The Dissolution of International Borders (Keeping the World Company)

How Does this Affect our World. The hosts for this show are Jay Fidell and Tim Apicella. The guest is Jean Rosenfeld.

Borders have been dissolving for a long time. See what has happened in Western Europe – you can often go from one country to another without being inspected. And migrants can come from the Middle East and North Africa, as well as Central Asia. Why? How does that affect the countries they are migrating to and how does it affect the countries they are leaving.

At first it seemed that the borders of Europe were open to migration, but now it is not so clear, and the flow of migrants has led to right wing political backlash in a number of countries. Likewise, the flow of Latin American migrants across the southern border of the United States has led to right wing political backlash here.

We can control entry by common carrier, that is by planes, trains and busses, but it is more difficult to control migration through the back woods. Although you’d think that with modern technology any country can identify people who enter the country legally or illegally, the fact is that many countries, including the US, have no handle on that and have not reformed their immigration systems to deal with the changing times.

As we have seen in Europe, integrating a migration from the global south requires significant effort and resources in the host country. Some migrants do not easily assimilate and some members of the host countries are unsympathetic to their entry. Of course, this can create social, cultural, racial, political, and public safety problems in the host country. While there are humanitarian and moral benefits, those migrations therefore need to be thoughtfully managed.

Where open borders were once an expression of international enlightenment, with the increase of global migration things have become more complex and have raised a multitude of challenges: the protection of the culture and civil society of the host country, the assimilation of migrant communities into the host country, dealing with the costs and impacts of that assimilation, and maintaining humanitarian care in the host country for the members of the migrant community.

Where will this all go? What are the impacts on the host communities, on the migrant communities, and on the communities the migrants have left. From a social and cultural point of view, clearly, the world is in many ways being reordered. We need to understand how that works, and how to ameliorate the effects in order to avoid the conflict that may otherwise result.

That this is happening all over the world. Increasingly, it is affecting geopolitics, global economics, the flow of humanity (see the subject of Ai Weiwei’s 2017 Human Flow movie), and the state of health and welfare of humanity in general. From a human perspective, should be addressing these things, but are we doing that?

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