What I ended up doing was reading the book a second time and writing down anything I learned about the crisis. I worked through some of these observations in part one of my review. But as I’ve done in the past for reviews of Impro and Option B, I’ve taken the remaining thoughts and run the rule of my own experience over them a little bit. The ensuing self-dialogues are below.
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Band-aids hurt people when they are suddenly torn off.
Plugging a sink ensures that water will eventually overflow.TOA: These are colorful metaphors for how policies aimed at large groups affect individuals.
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Removing global barriers to migration would, some estimate, as much as double global GDP.
Germany is accepting hundreds of thousands of refugees because it makes economic sense.TOA: I think a lot of people have an idea about the American Dream that goes something like this: you go to school, learn a few skills, work hard, and eventually move up. You get what you earn and hard work always pays off.
Sounds good to me. It’s missing a key piece, though. When someone ‘moves up’, who fills in? The first instinct is to say the next generation but in rich countries the birth rate has been steadily falling. Rich countries with low birth rates stagnate unless immigration makes up the difference.
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Refugees who enter Europe through another country will be denied asylum in the UK. The point of entry is often proven by European governments who produce photographs or fingerprints as evidence. Camera-wielding volunteers from the UK can cause major issues for refugees because many fear a photo will cost them a chance at having an asylum application accepted in the UK.TOA: This was the single most jarring fact from Threads. These days, it seems like anyone can have a picture of him or her taken at any time by anybody for any reason. It would be a big deal, I think, except that in most cases it just doesn’t matter. For me, having someone I’ve never met take a picture of me doesn’t bother me in the slightest (this changes if I am forced to alter my behavior, however, by someone standing in my path or asking me to grin into their phones).
My carefree attitude contrasts to the reality faced by refugees seeking the promised land of England. And the threat does not come just from well-intending volunteers looking to fill up their Instagram accounts with images from their #gooddeed. Governments will send police into these camps with cameras and document those who’ve arrived.
There is an element of a scare tactic here, I think, in trying to alter the migration pattern. Think about it this way – if word got out that one country in Europe was using photography to make asylum more difficult to apply for in the UK, a refugee will try to avoid arriving in that country.
This fact also furthered my appreciation for this book. Though Threads might have been more effective as a documentary film rather than a comic book, the method Evans uses is the perfect solution for the dilemma created by the desire to protect identities while also capturing the full reality of the refugee crisis.
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Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) operates hospitals in war-torn areas. Occasionally, these hospitals are bombed by ‘friendly’ US or European forces.TOA: This fact reminded me of my visit to the atomic bomb museum in Hiroshima. I went in 2008 during the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college. I strolled the museum, took in the exhibits, and learned all about the bomb at a depth I'd never considered before. At some point that day, I came to a jarring realization: we still do this.
Maybe we no longer do this literally. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum describes history, not current events, and it has been a couple of generations since we've used nuclear weapons or attacked a couple hundred thousands civilians in one go or whatever. But we still do this.
Sometimes, history repeats itself in the way you can run back a mad-lib. Just make sure to erase yesterday's nouns, adjectives, and racial slurs first before writing in the vocabulary we are using in the present.
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Open borders is a matter of when, not if.TOA: I have a favorite section in Moneyball where Michael Lewis describes a game announced by Joe Morgan. Morgan was a traditional baseball guy and this point of view manifested in his opposition to the data-driven approach of the Oakland A’s. During this game, Morgan was explaining to the listeners why the A’s approach of waiting for good pitches, taking walks if necessary, and having some power in the lineup to hit home runs was a strategy doomed to failure. As he made his speech, the A’s put a couple of runners via walks before a three-run homer cleared the bases.
History is marked by examples of people seeing something happening right in front of their eyes yet continuing on as if nothing were happening at all. When these things are happening on a national or even global level, I like to call them 'unstoppable trends'. The way these trends usually work is some person or group tries to stop or alter a new form of behavior that others accept without question. Most of the time, this acceptance is based on resignation that nothing can be done to slow down the momentum of change, advancement, or progress. The opposition leads to unnecessary struggle and a lot of wasted time but, eventually, what is inevitable comes to be and the world never returns to the old ways of yesterday.
In 1863, the end of slavery would have qualified as one of these trends. A sharp observer, perhaps aware of the Congress of Vienna in 1815, would have noted that most of the Western world had moved past slavery fifty years prior. Reader, Napoleon had to reintroduce slavery to France in the early 19th century. And yet, this same observer would have noticed its vital presence in the Confederacy and likely encountered scores of those who believed slavery remained a viable part of a healthy economic engine. Even if the Confederacy had won the Civil War, there would have been no reason to believe its badly struggling economy could have become the exception to the worldwide historical trend (1).
Open borders, no doubt about it, is one of these trends. The arguments against its inevitability are significant and they cite real obstacles that are many decades away – at least – from coming down. But these obstacles are coming down. Someday, the whole world will benefit from the same freedom of travel and migration currently enjoyed by the citizens of the globe’s richest countries. To suggest otherwise ignores the reality of the crisis captured in Threads: the world’s poorest people, those with almost no resources to devote to safe travel, are pouring into Europe every day.
Open borders, in a sense, is already a reality. There are not enough walls, literal or otherwise, to keep people locked into homelands where there is no opportunity, no equality, and no safety. The anticipated challenges of the 21st century – the resource demands of ten billion, the destabilizing effects of climate change, the splintering of larger nations – are only going to further increase the pressure on people to pack their bags and seek their fortunes elsewhere. Rather than worry so much about how to best keep everyone where they are, perhaps today’s efforts should be devoted to figuring out how to best achieve the doubling of global GDP some economists anticipate will result from a world with fully open borders.
Footnotes / a TOA sneak preview
1. Full equality, in general, is another…
I’d like to throw out some additional examples to further my point but I’m working on a fairly big post – a project or a series, if you will – where I look at the trends that might be happening in the present day. So, I’ll save these for later and ask for your forgiveness, reader.
