“Closed borders don’t make us safe.” A conversation with journalist John Washington.
In this episode of Nonviolence Radio, we’re joined by journalist and author John Washington to explore the complex realities of immigration, border enforcement, and the human costs of closed borders. Washington draws on decades of research and reporting to challenge common assumptions about migration, arguing that heavy enforcement measures often fail to address the root causes of displacement—climate change, political instability, and economic exploitation.
From the militarization of borders and the rise of surveillance technologies to the human stories behind migration and the moral questions surrounding “who belongs,” Washington examines both the historical and contemporary forces shaping global mobility. He also discusses practical ways listeners can support immigrant communities, from local organizing to principled advocacy, emphasizing that solidarity, awareness, and education are key to fostering more humane and effective immigration policies.
Transcript:
Stephanie Van Hook: Greetings and good morning everybody. Welcome to another episode of Nonviolence Radio. I’m your host, Stephanie Van Hook. I’m here with my co-host and news anchor of the Nonviolence Report, Michael Nagler, and we are from the Metta Center for Nonviolence in Petaluma, California. Now, if you heard in our theme song, I’m struck by Gandhi repeating as part of this mashup, “though a soldier of peace.” There’s a speech Gandhi gave where he said, “I consider myself a soldier, though I consider myself a soldier of peace.” And it’s actually quite apropos this morning as one of the top headlines is that there’s going to be a change in the nomenclature of our Department of Defense in the United States, where it used to be the Department of War. And then it changed to the Department of Defense, which is a little bit less direct about what its intent is and does, makes things seem a little different than they are. But the current administration and president in particular have decided to go back to calling it the Department of War, which is a little bit ironic for someone who very much wants a Nobel Peace Prize. But, irony aside, Michael I wonder what your thoughts are on this Department of War this morning versus being a soldier of peace?
Michael Nagler: Well, it was quite annoying that the euphemistic name, Department of Defense was introduced and a lot of people in the nonviolence world and the peace movement really objected to that.
And there’s a very close connection. I’m waxing a little philosophical here but this is important. Actually at its very basic core, violence is a lie and nonviolence is the truth. That’s why for Gandhi, if you remember, he said one, it was like a coin, which was actually just a blank piece of metal.
because both sides were equally valid. One side was nonviolence and the other side was truth. The first casualty in war is truth. That’s an old saying. And this was institutionalizing a particular untruth.
Stephanie: Now there are still opportunities for turning that around in some ways. Gene Sharp, the godfather of strategic nonviolence had said that you can fight a war non-violently, that non-violence, non dash violence, which we’ll have to explain a little bit, can be a form of warfare.
Michael: Well, I didn’t, I failed to comment on the second part of your question. Yeah. In fact nonviolence is a struggle that begins within the actor. And really that’s the most important scenario or place where the action takes place. And then you act it out, in the building of institutions that’ll be more just and equitable. And then when you have to, this is how I see the ideal trajectory unfolding, the final theater, that’s the word I was looking for, is in struggle with others and to that extent, it has a similarity to war, which is also a struggle. But the methods used and the end result aimed at are totally different.
Stephanie:.One would be destruction and disunity and power, and the other would be, as Martin Luther King said, Beloved Community. The aftermath of nonviolence is Beloved Community.
Michael: Yeah. But you still would have a kind of power, and in fact, probably a better kind: it’s not power over, but power with.
Stephanie: Wait, you’re saying that nonviolence isn’t powerless? Have I misunderstood? No, I’m just kidding. But that is a common misconception.
Michael: It sure is, yeah.
Stephanie: That there’s no power in nonviolence, you use it because you’re weak and to have no other recourse. But that’s not true.
Michael: It is such a misleading untruth. And in fact, Gandhi had to struggle against it from the very beginning. In one of his earliest speeches in South Africa, someone, Mr. Hosken in fact was introducing him and said, “the Indians have taken to passive resistance,” that’s what they called it still in those days, “because they are weak,” and I wish I had been there. I wish I’d been a fly on the wall because I could just see Gandhiji leaping to his feet, his full stature, and saying “we have taken to nonviolence because we are strong.” And that is the major shift in paradigm, in understanding, that I think we have to go through; to recognize that first and foremost, we are mobilizing strength, which has been dissipated in ourselves. And then directing that now focused and pure energy against things outside of the personal self. I almost said others, but as we know there are no others.
Stephanie: Ah, that’s an important theme of today’s show, this idea of us and them and building and other. But before we get there, I do also want to talk about this Department of War as contrasted to nonviolence, because Gandhi also said that nonviolence is a weapon, but it’s the weapon of the brave. We don’t often emphasize the weapon vocabulary around nonviolence because we don’t want to fit into the categories of weapons in the same way that weapons tend to be in a category of harm. But he did call it a weapon of the brave, imagining a Department of War where we’re fighting, first of all ourselves and we’re trying to win the war against our own negative drives and trying to win the war against poverty.
Michael: Yeah, I’d enlist in that kind of war.
Stephanie: We build a safe and just and equitable world of democratic freedoms and values, using the means of democracy and freedom, not the means that negate those very principles by which we say we fight and we use the weapons of nonviolence. All of that, I think, would make us soldiers of peace. Thank you.
Michael: Soldiers of peace, I think Gandhi pretty much had to use that vocabulary. He may not have personally liked it, but the, shall we say, the ethical odor of soldiering and war fighting was much less fraught in his day than it is in ours. In other words, it was regarded as a much more noble activity without the ambiguities that it brings along with it today. War in fact, could be equally vicious and equally violent, and Thucydides describes this very well. But there was still this feeling that being a soldier was primarily an act of defense and that you were risking yourself for the community. I think that’s one of the reasons that the big paradigm shift from war to peace, from violence to nonviolence hasn’t happened, and that is that the interpretation of war fighting is moral, you know, you are sacrificing yourself for the community.
And I don’t deny that, you actually are sacrificing yourself for the community. But what’s important for people to realize is that to undertake nonviolent work is also an act of sacrifice. It can be more difficult, it could be more dangerous. We were just talking in the car this morning on the way over here (beautiful drive, by the way) about how those three young men were murdered in the South, trying to introduce racial justice when the communities hadn’t been prepared for it. And I have learned recently that some 14 people have actually died being carrying out unarmed civilian peacekeeping over the last 20, 25 years. So it’s a minuscule number compared to what happens in the average street fight, not to mention weaponed war. But still you are risking things, you’re risking the disapproval of people who may not understand the value of what you’re doing. You’re sacrificing a lot of comfort and convenience and you’re not getting a pension.
Stephanie: Yeah. Well, all of this talk of war fighting and its alternatives and departments of war and being soldiers of peace; we do have to talk about this creation of “another,” of the “other,” of a “them.” There’s an “us,” there’s an ingroup and there’s an outgroup, and that whoever’s in the outgroup we can act violently toward. The “us” can act violently toward the outgroup and that is at play in war fighting absolutely. That all of a sudden human beings are only human beings within a specific nation state at which you participate. And then so we’re trying to shift that awareness and that ideology from being an “us” and “them” to this notion that you’re human, no matter where you were born.
Michael: Yeah. Or what color skin you have.
Stephanie: Everybody’s human. So this is not just happening with warfare borders, but also within the US in particular at this time with ICE and targeting immigrants to advance an agenda of “Making America Great.” And it’s extremely violent, there’s people in our local communities who are afraid to be seen outside, who are afraid to have had family members deported, friends deported. It’s a huge mess. And the question is, what can we do? What can people do to resist ICE, but also in a way that’s lasting? There’s actions we can absolutely take today. And there’s ways that we need to think about these issues in a broader context to make them longer lasting and more effective. And yeah, I wanted to shift to that conversation today, Michael. You and I both remember the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Which took place a couple of years after 9/11, but was absolutely part of the aftermath of 9/11 in this country. And it’s not that there wasn’t the racialization of needs and humanity before that, absolutely not. But with the advancement of the Department of Homeland Security, we’ve seen an increase in the militarization of our police departments, of border security, and so it all fits into this calling the Department of Defense to Department of War because we are in a growingly militarized space.
Michael: Yeah, my, I have a friend named John Marks. I would like to share one of his remarks with you. It’s not only about immigration. He says it’s about what happens when disappearance becomes policy. It is about how authoritarian systems succeed, not through spectacle alone, but by presenting themselves, this is the key, presenting themselves as orderly, legal, and necessary. “History offers a warning,”John said, “if this machine succeeds, it will not stop with immigrants. It will become the blueprint for domestic control and the silencing of millions.” And I think fortunately millions of people are beginning to recognize this: that authoritarianism will not stop at the chosen victim, at the announced victim, at the scapegoat, but it becomes a mode of being and a mode of relating to others. And as we always like to say here at the Metta Center, it’s based on a totally false misunderstanding of who we are as human beings. Recently. I’ve been looking into something that happened 40,000 years ago, and that is the demise of our cousins, the Neanderthals. Yeah. I know I’m stretching a little bit here, but there’s a lesson, a lesson for all of us.
Stephanie: I’m going along for the ride on this, Michael.
Michael: Come on along. I guarantee you it’ll come to a point. Got an interesting point. There’s a big mystery about why they perished. They were stronger than us, stocky, good-looking types, and they were very good tool users. They had art and they had everything going for them to stay around.
Stephanie: They had some doctors, lawyers…
Michael: Well, yeah, they had their own type of doctors and lawyers, I’m sure. But, I think scientists, ethologists, have landed on what it is that caused them to rather rapidly in terms of geological time, over a course of about a thousand years, they weren’t there anymore. And our immediate ancestors, Homo sapiens were growing. But there’s no sign of conflict. There isn’t a whole lot of sign of competition. But it seems like what happened was that the Neanderthals were very isolated. They were very local. In a typical Homo sapien cave somewhere in the Pyrenees, as we now call them, you might find tools that came from as far away as Siberia, that came from North Africa. People were trading tools and we can only assume that with that they were trading ideas. So they formed what we might call a dense network all over the populated world, and the Neanderthals did not. And that meant that they were much more vulnerable, especially when their numbers declined, an Ice Age or an onset of illness could have been the final thing that wiped them out. But what made them vulnerable was their habit or absence of a habit of interconnection. And that was really significant for me because when I was a classicist back in my legitimate career, I specialized in Homer and I specialized in the Odyssey. And in that epic poem, what happens is that the hero, the protagonist, Odysseus, he’s away fighting the Trojans for 10 years and then he takes another 10 years to get home, making his way across the Mediterranean, visiting people, as the poet says, coming to know their minds and so forth. And he exemplifies a Greek value, a Greek philosophical concept called “xenia,” meaning the ability to be a good friend to strangers. And so he goes around testing all these different communities, some of them on the margins of human existence as to whether they would feed him, which is what you did when you were a good xenos, a good host, or eat him, in fact, if you’re like a one-eyed monster in a cave. It shows that this concept of xenia of being able to go to another land and be accepted as a human being was absolutely critical in the development of human culture.
Stephanie: Yeah, there’s actually, in every world religion, there’s admonitions to remember to be kind to the stranger, welcome the stranger. Every religion. There’s no religion that says “shut them out. shut them down, send them back,” so this is pretty fundamental to our social contract, our unspoken social contract. Michael, thank you for bringing us all the way around from the Neanderthals to ancient Greece back here to where we’re sitting in Point Reyes Station.
We had the opportunity just a few days ago to interview somebody really brilliant, a journalist and author John Washington. Interesting, last name is Washington as George Washington was the first to call it the Department of War, but here we are, we’ve gone full circle now; and John Washington has a book called The Case for Open Borders. And there’s also some articles online that you can read that he’s written for The Nation and other places on this topic of not no borders, but open borders, the way that you move between states. In the U.S. you are under a certain jurisdiction. There’s certain laws that will apply to you, there’s ways in that make sense. And that this idea, this notion that having closed and militarized borders is relatively a new development in the history of borders and really not necessary. Even more than that, not effective. So we had a really good conversation with John and I’d like to bring that up. I go to him at the beginning and say, “aren’t closed borders good for a country?” And he jumps in quite passionately with a strong “No.” So let’s hear from John.
John Washington: No, I don’t believe they are. And. That’s not just my own belief or opinion, but there’s a lot of facts to go behind that. There’s a thing, we have decades of evidence showing the real immigration-enforcement costs on human beings. Both people who are migrating, costs on native residents, costs on the environment, costs on animals and plants, and the entire ecosystem that we’re a part of.
And beyond those costs, we also have pretty clear evidence that closed borders don’t do what they are purported to do. They don’t do a great job at keeping people out of the country. When I say that last part, especially right now in 2025, and we see that the numbers have dropped, numbers of people who are crossing the US Mexico border, for example, have dropped precipitously. They say, “this is evidence right?” And it’s not, actually, because if you look at the picture beyond borders, which is something that I have to often remind people to do, you’ll see that this hasn’t been a solution to the underlying problems that have been forcing people to flee, forcing or compelling people to flee. So in this case, Mexico has really stepped up enforcement. They have been under the threat of increased tariffs, of actual military incursion, and other sort of sometimes veiled and sometimes just explicit threats. And even though the new president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, has been singing a sort of a different tune than Donald Trump and even a slightly different tune than her predecessor, she has deployed National Guard troops to stop migrants from traversing Mexico towards the United States. So what we’re seeing now, and I’ve done reporting on this very recently in Mexico, is that people are getting trapped in Mexico.
So if your only goal is to keep people out of the United States, that is currently working. But “currently” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, because we have seen slowdowns in immigration before when heavy enforcement measures are implemented and they often work for a little while, but we’re only nine months into this administration. So I think that given ongoing effects of climate change, given ongoing political upheaval, given ongoing economic despoilment of many countries in this hemisphere and throughout the world, people are still going to be on the move. They may be redirected elsewhere besides the United States, that may be a trend that we see for a little while, but I doubt that will continue.
There’s another factor to consider here, and that is the one thing that I think actually does work in stopping people from migrating to a specific country is making the conditions in that country, in that receiving country bad enough for everybody that people don’t want to be there anymore. So if there are ongoing military deployments in the United States, if the economy tanks, if we gut basic services, medical care, education, if we just lay waste to society as we have it, then yeah, I guess you could say, okay, you are successfully stopping people from migrating here. But those things aren’t the same as building up more border fencing or border walls or deploying immigration agents. Those are addressing underlying conditions in your home country and doing nothing to address the underlying conditions in sending countries. So if you want to call that working, making a country bad, then I think you have a wrong sense of what working is.
Michael: That would mean the remedy is worse than the malady.
John: Exactly. Another way of saying it is cutting off the nose despite the face. What are we doing here?
Michael: As you were saying that, John, I was thinking about the other approach, which is not making things insufferable and unlivable in the sending country. We live in California. I’ve spoken to people who have migrated in here from, for example, El Salvador, where things were really not so sweet. I made a point of welcoming them and they said thank you, but we would rather have been back home.
John: Yeah, so when I make the case for open borders, we really like to emphasize that open borders are not an ultimate solution. I think they are absolutely part of the cure, but the solution is addressing the systematic harms that are being enacted. And those include all the things that I mentioned before. There was a recent five-year period in the United States where we spent 11 times more on border enforcement than we did in climate change mitigation. Again, if you want people to have stable homes and not be compelled or forced to leave them and migrate to your country, the logic would be that you would try to address those underlying causes. You would try to really look at why people are needing to flee. And so I think that opening borders does help in some regards. It both changes your mindset. It both makes you really understand that if you’re going to solve something as complex as climate change, then you need to work across boundaries, international boundaries to do so. If you’re really going to address the problems with the global economy as we have it today, where it’s still incredibly extractive and exploitative, you have to work with countries beyond your own border, and so I think opening borders does help address that, but it’s not the ultimate solution. The ultimate solution lies in those other fundamental sort of society-wide things that you need to change.
Stephanie: I want to ask a question that I know is used on the Trump MAGA side, that there are criminals coming in from other countries.
I think he specifically means Central and South America. And how do you address that, when people say, what about the criminals?
John: Yeah. There are people in any group of human beings who will commit harms. Absolutely. And I think that those should be addressed. I think that there’s a better way to address them than imprisoning people, torturing them and deporting them. You know, what you’re doing if you do that, let’s say somebody is picked up and arrested for drunk driving and they don’t have authorization to be in the country, or they do, but that’s removed from them or stripped from them, which is something that’s increasingly happening and they’re deported to, let’s say Mexico, back to where they came from. Is that a solution? What does that exactly do? I think that is more offshoring a problem than solving the problem, and in many cases, those people may come back or they may continue to disrupt the societies that they’re deported to and force others to flee. It’s just not really a long-term, even just like mature solution to a problem. You can’t just close the door on a problem or push the problem outside of your home and think that you’ve solved it; it doesn’t really address the underlying causes there. I say that open borders is not exactly the solution, but in this way, in individual circumstances it can be.
Think about why maybe someone is causing that harm because they’re forced into the shadows. They’re forced to work in black markets. They are literally being hunted by government agents armed with guns, and they are driven to extremes of anxiety, depression, desperation. Maybe that’s what pushed them onto the bar stool in the first place, and convinced them to drive home. Maybe that’s why they’ve committed some petty crime. And so if you take away all those extra stressors, you may actually achieve what you’re trying to do and failing to do while you just deport them.
There’s another circumstance here, and this is something that gets brought up, is what about the people who, what about the “rapists,” or what about the people who kill someone? Trump has made a lot of hay out of angel families, people who have lost a family member because a migrant killed them, whether intentionally or even inadvertently, and that is a tragedy. I don’t want to minimize the harms and the pain, the anguish that those families must be going through. But I again, think that achieving justice through modern forms of banishment isn’t the best way to do it. So I think that we can meet those harms, we can try to remedy them, we can try to find some sort of justice without just pushing that person beyond the border.
There’s just like the most basic moral understanding of who gets to draw a border. And one of the things I do in my last book is really try to walk people through the history of how a few different borders were drawn.
I look at the border of Australia, which is actually a really interesting border. You think it’s easy to draw it because it’s just an island nation. But there’s a lot of strange things that have happened about what island is where, and I look at the drawing of the Indonesia border, which is an archipelago of, I don’t do math, thousands of islands, like which islands are part of Indonesia, which are part of neighboring countries? Or look at the history of the United States border, who got to draw that line and what did they need to do to be able to draw it? And they had to commit mass murder, basically, and mass displacement. And then after they did that, they said, okay, now this land is ours, and anyone who crosses the line that we just crossed is going to be crossing a border, this inviable, supposedly international boundary that we just made up. You can go back not very far into history and see how many times the border has been drawn and redrawn in the United States and elsewhere. The most recent states were added to this country, obviously less than a century ago, and the border has changed so much.
Even more recently than that, ICE has only been around since 2003, any serious infrastructure along the US Mexico border has really only been there since the 1990s. That’s within my lifetime. That’s really not that long ago. And so if you say, this is a quip that often gets bandied about by the Right, “a country that doesn’t have borders is no country at all,” but really, the borders didn’t look like they looked today for a long time.
And I’m also not making the argument that a country can’t have borders. I think it makes some sense to draw a line around who is part of your commonwealth and say, “okay, you’re with us and you now contribute to the society and we give back and we have this relationship.” But the idea would be that people can come and go as they please. And they can register as they come in, so they can then pay into the pot and take from the pot as needed. And that actually improves security. That actually gives more awareness of who is in your country that undercuts the criminal enterprises that are helping people smuggle across boundaries right now. And you’re really solving a lot of these problems. But we don’t even know who they are. We don’t even know what they do, where they come from, how they got here. If you let them come, and you invite them in and you ask them to register as they do so you would know who they were, you wouldn’t force them to rely on these cartels who are in a very lucrative business of smuggling human beings. You would undercut their bottom line immediately if you just open borders.
Stephanie: Can you talk a little bit about the problem of the militarization of borders, how we’ve gone from having more open borders, I think in your research you say it’s in around the twenties that we’re getting more closed borders, and then swing past 2001, 2003, the borders become more and more militarized spaces. What kind of trends have you seen and why? And why does it matter that our borders are becoming militarized and we’re using military technology on immigrants and what does it all mean?
John: Well, we’re speaking today when I was just reading some reporting about Trump sending more active military troops into Chicago. We saw just yesterday, it was two days ago now, a military strike on a boat of alleged drug smugglers. We saw military deployed to LA, obviously, in force. So this is an accelerating trend, but it’s been something that has been happening for a long time. I live in the borderlands. I live in Tucson, and we have been subject to checkpoints for well over a decade. We have seen surveillance technology, basically blanket the southern end of our state. We see military style surveillance blimps floating above our cities and our lands where we recreate and predator drones. You catch them zooming across the sky sometimes. So it has been an issue for a long time, but it’s absolutely picking up in pace right now. I think also when we talk about militarization of the borders or the borderlands or immigration forces, there’s a couple of things you need to keep in mind is this has gone hand in hand with the militarization of police departments throughout the country as well, so it’s not exclusive to immigration enforcement and we have to understand that this country and these lines that I was just talking about, that were originally drawn, were drawn because of military might and military conquest. So it’s not like this is brand new either. I think you have to remember that history.
But what happens when you further militarize the border is your policing in like the worst and most militaristic sense of that word, everybody is subject to that. I am a native-born American citizen, and I am now subject to all that surveillance that I talked about where I live. There was another announcement just the other day that the Trump administration now has the green light to use Paragon, which is basically spycraft software to surveil cell phones. And I think it’s really important to note here that this trend isn’t only happening or even accelerating under the Trump administration, but the administration that first bought that Paragon software was the Biden administration. They were blocked by the courts temporarily, and we just got the go ahead this week.
We are, I think, it is not an exaggeration to say that we’re under threat of becoming an increasingly militarized state, and yet it’s also important to say that it doesn’t have to go that way. We can stop it. It takes will or acquiescence or ignorance to go that direction; and to go another direction to a non-militarized state, to a more peaceful state, to a place of open borders, or at least in that direction, it takes solidarity, organizing, awareness, and resolve; and I think that’s a decision we can make right now. We are continuously at a crossroads, and we are at a very important one right now.
Michael: It strikes me always that we’re dealing with some very fundamental issue here about what is a human being and who is “us” and who is “them”, and we tend to think that those categories are given by nature and inviolable, and yet they keep on shifting. And so underlying all of this maybe is a question of education. If we could educate people to have a broader definition of what a human being is and who they are and what community means, I think then the political will would follow.
John: I agree. I think the questions underlying all of this are really fundamental and even almost basic. Like one of the questions I try to address in my book is “who belongs?” And that’s a really simple two word question. And if your answer is anything but “we all do,” there’s a lot of educating I think we need to do. When you talk about “what is a community?” and “what do communities look like?”, they’ve always been mercurial, they’ve always been shifting, and they’ve also always been on the move. Like no human population is ever completely stable either geographically or demographically. And that’s some really basic, like anthropological history that is indisputable. And you can look at different examples of that and see what happens when those communities are cleaved in two or when suddenly some people are othered or racialized and othered.
And anytime you start doing that, it doesn’t always go all the way down the path, but you are on the path towards totalitarianism, towards fascism, towards genocide. That is the first step along that path, is when you say, “these people don’t belong here.” And yet that is a fundamental premise of the nation state. The nation state is not only a political entity, but is a political entity fictionally forged around this idea that there is this cohesive national identity. But if you look at any modern nation state, you’ll see that it took a lot of effort and often a lot of violence to forge that identity.
I say that and also, people sometimes react and say, “what about different ethnicities? These are things that are real and we should celebrate them,” and I absolutely agree. My mother’s Romanian, she grew up in Romania, and I am very proud of my Romanian ancestry. I grew up in a Romanian American community and I would never want to give that up, that was wonderful, I want to give that to my child. But I think we can do that in a way that is non-exclusive. Or nonviolent at least.
Michael: More to the point, perhaps it is almost as if there’s an arrow that can point in one direction or another, either toward inclusion or toward exclusion. And there seems like those arrows have their own momentum. So once you decide to draw the line somewhere, because it really doesn’t work because it’s artificial. because it doesn’t really grow organically out of nature, the circle in which you find yourself shrinks. More and more exclusion and it’s more and more uncomfortable even on the practical levels that you talk so well about, which is how jobs beget jobs and the economic dimension of it.
John: Yeah, I think that you’re exactly right. You’re pointing in a direction and we’ve been pointing in the wrong direction, I’ll just say that bluntly, for a long time. I already gave the example of the Biden administration teeing up the Trump administration on this surveillance technology to spy on people’s cell phones, but that goes back a long time. It is very much a bipartisan push towards border militarization, towards this crackdown that we’re seeing realized today. Obama was the first person to implement the Secure Communities program. He was hailed as the deporter in chief. He was the first one to really ramp up family detention where, you know, I visited detention centers in Texas under the Obama administration that were holding 2000 mothers and young children, some tender aged children who almost all the kids went into periods of regression. They started wetting the beds. They lost weight. They became non-verbal or partially verbal. This is something that is very recent in history and is easy to forget because of the horrors we’re witnessing today.
But when you talk about direction, when we talk about momentum, you have to remember that it’s not okay just to call out the excesses of your political enemies. It’s really important to stand on basic principles and not forget what you believe in. And this is something that I think the Dems, in particular, the Left more broadly, has failed to do for 30, 40 years, is say, “look, actually, okay: Obama’s in office now. Biden’s in office, or maybe Kamala would’ve been in office. Things would’ve been not as bad, but things are still really bad.” We still saw family separations under Biden. I just was talking about some of the worst things that we saw under the Obama administration. I think what we’ve long been lacking on the Left especially is that basic clarity of principle saying “actually, we believe that people should not be discriminated against because of where they were born. We believe in fundamental human rights no matter where a person is, and if they had to cross a fictitious line or a artificially-forged line to be in a place where they feel at home or where they find economic or basic security, we still want to respect those people’s fundamental human rights,” and that’s something that the Left hasn’t been very clearly saying at all.
Stephanie: So if we were to create a few points for people listening to this show today that they could move forward into the world with, that help them really solidify a better perspective on borders and immigration, what would you suggest?
John: I think there are really concrete actions that people can take right now. In almost every community in the United States, there are some form of immigrant activist organization. They should join it. They should be aware of it, they should support it, they should donate to it. Right now, people are under a very serious threat. No matter what they do. No matter who they are. And it is, of course I think very much that immigration enforcement right now is a spearhead for further crackdowns, as evidenced by what we’re seeing in DC and what we might see coming in Chicago. So get involved. There’s a very real and urgent need. You can be a witness, you can be accompanier at courts. You can just show your basic support. You can be neighborly.
I think one thing that happens and is important to note, too, is the importance of local organizing. So we have examples throughout the country of local jurisdictions pushing back against ICE, and that doesn’t happen by itself. That help happens because of grassroots organizing and effort and just the critical mass. So pay attention to your city council, your county supervisors. And know what’s going on in your community. Know if there’s a detention center being built or if there’s already one there. Know if there’s ICE enforcement activity in your community and you can be a part of stopping it. Push towards sanctuary policy. That’s not an ultimate end and we need to shoot far beyond that, and that’s also now potentially bringing a threat from the administration. But steps like that are steps in the right direction, at least.
And I think knowing history and being more literate in how these things came about is really critical too. It really opens people’s eyes. And last thing, and this is a little bit of the repetition of this idea of the Left more broadly standing on principle, is I think people themselves shouldn’t shy away from saying things like, “I stand with my neighbors no matter where they’re from. I want to support my neighbors. I want to help safeguard my neighbors,” or “I believe in open borders.” That shouldn’t be a scary thing to say. If you don’t believe in them, you might at least believe in less cruelty, deliberately aimed at someone just because of where they’re born. And I think that you need to state those basic things. I think saying it aloud is a good step.
Stephanie: For those of you just tuning in, you’re here at Nonviolence Radio. That was a conversation with John Washington. He is author and journalist and the book is called “The Case for Open Borders.” He has also written a book called “The Dispossessed.” It’s all looking at these questions of immigration and his perspective is just so helpful because he’s always looking at the underlying causes. So if we’re talking about “how do we improve immigration processes, how do we support a more robust country,” it’s always looking to, “Well, what are the underlying causes that are making it cruel or bad or harmful, and how do we resolve that?” And I think that’s really wonderful because it is getting into this deeper sense of what defense could really mean. And he gives some really good examples of what people can do to support people in their communities right now, such as joining organizations and getting involved in some way, being able to talk with others by saying, “I support my neighbors,” and showing up.
There’s some articles too on Waging Nonviolence in particular that I found about mutual aid and support within our local communities. One article I’d like to point out before I pass this back over to you, Michael, is from Victoria Valenzuela. She talks about the LA area, networks of mutual aid doing fundraisers for families, people showing up at a tamale cart for example, where a woman running the tamale cart had some problems financially because she was losing customers because of deportation. So her son, 14 years old, had to come and work the cart for her. And just this entire community showed up and started buying 50 tamales at a time giving backpacks for him and his brother for school, and just like really supporting that family. There’s also people showing up at places where day workers are waiting for jobs to warn them if ICE is coming or to go get them a coffee or to support them in some way so that they’re not as vulnerable when they’re just looking for work. So there’s a lot of ways of getting involved and there’s a lot of learning we can do. Again, John Washington’s book, “The Case for Open Borders” is also an article online, which you can look up, check out the book, because it really does start bringing up those underlying issues. And then Waging Nonviolence, I would recommend, in particular for clear examples of how mutual aid and other tools for getting involved in your local community as well as local radio. Again, this is so important. If we don’t know what’s happening in our local communities, how can we get involved? So it’s really important also to support local community radio. And with that, Michael, I’ll pass it to you for a little bit of news before we head out today.
Michael: All right. Thank you Stephanie. Yeah, you mentioned that article from Waging Nonviolence which I thought was very important and I had quoted something from Common Dreams, that’s also a very good source. And there’s also some good developments: 350 million people, “the rest of us,” are fighting back harder than ever. And then on Labor Day weekend, we saw some of this under a project called Workers Over Billionaires. Actually, it’s workers over a trillionaire now. And that happened across the country. And especially in the home turf back on the East coast of the billionaire class, which is the Hamptons on Long Island.
And reading all of this, it struck me as rather strange and unpleasant that we’re going back to the class struggles of the twenties and the up to the forties, and it starts to look as if the war, the big one, World War II, which is an interlude that distracted us and solved the problem temporarily in the way that John Washington so cleverly designated that what we call in the nonviolence world, sometimes work versus “work” where work means to really solve something in the long term and “work” means to apply a short term solution where you kick the can down the road and the thing keeps coming back. This is providing an opportunity for people to deepen their solidarity and their awareness (I’m borrowing those terms from him, I really like them), and to form community. And what I think we should really appreciate about this is that this is the way we want to go anyway. That this is not just solving a particular problem, what’s going on at one falafel stand or one street corner, but it’s bringing us closer together as human beings. And I think there’s nothing more important than that.
And I want to point also to one international event that’s happening now, I’m sure everyone has heard of it. It’s the Global Sumud Flotilla, which for the 38th time has launched, this time from Barcelona.This time participants came from 44 countries and they include doctors and immigration lawyers and others. And they are addressing the illegal blockade that Israel had imposed back in 1997. They point out that corporate media are ignoring the flotilla, which actually endangers the participants. And let me read you a quote, “any supposed recovery in foreign investments, however, was deceptive. It was not the outcome of a global rallying to save Israel, but rather a consequence of a torrent of US funds pouring in to help Israel sustain both its economy and the genocide going on in Gaza along with other war fronts.”
So Norway, Slovenia, and several other countries are now starting a trend towards recognizing Palestine on the one hand and divesting from Israel. And it really seems that, and this is not just me saying it, but it really seems like this is the end of Israel as a nation state. Or to quote a phrase that occurred to me frequently in my mind when I was listening to John Washington, a term that we used to use in the peace movement, the “national security state.” Okay, it’s one thing to have a coherent culture, integrity, but it’s another thing to start throwing barbed wire around that and saying, “we are who we are because we are not you, and you are not us.”
And I’d like to share one other quote with you. And it’s this, it’s a reference to “the growing gap between our cowardly and failing big institutions,” (namely Congress, the Supreme Court, big media, university administrations, et cetera, et cetera), the gap between all of them and “the wisdom of regular folks.” I am trying to write an article these days called “Ivy Day in the World.” It’s based on the James Joyce short story “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” that illustrates graphically and with a lot of feeling how things migrate down to the lowest common denominator, the more people are involved. So this really is, how are we going to federalize small groups and build larger entities that are not top-down, hierarchical and uniform? And I hope we’ll have the answer for you in our next program.
Stephanie: Well thank you everybody for joining us for another episode of Nonviolence Radio. We want to thank our guest today, John Washington. Shout out to our mother station KWMR, to the Pacifica Network who helps to syndicate the show, our friends over at Waging Nonviolence and to Elizabeth High who helps to transcribe the show for us and make that available when the show is over and being syndicated. So thank you so much to everybody who makes this show great. And until the next time, please take care of one another. That’s really the theme of today’s show is that’s something that we can all do. Okay. Until the next time.