Borders are Bullshit
As a Jamaican who loves to travel, I have often reflected on the irony of having a “poor” passport, meaning one that doesn’t get you into many countries easily, while living on a Caribbean island that everybody wants, and gets, to visit.
Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) protects Freedom of Movement out of any country, and into a country of which you are a citizen. But it doesn’t go so far as to protect the right of an individual to explore the world. This has always seemed strange to me, as the right to travel is almost inherently implied in the pursuit of other expressed rights, such as those in Articles 3,19, 22 and 23: the right to liberty; the right to seek information regardless of frontiers; the right to free development of personality; and the right to favourable work and opportunities among others.
If human rights aren’t your thing, support for the right to travel is present in even a brief look at how we became a globalized society. If creationists and evolutionists can agree on the existence of Pangea, we should all be able to accept the fact that the land we all live on was once part of a supercontinent: we were all originally from “one land.” Over the course of significant time, this land split and started to shift and societies were formed based on the beliefs and practices of the people that now lived on these “different” lands. Can you imagine if the land hadn’t split and we thought of ourselves as one people, on one land sharing all resources, as opposed to different nations with varying concepts of status and limited resources?
But the land did split. We moved from Pangea to Politics.
From that initial split until now, we have continued to seek ways to reconnect as we navigate the unavoidably interconnected human experience. With the passage of even more time there has been the rise and fall of various civilizations, and the formation and erasure of nations. Some of these have been based solely on geographical realities (think Australia the island continent), but others have developed along with economic or climate-related necessities. In the annals of time the establishment of national borders is relatively new, dynamic and largely based on commercial interests. However, travel is an enduring human practice.
In our new normal, border control practices and policies are shifting daily, but neither visas nor seizures have stopped coronavirus (or climate change) from being a concern across continents. Even before this pandemic, the logic of invisible lines across the land was showing serious limitations. The internet in general, and social media in particular, has brought about the virtual erasure of geographical borders and an exponential expansion in the global nature of conversations. With the exception of countries like China and Ethiopia, with government controlled internet, by and large we are all experiencing a reality in which we are able to influence and be influenced by outsiders without travel, at an unprecedented scale and rate.
Borders are blurring more than ever before. Whether this is a good thing, or a bad thing is debatable. But as I just finished applying for three visas for one trip where my British “equal” would not have needed any, I feel I can’t be alone in questioning it. Visas are expensive, invasive, time-consuming and quite possibly discriminatory. Considering our Pangean past, cross-continental concerns, and hyper-connected present, how justifiable is it to deny the individual right to travel?
Borders Are Bullshit.