Borders Are Newer Than You Think

A Hundred Years of Pretending

Here's something that should reframe every conversation you've ever had about immigration: the modern passport didn't exist before World War I. The border as a bureaucratic checkpoint, the thing you picture when someone says "border security," with fences and guards and papers and stamps, is roughly a century old. For the vast majority of human civilization, it simply wasn't there.

People moved. They always moved. For thousands of years, humans migrated in response to seasons, resources, conflict, opportunity, curiosity. The idea that a line on a map should determine who gets to live where, and that crossing that line without the right paperwork constitutes a crime: this is recent. Extremely recent. And the fact that it feels ancient, natural, inevitable, tells you more about the power of institutions to naturalize themselves than about any inherent logic of territorial sovereignty.

Before the Passport

For most of the 19th century, Europeans moved across the continent without papers. The British didn't need passports to travel to France. Germans migrated freely to the United States. The Ottomans, the Habsburgs, the Russian Empire: these were vast multiethnic territories where people moved internally with minimal documentation.

The United States had effectively open borders until the 1880s, when the Chinese Exclusion Act became the first significant restriction on immigration based on nationality. Before that, you showed up. That was the process. Ellis Island, which opened in 1892, processed roughly 12 million immigrants between 1892 and 1954. The average processing time? A few hours. Most people walked in, answered some questions, got a medical check, and were admitted the same day.

Compare that to the current system, where a legal immigration case can take years or decades. Where asylum seekers wait months or years for a hearing. Where the backlog for certain visa categories from certain countries stretches past 20 years. We've gone from processing people in hours to processing them in generations and somehow convinced ourselves this represents progress.

The War That Changed Everything

World War I is when borders hardened. The belligerent nations needed to control movement: to prevent espionage, manage labor supplies, and track populations. Passports, which had existed in various informal forms, became mandatory. Exit visas appeared. Border checkpoints proliferated. The free movement that had characterized the previous century evaporated almost overnight.

In 1920, the League of Nations held a conference on passports and customs formalities. The explicit goal was to standardize travel documents across nations. What emerged was the ancestor of the modern passport system, a temporary wartime measure that was supposed to be rolled back once peace stabilized.

It never was. Temporary restrictions have a way of becoming permanent. The bureaucracy that grew up around border control developed its own institutional momentum, its own budgets, its own constituencies. By the time anyone might have argued for a return to prewar openness, the infrastructure was too entrenched.

John Torpey, the sociologist who wrote The Invention of the Passport, traces this arc meticulously. The state's monopolization of "the legitimate means of movement" parallels its monopolization of the legitimate means of violence. Both are relatively recent. Both feel eternal. Neither is.

The US-Mexico Border Before It Was a "Crisis"

The US-Mexico border was, for most of its history, something closer to a suggestion than a barrier. Reece Jones documents this extensively in Violent Borders. Until the mid-20th century, the border was lightly patrolled. People crossed for work, for family, for commerce. The Bracero Program, which ran from 1942 to 1964, formally brought millions of Mexican workers to the US for agricultural labor. When the program ended, people kept coming, because the economic logic hadn't changed, only the paperwork requirements.

The modern enforcement apparatus is shockingly recent. Operation Gatekeeper, which militarized the border near San Diego, began in 1994. Operation Hold the Line in El Paso started in 1993. The dramatic escalation of border fencing, surveillance technology, and enforcement personnel is a phenomenon of the last thirty years, not the last three hundred.

Before that? People crossed. They worked. Many went back. The pattern was circular migration: come for the season, return home, repeat. The wall didn't stop this migration. It disrupted its circularity. When crossing became dangerous and expensive, people who used to come and go decided to come and stay. The enforcement created the permanent undocumented population it claimed to prevent.

Douglas Massey, a Princeton sociologist who has studied Mexican migration for decades, has documented this paradox extensively. Every major increase in border enforcement has correlated with an increase in the permanent undocumented population. The wall didn't keep people out. It kept people in.

Schengen and the Proof of Concept

If you want to see what relatively open borders look like in the modern world, look at the Schengen Area. Twenty-seven European countries. 420 million people. No border checks for internal movement. A French citizen can drive to Germany, take a train to Italy, and fly to Portugal without showing a passport once.

When Schengen was proposed, critics predicted exactly what critics of open borders always predict: mass migration from poor countries to rich ones, wage depression, welfare tourism, loss of sovereignty. The collapse of social order.

None of it happened. Migration within the Schengen Area is modest; most people stay where they are, because moving is hard and people have lives. The EU's free movement provisions have existed in some form since 1957. The social fabric has not dissolved. The welfare states have not collapsed. Rich countries are still rich. Poor countries have gotten richer, in part because the freedom to move creates economic dynamism.

Is Europe's immigration situation simple? Obviously not. But the Schengen experiment demonstrates that controlled open borders between countries are not only possible but economically productive. The dire predictions failed to materialize, just as they've failed to materialize every other time someone has opened a border and waited.

Who Borders Serve

Borders are not primarily about security. They're about labor control.

When you restrict the movement of people but allow the free movement of capital, you create a system where workers are trapped in low-wage markets while money flows freely to wherever returns are highest. A factory can move from Michigan to Juarez, but a worker can't move from Juarez to Michigan. Capital is global. Labor is caged.

This isn't incidental. It's the architecture. The same politicians who champion free trade agreements, the free movement of goods and money, turn around and demand stricter immigration enforcement. They want open borders for everything except human beings. The asymmetry is the point: it keeps wages low by ensuring that workers can't follow the jobs.

Branko Milanovic, the economist known for his work on global inequality, has argued that the single most effective anti-poverty intervention in the world would be to allow free migration. His research shows that the majority of global income inequality is explained not by what you do or how hard you work, but by where you were born. Two people with identical skills, identical work ethic (one born in Denmark, one born in the Democratic Republic of Congo) will have wildly different incomes, entirely because of which side of a border they happened to enter the world on.

Borders enforce this lottery. They make geography destiny.

The Story We Tell

The story we tell about borders is one of permanence, inevitability, naturalness. Nations have always had borders. Sovereignty requires them. Without them, civilization dissolves.

But the history tells a different story. Borders as we know them are a product of early 20th-century bureaucracy, wartime paranoia, and institutional inertia. They've been enforced unevenly, expanded arbitrarily, and militarized recently. The passport is younger than the airplane. The surveillance state at the border is younger than the internet.

None of this means you have to support fully open borders tomorrow. But it means you should stop treating the current system as natural law. The borders you grew up with are political choices, maintained by political power, serving political ends. They could be different. They have been different. For most of human history, they didn't exist at all.

That's not an argument for chaos. It's an argument for honesty, about what borders are, who they serve, and how recently we decided that a line on a map was worth more than a person trying to cross it.