The Border Force of the Garden vs. The Barbarians of the Jungle — or Open Doors as a Metaphor for Open Borders
“Europe is a garden,” … “Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden.” — EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs
When you have travel plans, expect the unexpected. Even more so if you are traveling to the garden part of the world and you’re from the jungle part of the world. No matter which passport you carry and whether you need a visa or not, as long as your name is a tongue twister and your skin color is anything above White, you will be made to feel like you’re not welcome. Unnecessary questions and long waits are the norm. Even though this happens to me almost every single time I go to the garden, it still manages to mess with my mood. The feeling of having done something wrong never leaves me throughout the trip and it keeps me on edge, thinking maybe I should have stayed home where I don’t have to face this kind of anxiety.
“Where are you going? Where are you staying? What are your plans? When are you leaving? Are you going somewhere else from here or are you flying back home? Who is picking you up from the airport? Do you know anyone living in the UK?” The badgering questions of the uniformed Border Force officer at the London Heathrow Airport leave me incredibly annoyed and feeling unwelcome before I’ve even technically entered the UK. I then start thinking to myself of what kind of treatment do UK citizens receive at the border in the jungle of the UAE. Would the immigration officer wearing the UAE’s national dress badger them with questions such as the ones I receive, or would it simply be “business or pleasure? … Welcome to the UAE”
As I wait there, staring at the Border Force officer to check the documents I wonder whether he got into this job because he wanted to ensure people coming from the jungle have a difficult memorable experience, and thus never think of staying and certainly never think of returning.
In Mohsin Hamed’s novel, Exit West, he discusses the topic of migration, refugees, and open borders quite extensively (it is actually the main point of the book). When a Middle Eastern country is ravaged by a war, mysterious doors start appearing out of nowhere when crossed these doors would take a person to an entirely different place, a different country, a different continent — mainly from war torn countries, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Nigeria, to more developed countries such as Greece, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Our protagonists, Nadia and Saeed, who fell in love just before the war happened, would travel through these doors, and their adventures to uncertainty start from there.
Throughout the story, we meet different people from all over the world who cross these doors from their struggles to what they hope is a better life. Before they know it, they are met with the full force of the military and police, everywhere they go. When Nadia and Saeed settle in a house that they land in in the UK, they find themselves joined by different people coming from different places joining them through a door in the house. Some are from the same country that Nadia and Saeed are from, others speak different languages from all across the world. But they all get along, despite their cultural differences, because they know one thing has brought them together and it is the struggles of war.
While the topic of Open Borders might be too easy to talk about as a dream for people from the disadvantaged, overexploited jungle, the thought of it seems to leave a bad taste and a loud ringing in the mouths and ears of White people from the Western world, as they imagine their perfect garden shattered by an influx of what they see as barbaric brown people from the jungle who would most definitely destroy the bland garden that is Europe and much of the West with cultural diversity and a mixture of color. They should fix the problems in their own countries, not come here, they seem to think. The irony is that much of the destabilization of the region has been a result of Western super powers selfish foreign policies that vilified the region, had the Western world not targeted the East as a battleground for the war against communism and any ideologies that attempt to balance the reign of super power from the West to anywhere else.
