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They do, of course, as you admit yourself. It's merely a "no true Scotsman" of what constitutes a border.
It's not clear to me why this is true except that you feel strongly about this particular issue. Like if you were a leftist telling me about how governments that don't control inequality cease to be a government "properly speaking" because , I'm not impressed.
The current immigration regime is not unprecedented. There was much more freedom of movement before the latter part of the 20th century than there has been since. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the foreign born share of the population was comparable to what it is today. Was the USA not a government, properly speaking, but merely an economic zone? I don't think so, but if it was, it seems being an economic zone doesn't really mean much for the future trajectory of your country.
For what it's worth, I don't believe that the US has no borders, or didn't have any during the Biden administration.
It had and still has badly enforced ones, which still produce part of the dissolution effect I describe, but not nearly in the total sense that totally open borders do.
People conquered by the Mongols probably found it clear that despite being allowed to maintain their own self government, the ability for the aforementioned Mongols to sack them or collect tribute at will was the dissolution of their statehood.
Perhaps there is some future hypothetical state of humanity where people wandering in and out of your territory is as consequence free as the microbes living it up on top of our skins are to us (and even then those are not in truth consequence free), but since we live in a present where the content of a population has important political consequences as humans always exert political influence of some kind where they live, we have to acknowledge this reality in our political models.
I'm sure that if the US truly had no borders, as the far west once did, and Mexican cartels were allowed to roam free and pillage at will, or some imperilled population could simply install themselves on your neighborhood overnight you'd properly understand your condition as stateless.
In the meantime, I maintain and am not alone in doing so that a proper definition of statehood requires an exclusive territory.
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