 2023 on terrorism]). And when such ideas are stacked together, they are intensified, made visceral; asylum, for instance, is made deathly frightening by condensing its meaning with sudden violence. Borders amplify; border talk is loud.

Condensation not only transfers or blends ideas: It also unifies them. Multiple phenomena become one via the political rhetoric of “the border” (meaning above all, the U.S.-Mexico border), deployed as an unquestioned and impactful shorthand for diverse issues, feelings, and people. Assertions that hardly make sense by themselves become apparently obvious — naturalized — when locked together inside the sign of the border. Unsurprisingly, border symbolism’s power to unify meanings serves nationalism, often a racialized version. Real nation-states are unequal and diverse, and have links across borders. But via condensation, these complexities are reinterpreted as a single unified package inside a bounded container — that is, the nation-state — and a singular threat by strangers from outside.

Such unification of one side, and separation from the other, mean that this extreme idea of borders tends to deny relations that span borders. While actual capitalism, for example, involves a variety of flows of investment, labor, inputs, consumer goods, information, and so forth, within boundaries and across boundaries, bounded thinking denies such uneven and combined exchanges in favor of an imagined closed national economy. Likewise, this perspective on borders resists the co-presence and connectedness of differentiated and unequal people, whether already inside boundaries (such as immigrants of various statuses) or transnationally. This is not only a matter of social analysis, but also of ethics: bounded reasoning makes it harder to conceptualize people across boundaries, or migrants who cross them, as moral equals to those within.

In radically distinguishing between “inside” and “outside,” borders simplify each side. The inside is treated as a singular, cohesive entity. This distinction often identifies insiders (archetypically, white citizens) with safety, well-being, and righteousness. The good but also vulnerable self is protected inside a powerful carapace of nationhood — symbolically a safe home, as in “homeland security.” Sources of danger — especially unpredictable, mortal, and non-white ones — are relegated outside. In between the two is the perfect border that surrounds the home, protects from all danger, and filters in only good people and flows. The threshold of the home is particularly at risk. As the anthropologist Douglas (1966) noted many years ago in Purity and Danger, people and things that stay inside conceptual distinctions and boundaries are ordinary, but those that cross such boundaries are impure, powerful, and dangerous. Perfect border visions are compelling drivers of politics because perfection of containment is desirable but can never be achieved.

As it stands, on each side of the border, inside and outside, drastic reductions take place and the complex geography of “good” and “bad” is simplified into binaries. The interior is seen as uniform, unified, and good, and the external world its precise opposite. Risks thus seemingly only come from outside and aim, like arrows, inward. Actual inside-outside relationships, such as migration or transnational drug and arms trafficking, are obscured. In each case, the source of supply lies across a border from the place of demand, and a full perspective on the phenomenon requires both sides. To think that problems only come from the exterior, then, hides the partial culpability of domestic society (Stoddard 1976 remains the classic statement), placing blame entirely on outsiders. Furthermore, practical responses to domestic issues are easily displaced to the outer boundary, avoiding conflicts and complications. It is controversial and conflictive to enforce immigration laws inside the nation-state, such as by punishing employers, or conversely legalizing workers, as real struggles and dilemmas are transmuted into simple, magical answers: build a border wall; enforce border exclusion (Heyman 2012).

Border exclusion — such as the recent mass deployment of Texas National Guard and State Police (Texas Tribune n.d.) — is a gesture toward making the world conform to an imaginary ideal, not an assessment of factual realities and viable ways to improve them. I propose that this exclusionary impulse is responsible for many of the deaths documented empirically in this special issue of papers. If we are to change this mortal situation, we need to discuss ideals in conjunction with insisting on facts.

Borders as Central Places in Relations

At borders, we face shared problems. These matters come out of a complex and dynamic world and cannot be willed into non-existence through violent imposition of an exclusionary barrier. In my previous work (Heyman 2022), I have explored environmental challenges that extend on both sides of a border, using the concept of a “commons” (Ostrom 1990). Commons are resources from which everyone can partake, and thus all actual and potential users need to be involved in governance, such as access and limitation decisions (I also draw on Wasem’s [2018] insight that immigration is not a national program, but a phenomenon to be governed). If common resources cross boundaries, then effective governance involves all parties on all sides; any attempt to draw an exclusionary line will fail because actors will use the resources anyway, potentially exhausting them up or otherwise degrading them. The wider world of border-crossing issues are not all precisely resource commons, but the lesson is broadly applicable: we need to think of borders as standing in the middle of flows, relations, and connections, and then ask how we can bring together the various endpoints, rather than pretend the “outside” does not exist.

In doing this, I do not claim that a new perspective on borders offers a perfect and simple answer. In issues of dynamic and complicated relations, the answers are difficult and never complete. The point is to think about answers as coming from a non-exclusionary perspective, tackling border crossing on both sides of the boundary, and not thinking of migrants as a purely external problem that needs to be controlled, even stopped — with the consequence of death. At this time migration has been pushed politically to a high degree of salience and fear, which creates the unnecessary illusion that border and migration challenges are irresolvable. In fact, given the demographic and economic positives of migration in this era, as well as the more important human values, migration is one of the most resolvable of cross-border challenges, compared to much harder environmental ones tied into our technology, economy, and so forth. Of course, to solve this challenge will require abandonment of widespread racism and economic classism against people from less wealthy and darker skinned countries. Indeed, the whole point of commons thinking is that we are inextricably part of a shared world despite these illusions.

Briefly reviewing the flaws in the exclusionary thinking delineated previously, we discern some of the key features of migration viewed as a commons. First, migration involves both inside-borders and outside-borders (phrased from the perspective of the dominant country) (Brettell and Hollifield 2023). Much migration is arranged at the microscopic level, by networks of migrants, kin, and potential employers. Ideas and dreams (accurate and not) circulate widely, so some migrants move without clearly arranged plan and connection, but most have at least some funds and information (e.g., for transit and smugglers) for travel and arrival. This puts the lie to the notion that migrants are surging unexpectedly from outside the border barrier, a frame in which death might be unavoidable. Likewise, contradictory and often destabilizing U.S. foreign policy forms a backdrop to much migration, though local political toxicity also has its own logic (González 2000). In these migratory contexts of connectedness, the political frame of relationship works against the political frames of invasion and crisis. The recognition of connections matters: that departure, transit, entry, and settlement are most commonly arranged in advance, admittedly in a somewhat disorganized way, might provide leverage to govern it better on both ends and in transit.

Second, the notion of threats as emanating from outside, and the homeland as a place of security — but always threatened with penetration — is empirically wrong (yes, fentanyl is manufactured mainly in Mexico, from Chinese precursors, but guns are mainly manufactured and purchased in the United States, and smuggled into Mexico). Moreover, it excuses or erases the imposition of deadly risk in defending the homeland-self. In reality, we share in the Americas a common concern with violent criminality, which substantially drives migration. Enforcement specifically against migration, in turn, has in recent decades increased the profitability of smuggling, drawing criminal organizations into border crossing protection rackets and direct operations (Slack and Martínez 2020; Dudley, Asmann, and Dittmar 2023). There arguably is mutual reinforcement between enforcement bureaucracies and criminal organizations, in the past mainly for guns and drugs, but now for migrants (Heyman 1999). This observation of self-reinforcing border failure is a compelling starting point for a policy agenda to reduce criminal markets, operations, weapons, and profits by diverting migration away from covert routes.

Third, the condensation of issues of migration into the symbolically loaded U.S.-Mexico border has become increasingly extreme. The numbers of migrants seeking to cross this border have increased rapidly in very recent years, but this migration is highly diverse. Broadly, it includes two different border flows — attempts at covert entry, in which most deaths occur; and self-presentation to U.S. government officials in seeking admission (albeit pending adjudication) as asylum seekers. In addition to those movements, which garner the most publicity, there are large and important visa-based flows, both legal immigrant admissions and temporary visa admissions, which may turn into overstays. These come via a variety of geographic entry points, some of which are U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry (e.g., Castañeda Pérez 2022), but many of which are not. More importantly, such visa-based entries do not fit the attack-penetration border threat understanding that sits within the policies of deadly infrastructure and enforcement. Beyond putting the lie to simplistic stereotypes of migration, the actual diversity of flows is crucial to reframing of migration as a shared “issue” — acknowledging that it is in fact multiple, different issues. Border reductionism obstructs that understanding, and in the process costs lives.

The heart of this argument is that we cannot achieve the detailed policy work of transnational governance of migration — fundamental to making movement safer and more secure — without an encompassing positive vision in the field of political struggle. That vision, I suggest, is seeing borders as meeting points rather than danger-arrival points. The shift is from defense against the wider world, toward a joint commitment to negotiation and problem solving. This will require a vigorous rejection of racism and classism that drives xenophobia and exclusion. Of course, these hopeful words are easy to say but immensely hard to carry out. First, I will sketch some incomplete and poorly enacted policies that with all their flaws point toward cross-border solutions to the terrible pattern of border deaths, suffering, and criminal exploitation. Then I will address a serious conceptual objection, that mutuality embodied in commons thinking glosses over world-system inequalities and the role of borders in creating and enforcing them. I will conclude by acknowledging the imperfection of the vision, but arguing for its necessity in view of border exploitation, violence, injury, and death.

Directions for Cross-Border Commons Work

The moment during which I write seems like a crisis, even a full breakdown of immigration regulation by the United States, especially at the U.S.-Mexico border. Customs and Border Protection “encounters,” the statistic combining apprehensions and expulsions (before March 2020 apprehensions only), at the U.S.-Mexico border were higher in late 2023 than ever before in history, though there had been a previous elevated period before approximately 2008 (Gramlich 2024). This elevated migration has mainly been taken as a problem, one that needs to be dramatically slowed or stopped. Instead, its economic benefits might be considered a shared resource and responsibility (Edelberg and Watson 2024, also see Kerwin and Warren 2020), even while poorly managed, bringing about unnecessary human harms. Various undersized, incomplete, often experimental solutions have emerged in this period of disorientation and fear (Bersin, Bruggeman, Rohrbaugh 2024). Some are worth reviewing.

First, a substantial but nevertheless limited number of people from four countries (Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua) have been allowed to register for temporary parole into the United States. These people need to have sponsors who can fund their journey to the United States, a recognition of the networks previously discussed, and they fly directly to the country. This process avoids criminal actor-dominated travel routes and deadly risk crossing the border. Their number could be expanded, given the value of migration, and the countries of origin could be widened (e.g., why not include dangerous countries like Honduras and Ecuador?).

Another path to parole into the United States is the CBP One App, by which people from any country can apply to be reviewed for a credible asylum claim at U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry. The app has improved but remains imperfect. Some migrants do not have adequate smart phones, and some rare languages are not served.

But the more important limitations are ones that could be resolved with a serious commitment to a safe, open, law-reinforcing program to bring people into safety in the United States. Under the system’s current iteration, people must pass through a terrifying obstacle course in Central America and southern Mexico before they can apply from Mexico City or northern Mexico (Solano and Massey 2022; Pries et al. 2024). The rationale for this obstacle is not evident. And numbers of interviews at U.S. southern border ports of entry is far below demand because of inadequate funding of personnel and other logistical concerns. People wait for a random drawing of appointments, often in misery, exposed to criminal exploitation. A larger, faster program could reduce unnecessary waiting and weaken criminality in Mexico.

Relatedly, asylum applicants could be processed in much larger numbers at the well-controlled and safe U.S. ports of entry, instead of making risky covert entries or waiting in criminally dense Mexican northern border cities. Besides the CBP One App just discussed, issues limiting safe first entrance at the border include: the inadequate number of asylum officers at the border; inadequate space for initially admitted people to shelter while arranging movement to the U.S. interior; inadequate transportation; inadequate shelter in locations of interior arrival; and slow issuance of work authorization. The latter condemns people to charity, food, and shelter, or to violate the law to survive.

Finally, the United States has opened asylum screening centers in a few sites in Latin America. This remains a tiny initiative, and asylum-seekers perhaps are reluctant, in its early stages, to utilize this experimental program. In some ways, this process resembles the existing — but slow and numerically limited — U.S. refugee resettlement process. However, the creative idea of expanding the geography of migration and bypassing the expensive, dangerous, and criminally dominated passage through Mexico, is important. (This tiny pilot is for asylum-seekers, and should be distinguished from border externalization that involves making legal temporary visas hard to get at U.S. consulates.) Given the vast money spent on border enforcement, all of these logistical matters could receive better funding and be significantly improved.

Alongside these matters of asylum-seeking migration, U.S. visa-based migration is near dysfunctionality (Kerwin and Warren 2019). The periods of time waiting in immigration visa queues are, depending on category and country, so prolonged as to encourage unauthorized migration. Less often discussed is the near-disastrous shape of the legal migration agency, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). A major source of its decline is that many of its functions are funded only by user fees, which limits the size and speed of its operations. If we spend billions on border enforcement, would it not make sense to spend some of that money on a better functioning legal immigration system? At present, for example, immigration court backlogs of roughly three million cases include large numbers of persons unnecessarily in removal proceedings because they have been tentatively approved for permanent visas, but are enmeshed in multi-year visa backlogs (Kerwin and Kerwin 2024).

There also has been a slow but sure tendency toward contracting more temporary non-immigrant workers between the United States and Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean (Hernández-León and Sandoval 2024). Temporary legal labor migration has been criticized, often justly so, as violating officially set conditions and pay. Yet the balance now is in favor of temporary labor migration (violations of course should be systematically reduced). Insofar as some people crossing the border aim for their economic benefit and are not fleeing persecution, we should not put them in a situation where they risk death and violent coercion (but challenging my point, though in a different setting, see Bylander 2019).

By no means would this mix of suggestions remove all the border crossing dangers — a substantial proportion of people who cross today have already been deported and have lengthy bans on return legal migration. And they are motivated, given deeply established commitments inside the United States, to families, communities, and employers (Martínez, Slack, Martínez-Schuldt 2018). In many cases, those bars could justifiably be removed, reducing unauthorized border crossing, income streams for criminals, and border deaths.

These are short-term, managerial responses to the border situation. They likely can ameliorate the situation but not fully transform it. The United States and Canada on the one side, and much of Latin America and the Caribbean on the other (and arguably some other regions of the world), share serious common problems that need to be addressed. First, and almost certainly much harder to change than borders and migration, is climate change. Climate is not simply a driver of migration. Rather, it exacerbates various migration drivers (Risi 2023), including risks to livelihoods, extreme events, and possibly political instability. People concerned with migration, then, need to support vigorous policies of greenhouse gas limitation and shock-buffering/resiliency investment around the world. We need real change in the human-environmental systems across the hemisphere and the world, and funding from many sides but above all the United States. (A somewhat similar argument can be made for pandemic disease like COVID-19, the aftermath of which likely contributed to recent surges at the U.S.-Mexico border.) In a bitter irony, border migration deaths are likely to worsen with increasing heat index and temperatures, even as more people choose to migrate. This is an entirely predictable source of death, and one we should strive to reduce and eventually eliminate.

Second, we need to address the worsening criminalization of the western hemisphere — the most homicidal region of the world (Muggah 2022). A substantial (though incompletely counted) number of migrants — asylum-seekers and others — are partly or wholly driven by criminal violence and victimization. In turn, that criminality is driven by a U.S., Latin American, and Caribbean commons — a terrible, destructive one — of guns and the drug business. It is reinforced by the value of transit and smuggling payments of migrants, some driven from their home by other criminals. Likely some people who die at the U.S.-Mexico border are partly or completely driven to migrate by such violence and its side-effects (such as regional economic distortions). In a bitter irony, they die to avoid dying. The well-being of everyone affected by this toxic commons deserves attention. Reduction of criminality in the hemisphere is very difficult (Lessing 2017), but essential.

Finally, we can consider migration as a reasonably rational response to highly unequal returns to labor, education, and so forth in the world system. Even with costs and risks, people choose of their own will to seek better lives, or what they perceive as that. This points toward creating a commons around economic development that is more equitable, predictable, and stabilizing. As ideal as this choice sounds, the case is not so simple. An important — if largely ignored and forgotten — major study (Commission for the Study of International Migration and Cooperative Economic Development 1990) demonstrates that economic development initially mobilizes migrants, by giving them resources, information, and visions of change, long before it achieves stabilization. A better collective ethical way of thinking of this commons is not as a way to halt migration, but as a way to widen fairness: that equitable and effective economic and social development enables people to stay home if that is their preference. Very often, it would be (Gerschutz-Bell 2022). It is unquestionably better than dying in arid brush land or drowning in a river. People should have this option.

The huge inequalities in human well-being and standards of living in the world may in a broad sense drive migration. Ironically they represent also the outer limits of my argument here for a cross-border commons. Ball-Blakely (n.d.), a philosopher who supports open borders as freeing people to escape and resist world-system inequalities, correctly challenges the mutual agreement/mutual arrangement view of migration (and even more so challenges border restrictions) on the ground that borders help reproduce major inequalities. An example would be viewing with skepticism increased — but still limited — legal migration, including temporary labor migration (I do not speak for Bell-Blakely but I take that as a sensible follow-through on his argument). More broadly, my position of mutual consultation, agreement, and management is unquestionably naïve in the face of unequal power and major inequalities. I actually am persuaded by these points, but the issue of border risks and deaths pose a challenge. People are dying. Even a limited, unequal arrangement is superior to death and serious injury. From this admittedly limited and unaggressive position, I think we can work toward greater justice. The situation we actually are in, is worsening every day.

Conclusion

The exclusionary concept of borders is wrong in important ways. Most disturbingly, it injures and kills people and puts them at risk of victimization. The conditions of passage of the border have worsened over time, judging from documented deaths, whether the number of people crossing has ebbed or flowed. It thrusts thousands of people into dangerous conditions, and likewise denies them access to better conditions of living in a highly unequal world. It also diverts attention from important harmful processes that emerge from relational interactions between wealthy countries and middle to low-income ones, especially the United States and Canada vis-à-vis Latin America and the Caribbean. Numerous examples of hidden issues have been recited here.

The alternative is to think of borders as meeting points in these sorts of relationships, and the shared issue as a “commons.” Migration, with both drivers out and attractors/facilitators in, provides a perfect example. Because migration — in a political climate partially but powerfully shaped by racism and classism — has become so strongly polarized, it appears to be an unsolvable “issue.” In fact, it may not be a problem at all — rather, in our current demographic-economic situation, as well as for our cultural well-being, it might well be an asset. Insofar as it needs to be addressed, this essay has delineated many possibilities. The options are not perfect and magical — the challenges are hard and diverse — but they are ways that we can move toward a cross-border commons on migration. That might be a crucial move, not only for migration, but along a path that recognizes relationships and commitments of many kinds across the hemisphere and world. The recognition of need is not enough; real change in resources and power needs to follow. But a vision of connection rather than exclusion provides the political starting point needed for change to happen. It is the least we can do in the memory of people who have died at the border.