Maybe we are all prospective migrants. The lines of national borders on maps are artificial constructs, as unnatural to us as they are to birds flying overhead. Our first impulse is to ignore them.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Life is full of borders. Some of them, once crossed, can never be crossed again in the other direction. But there are new countries to discover across every one.
I get so disenfranchised reading the news, because global borders and lines we've created are completely unnecessary. That's just another person on the other side, and it's his bad luck that he was born there and it's my good fortune that I was born here. It's all kind of illogical.
As I got older, I had more experience with borders. Some literal - living in the dramatically blue misty mountains on the line between North Carolina and Tennessee, and living in California - home to expats, transplants, and refugees from both sides of innumerable borders.
The birds never needed passports... We always thought, the birds can go wherever they want, and we couldn't, really. The birds were very much the symbol of... free movement for me.
We always think of borders as something that separates two peoples but of course they unite them. It's something you have in common, literally.
Finally, in my critique of the immigration image of America, it is also important to know that we're not only a nation of immigrants, but we are in some part a nation of emigrants, which often gets neglected.
A nation without borders is like a house without walls - it collapses. And that is what is going to happen to our wonderful America.
These are our borders, and we have to secure our borders.
The more borders we have, the more quarrels, the more wars. That's one way to think about borders - they're trouble.
We need to make sure we have secure borders.