On Borders
Borders have always carried layers of meaning for me as a Pakistani. I come from a country with three borders that range from closed (India) to nearly impossible to cross (Afghanistan, Iran). I grew up in Lahore—today, my house is a short 45-minute drive one of the world’s most militarized borders: the Pakistan-India border. A border that has been closed to the flow of people and goods for 78 years.
It is a border I was able to cross twice — once in 2010, en route a conference in Bhutan, when I spent 5 days in New Delhi. And again in 2011 for the India-Pakistan men’s world cup cricket semi-final. It is significantly harder to cross this border today than it was back then.
Each time, as I went from Pakistani Punjab to Indian Punjab, the absurdity and arbitrariness of borders hit me. And then, the tragedy of states keeping Indians and Pakistanis separated from each other. I imagined the friendships, relationships, solidarities that could’ve been, in a world where this border was more open.
I saw how borders drawn on the ground became borders in our minds. How we created mutually-exclusive identities, how we were asked to pick sides — you’re either this or that. South Asian writers have written about borders for long enough — among some of the most poignant is the 1955 short story by Saadat Hasan Manto: Toba Tek Singh. Today, Indians and Pakistanis are primarily afforded the chance to meet each other outside South Asian borders. I met my lifelong Indian friends after arriving in America. We made imaginary plans to meet in the other’s city, to walk and feel our collective history with freedom.
Today, the older me sees borders with added nuance — not simply as a tragedy or inevitability born of historic events, but as something designed and sustained to serve the interests of the state on both sides of the border. Borders are central to a global system fraught with injustice.
From 2009-2012, in working closely with Afghan and Turkmen refugees in Attock (many of whom were double refugees, emigrating from Turkmenistan to Afghanistan to Pakistan), I could see that their fight wasn’t only against the daily hostility and suspicion with which Pakistanis viewed them. It was also resistance to state laws that kept them down by never granting them status or rights—even after three generations had lived and worked in Pakistan.
Their lives, livelihoods, families and homes remained split across two sides of a border.
But it is my time in America that sharpened my view on borders.
I first arrived in America in August 2001, two weeks before 9-11; my experience with its immigration policies and officers has always been hostile and dehumanizing in a way that the 18-year old me had neither experienced before nor had the language to articulate. After spending close to two decades in America, I see more. I see its southern border with Mexico, which is also among the world’s most militarized borders. I see a country where some humans are “illegal”. And where, today, the bipartisan war on migrants has become Orwellian.
While living in Brooklyn, I met Martín Espada, the Puerto-Rican-American poet whose poem Floaters asks us to confront the bodies that wash up on the shores of the Rio Grande, as South American migrants embark on perilous journeys on the search for safety and survival, in countries ravaged by American wars and sanctions.
Like a beer bottle thrown into the river by a boy too drunk to cry,
like the shard of a Styrofoam cup drained of coffee brown as the river,
like the plank of a fishing boat broken in half by the river, the dead float.
And the dead have a name: floaters, say the men of the Border Patrol,
keeping watch all night by the river, hearts pumping coffee as they say
the word floaters, soft as a bubble, hard as a shoe as it nudges the body,
to see if it breathes, to see if it moans, to see if it sits up and speaks.
As I spoke to Martín, a lone tear rolled down my cheek at the relief I felt at his indignation at America’s brutal border regime. I told him what inspires my own poetry, and carried his kind look and his words with me: “We need your writing!” His writing became a beacon for my own. Over the years, South American writers continued to educate and inspire me with their writings on borders.
Last year, I published a book review of Solito, a memoir by Salvadoran poet Javier Zamora on his journey crossing three borders to arrive in America, as an unaccompanied 9-year old. In his child’s imagination, he was on his way to what he called “La Linea” — the line, between Mexico and America. It is a book that humanizes the migrant journey and its impossible choices at a time when America’s bipartisan war on migrants is dialing up its ferocity.
In the aftermath of reading Solito, I found myself in rabbit holes of work by scholars, writers, and scientists who have published research on borders—specifically, on who is served by America’s border regimes powered by a spend in the hundreds of millions that goes to private enterprises: the infamous Elbit detention centers, surveillance technology, weaponry, training and so on. Experience, history and migration research has shown over decades that the militarisation of borders is ineffective. Far from stopping asylum seekers from crossing borders, it makes their journey more dangerous, and makes migration less, instead of more, orderly.
I’ve thought about borders much more in the last 2 years, as we witness the genocide of Palestinian people. As we consider the siege that Gaza has lived under for 20+ years. Again, closed, heavily militarized borders. Like the borders above, Israel’s borders with Egypt and Syria also take top position in how heavily militarized they are. Borders whose militarization is a necessity for the apartheid state.
If we consider the borders above, and their accompanying oppressive state machinery and border patrol forces, it is not hard to see why borders exist and how they are necessary for the state’s creation of an unjust hierarchy of human rights, enforced by violence and crimes against humanity.
There is the disposable labor that lives without rights, but is indispensable to the economy. There are the “aliens” whose wages and healthcare are tied to exploitative corporations. There are the “undocumented” who are criminalized even as they work 18-hour shifts for $5/hour, and are made to live under the constant fear of deportation.
Nandita Sharma, professor of sociology at University of Hawaii makes the astute observation that the point of borders is not to keep people out but to keep them in line. “The real work of borders is not necessarily to keep people out, but to keep them down once they get in,” she says, advocating for no borders as a practical political project. In her work, she explains how borders are central to a non-egalitarian nation state, and to a capitalistic society where wealth remains in the hands of a few at the expense of the many.
She reminds us that we live in a world that already does have open borders: but only for some of us.
The wealthy among us can move across borders freely. As can citizens holding certain passports, almost always from the Global North. American citizens in particular enjoy the greatest freedom of mobility — they move across dozens of countries without visas. Similarly, capital moves freely. As does the military—especially the American military, which can enter and invade countries and carry out operations with complete freedom and impunity.
It is open borders for the wealthy, for the military, for capital — and closed borders for migrants trying to survive, and for revolutionaries.
The discussion on borders is more critical today than it’s ever been. The imposition of oppressively restrictive and often illegal immigration policies by America and several European countries is happening precisely at a time when global conditions are making migration a more urgent need than ever before. Climate refugees now number in the tens of millions (the world recorded more than 20 million displacements each year due to natural disasters from 2019 to 2022). In the face of late-stage capitalism and staggering wealth inequality, ever-increasing global populations are struggling economically, living on subsistence wages. More and more people need to escape life-threatening situations, like war and genocide.
Today, we need more, not less freedom of mobility.
