(upbeat Hispanic music) - Good evening and welcome to Horizonte, a show that takes a look at current issues through a Hispanic lens.

I'm your host, Catherine Anaya.

The border has been a sensitive topic for decades with increasing calls for strong border security.

A Tucson journalist is out with a new book that offers a different perspective in the ongoing border conversation.

John Washington's book is called The Case for Open Borders.

In the book, he revisits the national origins of national security through border lockdowns.

He breaks down why experts believe open borders would be an economic, environmental, and ethical boon, and he profiles people impacted by the border.

Joining me now to talk more about the book and how he makes his case for open borders is author, John Washington.

John, so good to see you.

- Thanks for having me.

- Thanks for joining us.

So you've been covering the border for a very long time.

- Yeah.

- This book specifically focuses on the United States.

What is it that you uncovered that made you decide at this point, you know what, I need to write this book?

- Yeah, well, there are a lot of factors, trying to understand the origins, as you say, of immigration politics.

But I think what it comes down to is a fundamental question of fairness.

So, right now, there's a lot of people in the world who have the right and can enjoy the right of freedom of movement.

And there are another set of people, there's another set of people who are denied that right.

And you know, right now there are literally billions of people who are consigned to political instability, to persecution, to the onslaught of climate crises, to extreme poverty.

And they are not granted that right to move.

And if they try to do so, they can be subjected to blockades in the form of border walls, for example.

They can be, you know, practically hunted down by armed guards.

They can be imprisoned in immigration detention centers and sometimes held there for years, sometimes tortured, sometimes killed, and sometimes deported.

And there is no other reason for that difference than where someone is born.

You know, I think society over the past century or so, has taken strides to try to eliminate discrimination based on race, based on gender, sexuality.

And yet there's another immutable characteristic that you are born with and that you cannot help at all and yet denies you basic rights, and that is where you were born.

And so, you know, when I point that out to people, there's often a knee-jerk response saying, "Oh, well, you know, "if we were to open the doors any wider, "then people would come in "and they would, you know, "gobble up our resources "or they would take our jobs "or they would change our culture, "commit more crimes."

But actually, when you look at it, and when you look at the studies and you look at the evidence, all of those fears are unfounded.

- Well, let's talk about that because there is, especially now, so much information out there when it comes to the border, border security, of course, there are continued calls for stronger border security (inhales).

Based on your reporting and your research that you've done, how much of what we are hearing is misinformation?

- There is such a disconnect between the reality along the world borderlines.

You know, I live very close to the US, Mexico Border, and the way that it's talked about in the news, the way that the current national discourse is going, you know, I think it has become just basically a political football and we don't talk about the real impacts on human beings who are forced to either wait, or struggle to get over walls, or find freedom or security.

And I think that we have sort of dumbed down the conversation to such a degree that it no longer really reflects the actual reality on the ground.

- Well, I do wanna talk about the human element.

Obviously- - Yeah.

- That's very important.

But I first wanna talk about the fact that in this book you do make your case by dispelling some myths.

- Yeah.

- One of which is that we currently have open borders.

(John laughs) You say we're not even close to that.

- No.

- Can you explain that?

- Yeah, you know, this has become sort of a very frequent talking point, especially on the right.

And they accuse the current administration of having open borders when, if you look at actually their policies right now, the Biden-Harris border immigration policies are, in fact, to the right of the initial policies put forward by the Trump administration when he first came into office in 2016.

So, or rather in early 2017.

So, you know, the Biden administration has either expelled or deported over three million people.

They have gutted asylum protections.

They have raised more money for putting more people in immigration detention.

So, open borders we have not right now.

And if you go down to the border, you see that.

They have actually sealed further gaps in the wall despite promises not to build another mile, another foot of wall, they have certainly done so.

And people are now bottlenecked in northern Mexico trying or waiting patiently, or in some cases desperately to get across to reunite with family or to find safety and they are not allowed to because of the current administration.

- Well, so when you talk about making the case for open borders, I wanna point out something really important in that.

- Yeah.

- You're not actually proposing a world without borders.

Correct?

- Correct.

Yes, so there's a big difference between no borders and open borders and, you know, talking to experts and analysts, I think that a lot of people are actually pushing for open borders for more openness and not zero definition around countries.

So, there makes sense to have some sort of juridical line around a country that, you know, within which people are going to pay taxes and receive benefits, and you're gonna just organize yourself electorally and socially and things like that.

The idea of open borders is that the presumption is that people can move as human beings have been doing for all of history.

It is just they must register or they must pass through, you know, ports of entry and things like that in order to move.

It's much like moving from one, you know, jurisdiction in the United States to another.

You cross a state line and you move to another city or state and you have to go through a number of different processes and register to vote and go to the DMV.

It's a bit of a headache, but the idea is that you can do it.

- Right.

- And I think that's what is proposed with this idea of open border.

- So, you talk about migration and the origins- of migration.

- Yeah.

- And that, you know, human movement has been happening forever.

- Yeah.

- And you know.

- When you're trying to tell people that they can't move, obviously, you have tremendous issues.

So, and we've seen that.

People are dying.

They're, you know, it's traumatic for families.

So, what is your belief or based on, you know, your research and your knowledge at this point, how do we approach this situation- - Yeah.

- In a humane way?

- Yeah, so I think, you know, despite the title of the book, I don't think this is actually an incendiary or radical proposal.

One of the things I wanted to do is just remind people of what things used to look like in relatively recent history.

So, before the 1990s, for example, there was really no permanent infrastructure.

There was very little permanent infrastructure along the US, Mexico border.

There wasn't much wall at all.

We haven't had, we didn't have ICE, the Immigration and the Customs Enforcement Agency until 2003.

So, you don't have to go very far back to see a very different reality.

And if you go back, just say a hundred years, we didn't even have border patrol.

There was this, it was a much more open, sort of flow of people and goods.

It wasn't completely open, but you really just can look very recent in history.

And here's another number that I think a lot of people sort of forget.

In the year 2000, there was about 12 border walls throughout the world.

Today that number, you know, just a quarter of century later is in the eighties.

So, this is not something that is going back to a more open society, is not going back into, you know, centuries past.

It's going back to into very recent history.

We can do it.

I mean, we lived and we had a nation for a long time without the sort of border infrastructure, the surveillance technology, the border guards and this array of border detention centers that we have now.

- You profile people who are directly impacted- - Yeah.

- By what's happening at the border in every chapter in your book.

Was there anything in talking to those people that surprised you or impacted you more than anything else?

- You know, as a journalist covering this, I talk to people all the time who are impacted by border infrastructure, by border enforcement measures.

And I think almost every time I have a conversation with someone who is ripped away from their family or is in an emergency situation where their life is at stake, or they are running from some persecutor and they're unable to cross the line that I am able to basically traipse across, it really impacts me.

I mean, that I have this unearned privilege to walk either direction across this border that I live near and that other people face all these things I mentioned at the beginning of the program, you know, detention, you know, or if they try to do it by sneaking across, they have to walk through the desert for a week or more and they could die.

And many people do.

And I think that, that is always impacting and just recognizing that disparity is something that has been, I think, should not be normalized.

I think that it's important to understand just the gaping difference in basic rights that we have.

- Well, your book certainly gives people a lot to think about, potentially change some minds, who knows in their thoughts.

But I appreciate the passion that you bring to your book, and thank you so much for coming here and sharing, you know, parts of the research and knowledge that you have based on this subject.

- Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

- Yeah, thanks John.

- Really appreciate it.

- Good to see you.

That's our show for tonight.

For Horizonte on Arizona PBS, I'm Catherine Anaya.

Thanks for joining us.

Have a great night.

(upbeat Hispanic music)