They say borders exist to organize the world, protect cultures, and guarantee security. But borders are not neutral lines on maps — they are mechanisms of screening. They decide who can move freely and who must ask permission to exist, who is welcomed as “talent” and who is treated as a disposable threat. Borders do not protect peoples; they protect privileges.
The official narrative claims that states defend their citizens. In practice, they defend markets, disciplined labor, and global hierarchies. Whoever carries a passport from wealthy countries crosses the world without questions. Whoever is born on the “wrong” side must constantly prove their dignity, their usefulness, their innocence. The right to come and go has become a commodity: it is bought with money, with light skin, or with the “correct” nationality.
The border separates less between countries than between classes. It allows the circulation of capital, goods, and investments, while blocking bodies deemed surplus. Money crosses without barriers; people are searched, questioned, detained, and deported. When corporations exploit territories and resources, they call it globalization. When people seek to survive, they call it a migration crisis.
The state presents itself as the guardian of the national community, but the nation is a useful myth to justify real exclusions. We are taught to see those born outside as potential enemies, competitors for jobs, cultural threats. Thus, the poor of different countries are set against each other, while owners and rulers circulate without restrictions. The border divides those who could unite.
Borders are not equal — but they serve the same logic
Not every border is born from the same violence. There is a difference between lines drawn by colonial empires that tore apart Indigenous and African territories, borders claimed by peoples fighting for self-determination, or agreements between already constituted states. Yet, even if their origins vary, their contemporary effect converges: all operate as technologies of control that hierarchize lives according to class, race, and origin.
When a colonized people demarcates territory to protect itself from genocide, it is not exercising the same violence as an imperial state patrolling its borders to preserve stolen wealth. Recognizing this does not invalidate the central critique: even borders born from resistance tend, under the pressure of the state and capitalist system, to reproduce logics of exclusion. The very form of the state tends to shape these borders.
The question is not to deny historical differences, but to ask whether borders — any borders — can exist without becoming tools of hierarchy when inserted into a world organized by states, markets, and property.
Violence as policy
The violence of borders is daily and brutal. Walls, fences, detention camps, shipwrecks at sea, separated families, lives lost in deserts and rivers. All of this is treated as inevitable tragedy — never as the deliberate consequence of policies that prioritize property and sovereignty over human life.
Dominant arguments justify this violence: limited capacity of public systems, protection of labor rights, preservation of social cohesion. But these arguments rarely examine why resources are scarce when it comes to welcoming people, yet abundant for subsidizing corporations; why “local wages” are protected by creating racial hierarchies instead of organizing workers across borders; why “social cohesion” always requires excluding others, never sharing power.
When someone dies trying to cross, the system does not mourn; it reaffirms the need for “more control.”
Cruelty is not a failure — it is the method.
Internal borders
Inside countries, invisible borders also exist. Between wealthy neighborhoods and peripheries, between heavily policed zones and abandoned ones, between spaces where certain bodies are welcomed and others are suspected. Documents, cameras, informal checkpoints, watchful gazes. The logic is the same: filter who belongs and who must be kept at the margins.
These internal borders reveal something fundamental: the problem is not only geographic lines, but the logic that sustains them. A logic that turns difference into hierarchy, that values accumulation over life, that pits people against one another to protect the privileges of a few.
The false dilemma
They say that without borders there would be chaos. But the real chaos is the present: wealth without borders and people without rights; goods circulating freely while lives are blocked; solidarity criminalized while exploitation is legal. The problem is not the absence of order — it is the order that values commodities over people.
They also say that free movement would destroy cultures and local autonomies. But cultures have always transformed through contact — it is colonial and capitalist domination that destroys, not the movement of people. And true autonomy is not built with walls that keep the poor divided, but through horizontal organization that challenges those who accumulate power.
The real tension is not between mobility and community. It is between self-managed communities that welcome those who arrive and states that impose bureaucratic belonging; between networks of mutual aid built by those who live together and hierarchies maintained by those who govern from afar.
Paths that already exist
To question borders is not to deny cultures or differences; it is to reject the global hierarchy that turns birthplace into destiny. It is to affirm that no one is illegal, that movement is a human necessity, that living cannot depend on stamps, visas, or permission from armed bureaucrats.
Practices that point toward other paths already exist: community networks that welcome migrants, sanctuary cities that refuse to cooperate with deportations, transnational workers’ movements that support each other across map lines, urban occupations that house displaced people without demanding documents, collectives that offer translation, legal guidance, and housing through direct solidarity, neighborhood assemblies that integrate newcomers into collective decision-making.
These experiences are localized, fragile before state power, often repressed. But they reveal something essential: belonging can be built without walls. And more — they show that the true threat to collective autonomy does not come from those who arrive seeking a dignified life, but from states and markets that demand submission in exchange for survival.
Scaling hospitality, not control
The challenge is not small: how could local practices of welcome become generalized without creating new bureaucracies? How can resources be shared without this being managed by states or concentrated by markets?
The answer does not lie in a master plan, but in principles of action: horizontal federation among self-managed communities that share resources without central hierarchy; expropriation of accumulated wealth to ensure that welcoming does not mean imposed scarcity but fair redistribution; destruction of the borders that divide workers while building networks of solidarity that cross territories.
This requires confronting not only national borders, but the entire system that sustains them: private property that concentrates land and housing, states that manage artificial scarcity, capitalism that profits from division. There are no open borders under hierarchy — only selection of who may circulate. True free movement is inseparable from the abolition of structures that turn mobility into privilege.
Belonging without property
Borders serve the same principle as the state, the market, and property: divide in order to dominate. They separate so that we do not recognize ourselves as equals. They classify so that we accept inequalities as natural. They militarize so that fear replaces empathy.
Real freedom does not fit within maps drawn by empires. It begins when we refuse the idea that life is worth more on one side of a line than on the other. When we understand that our struggle is common — against states that control us, markets that exploit us, and borders that hierarchize us.
To build a world without borders is not to erase differences, but to refuse that differences justify domination. It is to recognize that all people who inhabit a territory have an equal right to decide about it — not by birth or document, but by living there. It is to affirm that community is made through daily sharing, not through bureaucratic exclusion.
No person is a stranger to the land they walk upon.
Strangers are the walls, the fences, the passports, and the weapons that defend them.
In struggle we are dignified and free people.
No walls, no passports, no borders — for life in common.
