I love the United States of America. Love is often difficult and complicated, but it comes from a deep connection. I can reasonably say I know this country better than most Americans; I have not only traveled back and forth across it many times, and to all 48 contiguous states; I have traveled through all of them as a hitchhiker, a guest of local people, listening to them hour after hour. All kinds of people, with all kinds of backgrounds, histories, prejudices, and politics.

I didn’t like or agree with all of them, by any means but I was grateful to all of them for giving me a lift. I learned a lot from that. I heard some terrible stories, and some beautiful ones. I had many surprises: the last time I hitched coast to coast, in 2006, a semi pulled over in central Oregon and the driver warned me that he was listening to talk radio and some of it was pretty extreme; I expected right-wing ranting, but it turned out that he was a gay Latino truckdriver listening to a socialist call-in show. You never know; this is a big and varied country.

I started this blog while doing research for a  book about borders and immigration, which I had tentatively titled  “The Pursuit of Happiness.” Thomas Jefferson was a dreadfully flawed apostle of liberty, but that’s an amazing phrase to trumpet as a basic human right. In its most literal form, it is the right to leave a place where you are not happy and go where you think you might be happier. You may be wrong; there is no right to happiness, but there is the right to pursue that hope.

Some people think “open borders” is a utopian dream, but the United States has been conducting an experiment in open borders and proved it can work. We have all these states with different laws, different tax systems, different standards of living, and if you are unhappy in one, you can go to another.

We have seen multiple mass migrations, and they have caused problems and been bitterly fought by people who wanted to maintain their state the way it was and avoid being “flooded” by newcomers – in the 1930s, California authorities attempted to block roads and prevent the influx of people fleeing the Dust Bowl; many northern communities established “restrictive covenants” to prevent being “overrun” by Jews escaping misery in Europe, Black Southerners escaping misery in the old states of the Confederacy, and all sorts of other people escaping all sorts of miseries. But those laws were stricken down, and those migrations happened.

That isn’t a simple story, by a long shot. Americans continue to constantly move in pursuit of happiness, and the constant movement works out for some and threatens others – but by now we all take that right for granted, and no one is arguing that states should be allowed to build walls on their borders.

That’s something to celebrate, a history that matters. Previous countries did not enshrine that right in their founding documents or protect it in their laws. Obviously, the US has often failed to honor its founding principles. The genocide, ethnic cleansing, and ghettoization of Native Americans; the centuries of race-based chattel slavery. But that statement of principles echoed around the world, and changed the world—I think for the better. It inspired anti-monarchic revolutions in Europe and anti-colonial rebellions in the Americas – and, over the years, US governments fought to suppress many of the movements our founding documents inspired. The world is not a simple place.

I love other places as well; I was not only formed by this country. I spent many formative years in Europe, which I likewise traveled from end to end, hitchhiking and staying with local people. For many of those years, Europe was still internally bordered; sometimes I had to get out and walk through customs and immigration posts, since drivers didn’t want potential problems; sometimes the drivers knew how to avoid the posts; sometimes I overstayed the legal limits in a country and avoided them myself. I was glad when Europe erased those borders; that hasn’t always been an easy story, either, but it hasn’t been a disaster; borders are brutal fictions, as real as their brutality and as fictitious as any gang turf, constantly shifting, disappearing, new ones appearing, sometimes logically, sometimes arbitrarily.

Even in the bordered years, I thought of Europe as one big place. I got that from my parents; my father had a romantic idea of Europe as the seat of culture; my mother knew it as her homeland, from which she had been forced to flee as a teenager. She was specifically from Vienna, and she always considered herself Viennese, but beyond that she identified as European rather than Austrian. She felt more at home in London, Paris, or Copenhagen than in any American city, even after living here for seventy years.

Vienna remained her first love; the Nazis tore them apart, but she never loved another place the way she loved Vienna. That shaped her view of the world, and is typical of many exiles and refugees. Her Vienna remained her Vienna; the Nazis could drive her out, but they couldn’t take that away from her. A place is not its government; it is the land, the people, your experiences, and your memories.

I love Europe; I feel a rush of that love when I step off a plane and hear familiar languages, even if I don’t speak them, and see red-tiled roofs or whitewashed walls, and can step into a restaurant and find foods and drinks that recall other times and people, and myself, walking the same streets five, forty, or fifty years ago.

I love Mexico. That’s another story, which I’ve written about before and probably will again. That was another formative place for me. Love is what I feel for the places that formed me. It is the love I felt for my parents; not because they had no flaws, but because that is what love is, for me. It is the feeling toward a few places and people that, for better or worse, in sickness or in health, are forever part of me, and that I recognize with a deep sense of connection.

That doesn’t mean I like flags or national anthems. There are many images and songs that say “America” or “Europe” or “Mexico” to me. The flags and anthems are other people’s symbols; that’s fine, or not, depending on how they are used. I often like fireworks; in good times they feel like celebration, like rainbows or the northern lights or champagne popping. In bad times, they feel too much like “the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air,” and make me think about people trapped in places where explosions are the sound and glare of terror rather than celebration.

“The pursuit of happiness” is the right to leave those places and go to safer places, and also the right to return to those places. Borders never feel to me like protection; they are always brutal, murderous; if there is one thing Jewish history teaches, it is the importance of being able to move, to leave, to go somewhere else.

I am not telling anyone what places they should love. When I say my mother loved Vienna and I love the United States because those were the places that formed us, I don’t mean everyone should love their birthplace. I know plenty of people who do not have any deep sense of connection to the place where they happened to be born or spend their childhood. One of the most brutal lies of nationalism is that people “belong” to particular tribes or places. People are constantly forming new tribes and moving to new places, and finding new loves.

People are also constantly moving and finding new problems. I believe in the inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, whether you find it or not. I was inspired by Woody Guthrie and hundreds of children’s stories to leave home at age eighteen and seek my fortune – in the old sense of the word, not meaning a heap of money, but my future, my fate, my luck.

I was born with immense privileges: white, male, with a US passport and parents who did not depend on me. I could leave home without creating problems for anyone, and could roam the world with few limitations beyond my ability to make a living on the road – which, for an American guitar player, was easier almost anywhere else than in the US. I took full advantage of those privileges, traveling for most of the next dozen years.

In those days, it was much easier for people to travel – even people from poor countries, with weaker passports and darker skin. Two hundred years ago, it was easier still; there were effectively no borders for ordinary travelers – the borders that were enforced were almost all to keep particular people from leaving, not to keep new people from arriving.

That world was worse in many ways, better in others. But borders have not become more necessary; or rather, they have become more necessary specifically to preserve certain kinds of privilege for some people, and to deny those privileges to others. It is the logic of the gated community; most people reading this do not live in one and find it annoying if they go to do a job or visit someone at home and have to go through a guard post and prove their right to enter the neighborhood. And, if you have had that experience, you know that the gates are only hard to pass in one direction; the guards do not demand identification when you leave.

Nations are just communities writ large; nations that police their borders are gated communities. With some exceptions, it is not hard to go from a rich country to a poor country; the difficulty is for people from poor countries – and particularly poor people from poor countries – to enter rich countries. Borders are built for them, or rather, against them.

Against “the poor, the huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.” Against “the pursuit of happiness.”

I love the country that made those phrases iconic. I urge everyone who loves this country to do what you can to make it live up to them.