The power of local borders to resist and prevent transnational mobilities in education has received little attention in comparative education. In this article we explore the motif of border immunology' with reference to new history, a mobile paradigm of history teaching, and Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot history textbooks as types of local borders that have been impermeable to new history. The overall argument we explore here is that ethnonational forms of collective identities that are imagined to be constitutive of textbook borders account for immunity to mobility and change.