One way to look at a border is to see it as a dividing line, a boundary that keeps people apart. For twenty-eight years, on one side of the Berlin Wall—in West Berlin—were freedom and Coca-Cola; outside were Communism and a surveillance state. Even if most East Berliners and East Germans would have preferred to reside in West Berlin, the border wall, mostly, kept them out.
The dismantling of the wall in 1989 showed the world that when barriers come down, people do come together, especially when the barrier that divided them was erected for dubious political reasons. Tracking the shifting contours of borders over centuries often reveals them to be arbitrary, temporary, and unstable.
Journalist and translator John Washington examines the history of these shifts as a reporter for Arizona Luminaria in Tucson. Much of his reporting has focused on migrants who have fled their homelands in search of safety and a better life. He has trekked through the desert and across mountains—exploring every stage of the journey these human beings take through Central America, Mexico, and the Southwestern US. In his 2024 book, The Case for Open Borders, Washington rejects the idea that closed borders improve security, arguing that border enforcement itself creates a lucrative market for the smuggling of drugs, guns, and people. And making unauthorized migrants live in fear, he writes, only pushes them further into the shadows, leaving them more vulnerable to human predators and exploitation.
Even amid the fierce debate in US politics over migration, there remains a lingering notion of America as a nation of immigrants. In his farewell address President Ronald Reagan described his notion of America as a shining city on a hill, full of all kinds of people living together and open to “anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” Assessing his administration’s successes, which included an amnesty for nearly three million unauthorized immigrants, Reagan claimed that the nation was “still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.”
Washington, who happens to be a distant relative of the first American president, won an award for investigative journalism from the Institute for Nonprofit News in 2023 for his reporting on deaths at the Pima County jail. A related documentary, Death Behind Bars, premiered on public television earlier this year and can be viewed at PBS.org. He spoke with me in April and June of this year, over two discursive video chats from his home near the US–Mexico border in Arizona. He says the idea of this country as a welcoming place for immigrants is largely a myth Americans like to tell ourselves. “There’s never really been this heyday of absolute welcome in the United States,” he said. “That’s a false notion.” But could we create such a welcoming beacon in the future? He thinks so.
Not all conversations are as linear and succinct as they appear. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.—{read}