How Borders Were Invented And What They Cost

Let me lay this out properly, because the sequencing matters.

For most of human history, the idea of a "country" in the modern sense didn't exist. People lived under overlapping authorities — a local lord, a religious institution, a trading guild, a distant king who collected taxes once a decade. Loyalty was personal and layered, not territorial and exclusive. If you moved from one village to the next, you didn't need documents. You might need the blessing of your lord or the permission of your guild, but you weren't stopped at a line on a map.

The first big shift is the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Two treaties, signed in Osnabrück and Münster, ending the Thirty Years' War. The settlement established, among other things, the principle of cuius regio, eius religio — the ruler of a territory determines its religion — and the idea that sovereign rulers don't interfere in each other's internal affairs. Historians debate how big a break Westphalia actually was; the concepts were already in the air. But it's the conventional marker for when the map of Europe starts looking territorial rather than personal.

The second big shift is the long 19th century, which is when the nation-state as we understand it gets built. Before 1800, most "countries" were multi-ethnic dynastic holdings. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars exported a new idea: a nation is a people, bounded by language and history and destiny, with a right to its own state. Italy and Germany get unified along these lines. Greece breaks away from the Ottomans. The old multi-ethnic empires — Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian — come under increasing strain.

Through all of this, here's what's missing: the passport. Individual movement between European countries, for most of the 1800s, required no documentation for most travellers. There were exceptions — Russia kept internal passports, war time brought temporary controls — but the default, for an ordinary middle-class European, was free movement. Thomas Cook started running package tours to Switzerland in the 1860s. Nobody needed a visa.

The third big shift — the one that built the world we live in now — is the First World War. Governments introduced passports as a wartime security measure. When the war ended, they didn't drop the requirement. The 1920 Paris Conference on Passports and Customs Formalities formalised the modern passport. The interwar period locked it in. After 1945, decolonisation multiplied the number of sovereign states from roughly 50 to nearly 200, each with its own border regime. By the 1980s, biometric standardisation was underway. By the 2000s, the EU's Schengen area showed that borders could be softened — but Schengen was an exception that reinforced the rule outside its boundaries.

So the timeline, compressed: territorial sovereignty is about 380 years old. The nation-state as an ethnic/linguistic idea is about 200 years old. The hard border with mandatory papers for ordinary travellers is about 100 years old. The biometric surveillance border is about 30 years old.

That's it. That's the whole arrangement.

The specific geographies matter because they show the arbitrariness.

The Berlin Conference, 1884–85. Fourteen European powers met in Bismarck's capital to divvy up Africa. No African representatives were present. The conference produced the General Act of Berlin, which codified the "effective occupation" principle and set rules for how European powers would claim African territory without going to war with each other. The actual drawing of internal African borders happened over the following decades, largely in European capitals. Rivers and mountain ranges were used where convenient. Where they weren't, straight lines on a map. The resulting borders cut across more than 170 ethnic and cultural regions, splitting peoples in half and yoking historical enemies together. Every African conflict from independence to the present day inherits that cartography.

The Radcliffe Line, 1947. When the British decided to partition India, they appointed Cyril Radcliffe, a London barrister with no South Asian experience, to chair the boundary commissions. He arrived in India in July 1947. The line was published on 17 August, two days after independence. Radcliffe had five weeks. Partition killed somewhere between several hundred thousand and two million people in the migration that followed — exact figures are disputed — and displaced around 15 million. Radcliffe burned his papers and never accepted his fee. He said he didn't want to be remembered for it. He is.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement, 1916. A secret agreement between British diplomat Mark Sykes and French diplomat François Georges-Picot, negotiated during the First World War, carving up the Ottoman Empire's Arab provinces into French and British spheres. The subsequent San Remo conference, the British Mandate, and various commissions produced the borders of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, and Israel. Almost every contemporary Middle Eastern conflict traces some of its genealogy to those meetings.

The U.S.-Mexico border. Established in its current form by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and the Gadsden Purchase (1854), both at the end of or following the Mexican-American War. The U.S. took roughly half of Mexico's territory, including what's now California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. The line is the preserved contour of a 19th-century war that Mexico lost.

This isn't a polemic point. I'm not saying the lines should be redrawn. I'm saying: the next time someone tells you a border is sacred, ask who drew it and when.

The Missing Migrants Project, run by the International Organization for Migration, has documented more than 75,000 migrant deaths worldwide since 2014. The Mediterranean is the deadliest route — 29,000+ documented deaths. The actual number is understood to be higher because many disappearances at sea are never reported.

The U.S.-Mexico border has its own grim accounting. The "Prevention Through Deterrence" policy, formally adopted by the U.S. Border Patrol in the 1990s, aimed to push migrant crossings away from urban areas and into the desert. The logic was that the desert would deter. It did not deter. It killed. The Pima County Medical Examiner's Office, which covers the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, has processed thousands of remains. Many more are never found. The group No More Deaths and others have documented how water caches left in the desert for migrants have been systematically slashed by Border Patrol agents.

The English Channel has killed dozens in the last few years alone. The 2021 sinking that killed 27 people in a single night prompted a brief wave of media attention, then nothing.

There's a specific moral structure to these deaths. They're not incidental. The border policies are designed to produce risk, on the theory that sufficient risk will reduce crossings. The dead are not a policy failure. They're a policy output. This is worth saying plainly because the usual framing treats them as tragedies that happen, rather than as consequences that follow from choices.

The economics of migration restrictions is one of the strangest areas in the field, because the numbers are so large that economists have trouble taking them seriously.

Michael Clemens, formerly of the Center for Global Development, published a 2011 paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives called "Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?" The paper reviewed the literature and concluded that removing barriers to labour migration could add between 50 and 150 percent to global GDP. Even the conservative end of that is tens of trillions of dollars.

The mechanism is straightforward. A worker in Malawi performing exactly the same task as a worker in the U.S. earns a fraction of the wage — not because they're less skilled but because they're operating in a less productive economy with worse capital, infrastructure, and institutions. Move that worker to the U.S. and their productivity rises to match. The gain is captured partly by the worker, partly by the receiving economy, partly by the sending economy via remittances.

The "place premium" — the ratio of earnings for identical workers in different countries — is on the order of 3x to 15x depending on the pair. Clemens, Montenegro and Pritchett (2019) estimate the place premium for the U.S. against developing countries is typically 4x to 10x. That is: the same person, doing the same work, earns 4 to 10 times more on one side of a line than the other.

This is by a wide margin the largest source of inequality on Earth. Oxfam's annual reports on billionaire wealth are small next to it. The Gini coefficient for global inequality is dominated by between-country variation, not within-country variation. And that between-country variation is enforced by the border.

The counter-arguments are real and worth taking seriously. Concerns about wage effects on low-income native workers (the literature is contested but the consensus estimate is that effects are small). Concerns about welfare state sustainability (addressable with policy design). Concerns about cultural change and political backlash (real, and the political backlash is why none of this will happen fast). I'm not handwaving these. I'm saying: the current arrangement has a price tag, and the price tag is trillions of dollars plus thousands of corpses per year, and that price is not visible in any politician's budget.

A few frames I find useful when you're reasoning about borders:

The Historical Contingency frame. Any arrangement less than 150 years old is contingent, not natural. The passport regime is 100 years old. Treat it as a technology with costs and benefits, not as a law of physics.

The Ancestor Test. Every person reading this is descended from migrants. Not in the abstract — in the specific. Your DNA is a map of crossings. Somewhere in your line there was a person who walked out of a place they couldn't stay in and walked toward a place they didn't know. The border regime, applied retroactively, kills your ancestors. Which means it kills you.

The Reverse Question. Don't ask "why should we let them in?" Ask "what justifies keeping them out?" The burden of proof sits differently depending on where you place it. Joseph Carens, the political philosopher, has argued for decades that the right to exclude requires positive justification, and that most of the standard justifications don't survive scrutiny.

The Global Apartheid frame. This one is stronger language but it's not hyperbolic. Apartheid was a system of legally enforced separation where rights depended on a category you were assigned at birth. The global border regime does exactly that, across a larger population, with more deaths. Seen from 500 years in the future, the current arrangement will look the way 19th-century slave ships look to us now.

1. Map your ancestral migrations. Pick a family line — one grandparent, one great-grandparent. Trace back as far as you can. Write down every border crossing. Note which of them would be illegal under current law. Sit with the list for ten minutes.

2. Read one first-person account. Not a statistic. An actual account by one person who crossed. The Line Becomes a River by Francisco Cantú for the U.S.-Mexico border, or The Lightless Sky by Gulwali Passarlay for the Afghan-to-UK route. One human story does more work than a thousand stats.

3. Audit your moral intuitions. Ask yourself: if you learned that a friend had crossed the Channel on a small boat to reach you, would you turn them in? If your answer is no, you have already conceded that the border isn't a moral authority. You've just extended private loyalty over public law. Notice that.

4. Re-read a 19th-century novel paying attention to movement. Anna Karenina, The Idiot, The Magic Mountain, any Henry James. Note how often characters cross borders and what the process looks like. The absence of the modern passport regime becomes visible once you're looking for it.

- Michael Clemens, "Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?" Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2011. - Joseph Carens, The Ethics of Immigration, Oxford University Press, 2013. - John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State, Cambridge University Press, 2000. - Reece Jones, Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move, Verso, 2016. - The Missing Migrants Project (International Organization for Migration), ongoing data. - Branko Milanovic, Global Inequality, Harvard University Press, 2016. - Peace of Westphalia primary documents and commentary in Derek Croxton, Westphalia: The Last Christian Peace, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. - On the Radcliffe Line: Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition, Yale University Press, 2007. - On Berlin 1884: Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost, Houghton Mifflin, 1998, for the colonial logic; Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa, Random House, 1991, for the conference itself.

If every person said yes — yes to treating every other person as fully human, fully present, fully entitled to a life — the map would not be the first thing to change, but it would be among the things that changed. Borders aren't the disease. They're a symptom of the disease that Law 1 names. The disease is that we sort people into who matters and who doesn't, and we draw lines to enforce the sorting.

Asking how recent the lines are is not the answer. It's just the entry point. But entry points matter. You can't walk through a door you don't know is there.

Next action: go look at your passport. Read the page where it says what it is. Notice that somebody, within living memory, decided you needed one.