The border isn't where you think it is

Time of India

a day ago

As the Business Head for The Times of India, I lead strategic initiatives and drive growth for one of the nation's most influential media organisations. My journalist friends believe I've crossed over to the proverbial dark side. Living on the edges of a dynamic newsroom, I dabble infrequently into these times that we live and believe in the spectatorial axiom – 'distance provides perspective'. LESS ... MORE
After watching Milton Friedman in sepia tone and wondering if nuance had an expiry date.
Watch: Milton Friedman noted that before 1914, immigration functioned well largely because there was no welfare system.
Milton Friedman in the clip looks like the kind of man who'd win a Nobel Prize and then grumble about the inefficiency of the coffee queue. Neatly suited, laser-sharp, and perpetually squinting at the stupidity of the world, Friedman was many things—but above all, I think, he was allergic to fluff.
It's 1978. The world is bracing for disco's aftershocks, America is tiptoeing through stagflation, and Friedman—brows knitted, voice measured—tells an interviewer something almost blasphemous by today's standards:
'It's a good thing to have immigration. It's a good thing to have people coming here and making a better life for themselves.'
But then comes the pivot, the asterisk, the economist's scalpel:
'But it is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. You cannot have both.'
And just like that, the conversation takes a turn.
Fast forward to 2025. We've got biometric passports, facial-recognition turnstiles, and TikTok debates on citizenship. But we're still lost in the same forest Friedman mapped out 47 years ago—only now we're shouting into it.
Today, immigration isn't just a policy issue—it's a vibe check. It's cable news theatre. It's social media outrage merchandised in five-second clips. And somewhere along the way, we stopped asking: What kind of society do we become when we turn people into problems?
Even the language has mutated. Refugee has become a technicality. Asylum is now a negotiation. Migrant is code for someone who's just a little too brown to blend in without explanation.
Across the US, border discourse has become a Hall of Mirrors—liberals with 'No Human is Illegal' bumper stickers now whisper qualifiers like 'legal pathways' and 'orderly processing,' while conservatives campaign on promises to finish walls that never really worked. Everyone's arguing policy; no one's reading the fine print.
And that fine print? Friedman wrote it years ago:
'The problem is not that people are coming. The problem is that we've set up a system where we encourage them not to work, not to produce, not to become part of the economy.'
The contradiction he flagged was simple: You can't build a compassionate society and run it like a fortress.
But the world today has a different approach. It's not just America. Europe detains boats like they're invading navies. The UK turned deportation into a spreadsheet. Even India—land of a thousand migrations—is busy drawing lines in sand with alarming confidence. The country that once welcomed Parsis and Tibetans with little more than tea and trust now debates which religion makes you deserving of refuge.
Let's be honest: the modern nation-state isn't equipped to handle movement. It likes borders, boxes, biometric IDs. It doesn't know what to do with people who just show up and say, 'I want to live.'
Because that requires a kind of generosity that doesn't fit into spreadsheets.
But here's the kicker: immigrants keep showing up. With tired eyes and stubborn hope. They deliver food, write code, clean rooms, harvest fruit, fill the jobs locals find beneath them. Not because they're heroes—but because they believe the myth that a better life is worth chasing.
And maybe, despite everything, that myth still matters.
So yes, Friedman was right. You can't have unrestricted immigration and an unchecked welfare state. But that was never the whole story. The story is also about humanity, hypocrisy, and the way systems are gamed not by migrants—but by those who profit from the illusion of control.
The real border isn't a fence in Texas or barbed wire on Lampedusa. It's the mental line between us and them.
It's the idea that they don't belong until we decide they do.
It's the imagination gap.
And unless we bridge it, we'll keep building walls around a future that no longer belongs to just us.
Somewhere, Friedman is probably watching, bemused as ever, wondering why his quiet caveat became the loudest thing in the room—and why no one stayed for the rest of the sentence.
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Views expressed above are the author's own.