REFUGEE

Viet Thanh Nguyen, ed., The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives (New York: Abrams Press, 2018):

     We should remember that justice is not the same as law. Many laws say that borders are sacrosanct, and that crossing borders without permission is a crime. Unpermitted migrants are these criminals and the refugee camp is a kind of prison. But if borders are legal, are they also just? Our notions of borders have shifted over the centuries just as our notion of justice and humanity have. Today we can usually move freely between cities within a country, even if those cities were once their own entities with their own borders and had fought wars with each other. Now we look back on those times of city-states--if we remember them--and I doubt few of us would want to return to such conditions.

Id. at 18-19.