It's been a long time since I crossed a national boundary. Yes, once upon a time, as a young man, I hitchhiked into and across Canada, as well as around significant parts of Europe. And once upon a time, as a grown-up and an editor at a publishing house that put out a translation of a Japanese book on the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, I managed to make it to Japan. But it's hard for me to imagine the kind of borders my grandfather crossed in the late nineteenth century. As a young Jewish teenager in what's now the embattled Ukraine, he left home alone and, over a couple of years of work and wandering, made his way north to a port in Germany where, at about age 16, he boarded a ship to America. He landed in New York City in perhaps 1892, an immigrant with the German equivalent of 50 cents in his pocket (or so my aunt, his daughter, told me many years later).
These days, Donald Trump and crew would undoubtedly have been all too eager to toss him out of the country. And of course, at the very moment when his administration has indefinitely suspended immigrant visa processing for the inhabitants of 75 countries, a combination of wars like those in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan, political hell, and the increasing ravages of climate change are all ensuring that ever more people will have little choice but to leave their homes and countries in the years to come. As of 2024, according to the United Nations, there were already an estimated 304 million migrants globally, double the figure in 1990. And don't doubt that, on such a planet, those figures are still rising.
And in the world Patrick Strickland, author of You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave, describes today in his first piece for TomDispatch, it's literally a hell on earth being a migrant (and that was true even before Trump gave such a hell a new meaning). In that context, let Strickland take you to the crumbling borders of our world and consider what being an immigrant now truly means. Tom
Immigration and the Invasion Story
Borders as Crime Scenes and Crimes
After a year of gutting the United States government, deploying armed jackboots to American cities, and bombing at least seven countries, the Trump administration kicked off 2026 by invading Venezuela and kidnapping its president, Nicola's Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores. In the wake of that assault, President Trump doubled down on his abandonment of the isolationist positions he once supposedly held, threatening military action against Colombia, Cuba, Iran, and Mexico. He then vowed that the U.S. would come to "own" Greenland either "the easy way" or "the hard way."
In truth, American imperialism defines much of this country's history, but the latest escalation comes at a time when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have also been deployed around the nation to grab immigrants off the streets and whisk them to detention centers. Meanwhile, Trump has continued to preach the jingoistic gospel of stopping the arrival of new refugees and migrants, while blasting European governments over migration -- even as he vows to launch military campaigns that will undoubtedly result in further mass displacements and fleeing people crossing borders in search of safety.
Destabilizing countries the world over and then attacking the people who flee those wars is, of course, nothing new. From the September 11th attacks in 2001 until September 2020, this country's war on terror, according to one study, displaced an estimated 37 million people in eight countries. And that figure doesn't even include several million displaced during smaller conflicts the U.S. participated in from Chad to Tunisia, Mali to Saudi Arabia. Nor does it include the number of people displaced by Israel's five wars since 2008 in and around the Gaza Strip, its land theft in the occupied West Bank, or its frequent airstrikes in Lebanon, Syria, and even Iran, all made possible thanks to Washington's financial and military support.
When it comes to Washington demonizing the people displaced by its weapons, just ask the Palestinians.Millions of them live strewn across the map of the Middle East and beyond thanks to Israel's ongoing military occupation and the American tax dollars that have enabled it.
"Eight Lives, Gone Just Like That"
In March 2015, I sat in the back of a taxi bound for Saida, a Lebanese coastal city a little less than an hour south of Beirut. The taxi hummed down the highway, the sea blurring through the windows to our right, and then swerved inland. Saida is more than 30 miles north of the country's boundary with Israel and some 50 miles west of the border with Syria, but even that deep inside Lebanon, a de facto border appeared in the front windshield. The driver made a series of turns, braked, and inched toward a military checkpoint outside Ain al-Hilweh, a Palestinian refugee camp.
Lebanese soldiers appeared on either side of the vehicle. Their job was to decide who could -- and could not -- enter the camp. After reading over our documents and ensuring that we had the proper military permission to enter the camp, the soldiers motioned the driver to move forward. We eased in amid a sprawl of ramshackle homes, many built atop one another. It was a dusty, humid day, but people clogged the streets. Children punted a soccer ball back and forth in the road. Motorbikes trembled over potholes. Men stood around in knots, smoking cigarettes and sipping coffee, and some walked by with Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders.
Along with an American photographer and a Lebanese reporter, I had gone to Ain al-Hilweh, the largest of Lebanon's 12 Palestinian camps, to speak to people who had been doubly displaced by the war in neighboring Syria. As that civil war tore through the country -- a war that drew interventions from the U.S., Great Britain, France, Israel, Russia, Iran, and several other places -- Palestinian refugees from Syria found themselves fleeing to Lebanon. The population of Ain al-Hilweh alone had swelled by tens of thousands.
Of the Palestinians we met that day, the only ones who had ever set foot in their ancestral homeland were those who had been born before -- and lived through -- the 1948 war that led to Israel's creation. What we'd soon learn, however, was that a term like double displacementfailed to capture the extent to which borders had governed every aspect of their lives in permanent and repeated exile.
In a corner store with barren shelves, we found Afaf Dashe sitting in a small chair near the counter. At 70 years old, she had survived the Nakba -- Arabic for catastrophe, the term Palestinians use to describe the ethnic cleansing of their country since 1948 -- as a three-year-old girl when her family fled to Syria. She had grown up in a suburb of Damascus, married, and raised children. When civil war started to rip through Syria in 2011, she and her family gritted it out through four years of barrel bombs, airstrikes, and shelling before they finally escaped.
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