If someone I don't like is allowed to go somewhere I don't want them to go, they could start killing people at any moment.

Also, I am of the view that every single person south of the border that would want to cross north of Mexico is a gang-affiliated serial killer. Every single person coming from East Asia is a spy, a saboteur, or a left-wing extremist intent on destabilizing the country. Every single African coming to the US has Ebola. Every single Muslim coming to the US is going to impose Sharia Law.

We need to close our borders until I, personally, feel safe. And the TV says I'm not safe. So nobody should be allowed, unless they are white.

You can strive for a future

Can I? I feel like I'm going to get yelled at for striving, because I'm doing it wrong.

Closed borders don't make things better for a selected few if they make the world those selected few live in shitty.

Grew up in Texas, and back in the 80s it was very normal for kids to just hop into a car and drive south of the border for Spring Break. This was the most normal thing in the world for hundreds of thousands of teenagers and young adults.

And then national media realized they could make a lot of cheap news coverage by scandalizing the practice. So we got a slew of news stories, which became inflated with an even more over-dramatized series of books, tv shows, and movies, showing kids going across the border for drug use and rape and animal abuse and to dispose of dead bodies for the cartels and to get eaten alive by the Chupacabra. We got bombarded by a slew of media with a flashlight under the chin whispering "Oh, you think these kids are having fun? Well, what if the news threw a red filter over the images and used graphical effects to imply everyone was murdered?!"

Both the US and the Mexican police got more and more involved. The borders became militarized. You ended up with these obnoxious traffic situations, which really killed the appeal of any kind of vacationing. Also didn't help that a lot of the popular destinations got enclosed and privatized, for the benefit of a few insider luxury developers. The cost of a vacation exploded, as cruise lines and chain hotels and resorts took over the best spots. And now it's been fully Disney-fied, with a heavily demarcated entry and exit for tourists who are heavily discouraged from mingling with locals.

Shit fucking sucks, man.

It’s not really about the borders per se, but it is about territory. Russians feel they need land (specifically railroad) access to the Sevastopol naval base in Crimea. Russia itself doesn’t have any warm water ports—they all freeze in the winter. So, during the Soviet Union, the Crimean peninsula was developed as an international port and naval base. The infrastructure was built with taxes from all the Soviet citizens, including a lot of Russians, under the assumption that Russia, as part of the Soviet Union, would have access to that port in perpetuity. As a result, some Russians feel ownership over this naval base, even though it’s deep in Ukrainian territory.

I don’t think Putin really cares about the Donbas much, except that it can be territory to protect access to the port. It is about borders, but it’s not quite as arbitrary as you say.

Russian strategic anxiety about not having a warm water port is quite literally older than America. This is some Peter the Great-era (early 1700’s) shit. I’m not excusing any of it, but I rarely hear anyone talk about this stuff in the English language media even though it’s like. The primary reason for the war.

Not really about "moving" the lines. It's about Putin wants other people's stuff, and the biggest picture way to define "not Putin's stuff" is "everything within the internationally agreed upon lines over here." It's not an obsession with borders, it's that they're a definition of the historical land of specific peoples and cultures. You don't want the whole globe named World of America, right? Lines that keep anyone willing to use force out of an area because the people within those lines said "nope, this is us, not you."