"The Case for Open Borders": Keeping only some people out

Photo from inside the library on the US-Canada border. Image source.

Here's another quote I want to share from "The Case for Open Borders". This is from pages 118-119:

Another popular defense of borders is that, as Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed, "We don't have a country without a border." Similarly, Obama White House advisor Cecilia Muñoz said that "[t]here are policy decisions to be made about who should be an immigrant, and that includes removing folks who don't qualify under the law. That's, I think, just the reality of being a nation."

But how does a closed border legitimize a country? The US border is wide open to goods, money, the well connected, and the wealthy-- so why is keeping poor people out important for maintaining a nation state? Though there are no formal financial requirements for Mexicans obtaining nonimmigrant visas to enter the United States, consular officers consider a person's finances and employment before issuing a visa, and poor people almost never get the pass.

In other words, the border is supposed to keep only some people out. Compare the triple fencing, watch towers, paramilitary Border Patrol, ground sensors, drones, and billions of dollars spent keeping people out of Southern California to the Derby Line in Vermont at the northern US border, where an opera house is literally divided down the middle between United States and Canada, where the international divide is marked by a strip of black on the floor of the town library's reading room. You aren't legally permitted to enter and remain in the United States from there, but unless you're looking down, your book-browsing could take you back and forth across an international divide without any notice.

I googled this Vermont library because it sounds cool, and it turns out that now the felon is closing access from the Canadian side, because I guess we can't have nice things.