I know this comment may piss off a lot of readers, but it deserves to be said. So, I’ll get it out and what’s done is done.
I happen to believe that the whole Title 42 business is a lot of crap. I think it’s a totally artificial ‘crisis’ which gives the media something to talk about on the evening news and gives every politician an opportunity to shoot their mouth off on Twitter, or a 20-second interview on radio or TV.
The reason I think that Title 42 is a load of crap is because I happen not to believe in the concept or practice of national borders at all.
That’s right. All this nonsense about passports, proper documentation, illegal migrants and all the other stuff which creates and sustains all the media and political noise about borders is nothing more than the fact that at a certain point in time, two governments drew a line in the sand to define who controls what, and this line always reflects a certain relative strength of one government versus the other at the time the line is drawn.
So, for example, chiefs from the Brulé, Oglala, Minniconjou, Yankton Lakota and Arapaho tribes signed a treaty at Fort Laramie in 1868, which allegedly gave them control over most of the territory which is now Wyoming and South Dakota, along with chunks of Kansas and Nebraska which were separate holdings and hunting grounds for these five tribes.
Know how long the treaty lasted between these sovereign, native American nations and the United States? Maybe a week.
If you ever go to the Little Big Horn site in Wyoming where Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Gall, and some other Sioux chiefs led two thousand warriors against the United States Army and slaughtered General Custer and 268 of his men, make a point of walking up to the top of the ridge where there’s a monument marking what happened that day. Look over to the right beyond the visitor center and you’ll see a casino sitting on the edge of this sacred ground.
Now maybe we give various Indian tribes authority to build casinos on land they originally owned – I don’t really know. What I do know is that these casinos and all the gaming taking place on Indian reservations is controlled and regulated by the United States.
Want to get a fresh perspective on what the word ‘borders’ really means? Take a look at a Mercator projection of the world and put your finger on the east side of the Bosporus Strait across from Istanbul, then move your finger all the way across Eastern Turkey, then across Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and up to the Himalaya Mountains in Nepal.
Your finger has moved through five countries, crossed five national borders, and if you were driving this route, you will have covered some 3,500 miles and change. This broad sweep of territory is occupied by several million people who have absolutely no concern for national borders, national sovereignty, national governments or national anything else.
This area is the location of an enormous transient population which moves from location to location either following herding animals which are raised and eventually slaughtered for their meat and their skins, or they follow the harvest cycles of the corn, wheat and edible plants that are natural to this zone.
Want another example of a region where transience is just as much typical of human settlement as is permanent settlement? Try the North African coast from Eastern Morocco, then through Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. That’s only about 2,400 miles, but like the landscape from Turkey to Nepal, the Bedouins who move across the high ridges of the Atlas Mountains could care less about any of the four national borders that they cross.
These desert nomads stream across national borders with their animals all the time, and I don’t hear how the centuries-old movement of this population represents any kind of threat to the settled, coastal societies of North Africa at all.
What we have in the United States is a fear of people coming here that has been cynically manufactured and exploited for political ends. Which is what the so-called ‘border crisis’ is all about.
Which is why we don’t need national borders.
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