Borders: The New Berlin Walls

Abstract

Current frontiers, the encumbrances to workers' travel, derive not only from historic settlements, wars and treaties, but also from ideologies and sentiments of racism and nationalism, constructs that distinguished a worker or petty merchant in one country from his counterpart in another. Ideologies that divided workers or prevented competition at one historical period, continue to function in the 'new global village', frustrating the creation of a global and mobile labour force, which would allow capital to reduce further the socially necessary cost of labour. Even as improved transportation allowed for increased mobility, social attitudes and laws obstructed people of darker skin or different customs from working inside national borders. Over centuries, in the age of empire, a virtual pigmentocracy was established and it set the standards and rules of residence and citizenship within the North American and West European nations - with implicit or explicit bias against people from the South and the East. Eurocentric axioms continue to provoke fear among members of the working and middle classes that hordes of 'uncivilized' immigrants will pollute, dilute or in some form pervert the direct line of western culture that runs from Greeks and Romans through Europe of the Reformation and Enlightenment and into the present; all held together by a White Christ and Moses that people of darker hues cannot truly share.