I Have a Dream

I have a dream.

“Imagine there’s no countries, It isn’t hard to do,“ goes a line from the famous song Imagine by John Lennon. Although most likely to be dismissed as a pipe dream at best, I believe that our society should work towards building a world without borders.

I came to the United States when I was nineteen. Coming from a society that was still grappling with the ills of caste-ism, I had almost no concept of racism. I arrived in the United States with the vague preconceived notions about various races that I had learnt from movies and television.

I had to broaden my horizon quickly, and while doing so realized that the extent of our horizon seemed to stop at imaginary lines. These borders,drawn across the population over time, are arbitrary lines put in place by powerful individuals only to expand their own sphere of influence.

Let’s step away from Lennon’s ultra-liberalism for a bit, and look at Dr. King’s speech, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”. Only now, ‘locale of their birth’ is just as important as ‘color of their skin.’ If we extrapolate the situation from the US to the rest of the world, it is no different. What makes racism so hideous is the fact that people are being judged and treated, based on something they have no control over. We have as much control over being born a citizen of a nation as we do being born of a certain race. So, how is the idea of discrimination based on boundaries and borders of countries any different from racial segregation?

Ever since our shared origin in Africa, we have constantly migrated. But today, there is more restriction on our movement than ever. The Gaza territory is no better than a prison. We need ‘transit’ visas to just change planes at international airport terminals. Even in America, the country with the greatest history of immigration, a plan to build walls around its edges had almost succeeded. Only recently, President Obama’s bailout package states that companies who receive the bail-out money cannot hire workers on H1 visas, working visas for non-US residents. The path towards permanent residency through H1 is particularly long for citizens of China and India, as applicants have been waiting for more than eight years. These are people who have been working for American companies for years, having complied with all the rules. Some have started families and are now raising kids, for whom this is home. They have paid their taxes, just like other good citizens, but are now being told they cannot apply for a job in a company that is being rescued with their own tax money.

Nepal's own borders seem to have been drawn at random, separating out populations that have no other differences other than the side of the lines they are on. Countless battles over where that line ought to be drawn still rages on, between Nepal and India, between India and Pakistan, so many others, the region of Kashmir being just one such example. The Government of Bhutan cleanly expelled thousands of Nepali-speaking Lhotshampas off their territory and homes, all while it boasted about an increase in GDH (gross domestic happiness).

We’ve reached an age where we’ve realized how much injustice there is in treating individuals differently over caste or race, and have worked hard to combat it. Similarly, we need to be able to see the absurdity in treating people differently based on which side of an imaginary line they were born on, and maybe, someday, we will do away with the restriction of movement, on a species that is, by nature, migratory.

This story originally appeared on March 12, 2009 on This I Believe, Inc., a non-profit organization whose mission is "to contribute to the improvement of society by enabling people to think about, express and share their deepest beliefs."