Every Sunday I recommend something for you #BorderAbolition library.
For the next several months, I'll be recommending work that inspires me to think about ways an abolitionist think tank might push public opinion & policy closer to #BorderAbolition.
For the next several months, I'll be recommending work that inspires me to think about ways an abolitionist think tank might push public opinion & policy closer to #BorderAbolition.
Today: Harold Bauder's, "Open Borders: A Utopia?" jssj.org/wp-content/upl…, where Bauder argues that there is nothing Utopian about abolishing migration restrictions.
Bauder argues there is nothing Utopian about eliminating our historically young borders, particularly because their abolition doesn't necessitate that we replace them with anything, let alone anything hard-to-achieve, & thus there is literally nothing unrealistic about abolition.
Bauder's arguments are critical to the work of any border abolitionist think tank: the chief objective of which should be to take a no-borders democracy out of the "utopian" realm and re-frame it as an entirely realistic, achievable, conceivable reality.
The goal is to make border abolition sound no less extreme or hard-to-imagine than something as mundane and non-controversial as campaign finance reform or increasing the budget for FEMA - just another bit of public policy designed to protect democracy or save lives.
A tank's work would be, not just in helping the public imagine a borderless world (which they struggle with today), but in persuading them that borderless democracy requires no great feat of human ingenuity - only the elimination of obsolete, dangerous systems.
A tank can accomplish this by pointing to contemporary, everyday examples of open borders which no one questions, & which appear as mundane as border abolition may one day appear, e.g., the open borders between the 50 U.S. states or the no borders between, say, NYC and Buffalo.
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