Imagine no countries

The restrictionist message is brutally simple — that illegal immigrants deserve no rights, mercy or hope. It refuses to recognize that illegality is not an identity; it is a status that can be mended by making reparations and resuming a lawful life.

- The New York Times, June 3rd, 2008

Borders and nationalities are socio-political constructs; they have no more basis in reality nor legitimacy than the dehumanizing ideologies of race that have allowed the haves to subjugate the have-nots throughout human history. At its worst, this way of thinking led Man to his darkest hours by justifying mass atrocities like the decimation of Native Americans, slavery, the Holocaust, and the Rwandan genocide. Gold stars in Nazi Germany, special pink birth certificates in the Dominican Republic, the Burmese junta's reluctance to allow Western aid workers into the Irawaddy Delta, and American immigration policy all serve to isolate the us from the them, to deny our shared humanity in service of the political and economic interests of those in power.
The US government and American mainstream culture is quick to cry wolf in defense of state sovereignty when it's convenient, forgetting about the times when it was in our interest to ignore it: the Mexican-American War then, the invasion of Iraq now.