When people ask where I’m from, I give the same answer: Jamaican, born in New York, raised in Miami. Borders separate all three places, and yet they fold together into the person I am. Had my ancestors never packed their bags and crossed those lines, I wouldn’t exist as I am, and the same is true for most of the people around me. In America, the immigrant story is the everyman story, rooted, uncomfortably, in the taking of Native land to build the country we live in now.

We are a nation obsessed with lines. We drew them between states so we could pursue our differing ideas of how to live, and we guard the ones at our edges as though they…