Borders and the Displacements They Create are Human Artefacts

When we think of migration control in today’s world, the images that might come to mind are razor wire fences, armed border guards, infrared body scanning devices and walls set up by states to keep others out. Yet the states that we take as given today—the primary source of our contemporary global migration control regime—are invented constructs, arbitrary mappings of people onto place. No inherent, let alone “natural,” order justifies this framework, which is evidence of nativist fear rather than national legitimacy, weakness rather than strength.