Border Regime, State, and a Decolonial Future Without Them in Aotearoa

There is no border regime without a State, which is made particularly evident in settler colonial contexts. In what follows, Kai-rui Cheng examines the relationship between these two apparatuses in New Zealand (a term referring to the settler colonial State in this text), and draws from Māori sovereignty as the basis to imagine what a stateless, borderless future would look like for Aotearoa (the term referring to the nation that preceded colonization and that will survive to it).

The contemporary nation-State borders of Aotearoa New Zealand have anchored skewed experiences of human mobility for different people. New Zealand’s borders are multiplied by the State into every sector that makes life under capitalism possible: housing, education, healthcare, employment, social welfare, and the opportunity to reside with loved ones in the place people love to live in. Permanent residency, or citizenship, has been further barricaded through the categorization between skilled or “unskilled” labor, the Acceptable Standards of Health (ASH), temporary migrant labor schemes, and the measure of whether someone can live without social welfare under neoliberal capitalism. With the terms of temporary stay determined by the State as an organized, armed body of power prolonging and refining class oppression and settler colonialism, expulsion is always in the question. Borders are imposed spatial barriers upheld by repressive processes and activities that engineer the (im)mobility of people, and are fundamentally (re)produced and utilised by the State to heighten disposability for the poor, racialized, disabled, criminalized, and migrant working class to preserve the contemporary reality of White, colonial-capitalist New Zealand.

In the contemporary State, borders are a key method to remove migrants as temporally wanted and unwanted sections of the working class, allowing New Zealand to monopolize time-space to stabilize and entrench settler-property relations through selectively incorporating a settler class and deliberately cheapening the labor exerted by those granted permission into the nation-State on time allowances.

For New Zealand to compete in the imperialist world, the State installed specific practices and laws that produced borders to shrink the circulation time and space between New Zealand and the international market.

Borders aided in accelerating the production and circulation time of commodity capital through denying permanency to insource temporary migrant workers to labor in hyperexploitative workplaces to rapidize the time of production and circulation in a process Harsha Walia calls “commodified inclusion.” Borders were secured as a key mode to regulate the movement of capital, with the State as the engine regulating relationships to fulfil labor requirements without permitting full participation for temporary migrants into the nation-State. With immigration control anchored in State power, New Zealand has demonstrated a tendency to remove migrants for indefinite periods of time, spiriting them back to their homelands, or keeping them in indefinite waiting within the nation-State. To shrink time and space for New Zealand to profit in the imperialist world, time-space displacement is inflicted on migrants and made functionable to the nation-State through the authority to regulate migrants.

While waiting for visas, migrants are left in waiting by the State, which Shahram Khosravi identifies as a systemic practice where the State holds someone’s life and body in limbo for indefinite periods of time making them not in full control of their life. Disabled migrants are left in indefinite waiting for their deportation orders, Pacific migrants on the Recognised Seasonal Employer Visa travel in-between nation-States every seven months, migrants on the Accredited Employer Work Visa are warehoused into cramped spaces, and Māori who return after residing elsewhere are disapproved for permanent residency—among the layered web of border violences, a close family member of mine must still renew his temporary visa despite having resided here for 24 years, and has spent more than my whole lifetime waiting for the State to approve his life to begin here. My memories are riddled with threats of deportation laid against him, denied treatment in hospitals, his denied access to welfare service and after 24 years, now his denied pension. These are all spaces fixed by the border regime as a set of activities and processes carried out by the State.

In pre-colonial Māori society, the State by this practice was never established, although there was tikanga (customs, law) practiced relationally through long standing relationships with hapū (political units and subtribes within regional groups), whakapapa (genealogy) and ahi kā (keeping the home fires burning) rather than through the repressive powers of the police, military and borders. Prior to the British introduction of private property, finance capital, and nation-State barriers, Aotearoa and Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa (The Great Connector/Ocean) were not bound by today’s spatial barriers, not limited to island States or ruled by cartographic lines seared onto the ocean. Rather, Aotearoa and Te-Moana-nui-a-Kiwa hold a history of unconfined human movement and migration across endlessly navigated waters unmarked by borders, bearing no resemblance to the contemporary waiting queues for visa renewals and the administrative climb towards permanent residency. As taught by Epeli Hau’ofa, the ocean was the shared body connecting the Pacific as “a sea of islands,” welcoming vast exchange systems of resources across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa. It was through boundless free movement that Polynesian navigators ventured towards Aotearoa where Māori then became the Indigenous peoples of Aotearoa. The repressive activities of New Zealand’s borders today uplift the free movement of capital and commodities at the expense of the highly barricaded and limited movement of people. However, the lineage and history of Aotearoa and Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa calls to the memory of an alternate, Indigenous understanding of migration.

Borders had no role in pre-colonial Māori society, making their first inception in Aotearoa directly correspond with the State fortified through Māori dispossession by British colonial forces and the re-organizing of time-space in the process of New Zealand State-building. The first instance of border violence was through the form of colonial-cartography waged on Māori as the principle means to aid the forced privatization of collective Māori whenua (land) by land grabs without hapū and iwi Māori consulted as consenting parties to the sale of their whenua. Catherine Comyn’s Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa (2022) notes that when the New Zealand Company debarked in Aotearoa, they initially received their financial support for the colonization of Aotearoa from the British capitalist class. This then marked capitalist collaboration as the foundations of the New Zealand State, where borders were formed first through spatial appropriation and privatisation, then through racist regulation and policing as the State developed, driving their origins and continued functions as settler, carceral and exploitative. To survey and carve out the land for speculative sale, the New Zealand Company mapped Māori whenua (land) by pinning survey pegs directly atop sites where Māori lived, carving borders to Māori pā (village), ancestral sites, urupā (burial sites), mahinga kai (food systems), wielding cartography to dispossess Māori from their homelands, life-making systems and resources. This practice of colonial bordering also sparked significant resistance across the motu (land/island).

Māori dispossession was initially consolidated through privatization and escalated into full-scale colonial invasion sanctioned by the Crown in direct violation from the causes set out in Te Tiriti o Waitangi which delegated “kāwanatanga” (governor) to the Crown, subordinate to rangatira (chief), and retained “tino rangatiratanga,” (sovereignty), for Māori in Aotearoa. Approximately 3.5 million acres were confiscated from Māori by the 1860s through land theft and invasion by British colonial forces. In the 1870s, Parihaka became the largest Māori village, holding thousands of Māori refugees who had been dispossessed by colonial warfare and land grabs on both Te Ika-a-Māui (North Island) and Te Waipounamu (South Island). Through casting aside surveyors’ pegs pinned around the whenua (land) and building fences and sitting around the pā (village) to defend Māori lifeworlds from sale, Māori at Parihaka disrupted colonial attempts at land theft and were met by brutal mass-scale invasion and genocidal destruction.

Leaders at Parihaka were consequently exiled from Parihaka to Ōtepoti (Dunedin) and incarcerated to carry out slave labor. During an assault on Chinese miners by Pākehā (European settler) colonizers, who faced slews of racist assaults by both the State and settlers, Māori who were incarcerated from Parihaka formed a line and sat between the Chinese miners and Pākehā colonizers to interrupt the attacks, in the same way they defended Parihaka. The Polynesian Panther Party, a group of Pacific and Māori activists, organized mutual aid based on the Black Panther Party model in the US, and most famously ended the 1974-1976 Dawn Raids mass-deportation operations against Pacific migrant communities through counter-raiding back cabinet members who endorsed the policy. During the occupation of Bastion Point, the Polynesian Panthers and Ngā Tamatoa (historically significant Māori civil rights group) defended the whenua by occupying it for 506 days against State-led spatial attacks in solidarity and struggle with Ngāti Whatua, who were facing the threat of further land theft. These moments of solidarities between migrants and tangata whenua (people of the land, Māori) since the establishment of the New Zealand State and border regime demands us to consider: what would it mean for Māori, Pacific peoples, asylum seekers, refugees, those who are undocumented, migrants and tauiwi, to relate without the regulation from the State? What would it mean to abolish the systems propelled by documentation designed to transform people into non-citizens, and remove the entity that displaces and detains people between nation-States? Certainly, this is not possible under capitalism and its nation-State systems that split the earth through State power to (re)produce nationalities and race across spatial lines to regulate, regiment and confine people to uplift global migrant exploitation and settler-property relations.

In the face of climate dispossession in Te-Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, rampant slashes to public services, streams of anti-Māori bills and tightened anti-migrant legislation, we are called to break the colonial reality inhibiting Aotearoa to produce conditions of possibilities beyond borders and the systems that make them. To shatter the State and steer towards border abolition, we must understand that borders are colonial violence and temporal fictions legitimized by State power, and work to believe in the abundance without these systems. Te-Moana-nui-a-Kiwa has always belonged to endless horizons and holds limitless possibilities to pursue decolonization for Māori to become self-determining agents in the making of their own futures.

Since 2012, the Matike Mai Working Group have come together to co-dream and co-imagine a decolonized Aotearoa through complete constitutional transformation, building on Te Tiriti o Waitangi as the foundation of social, political and interpersonal relationships between Māori and tauiwi (non-Māori) on this land without the central mediation from the Crown. Te Tiriti o Waitangi was not imagined through the vision of borders, but through the understanding that Te Tiriti meant the rights of Māori and land would be acknowledged and upheld, with guests who share the land working with Māori to help Aotearoa flourish. Mātua Moana Jackson compared Te Tiriti o Waitangi to the marae, where there are kawa (rules) to abide by and the sovereignty and mana (power) of the people whom the marae belongs to is not disputed. The agency of the visitor is importantly respected through pōwhiri, a welcoming ceremony holding space for interdependence and expression.

In the history and present, all peoples who share the land in Aotearoa have a responsibility to restore tino rangatiratanga (Māori sovereignty) and to build relations of interdependence against the spatialized differences imposed by the State.

For this, Mātua Moana Jackson draws on the marae as a model of interdependence, manaakitanga (nurturing the mana of others) and a relational practice of kawa (rules).

Interrupting colonial continuums to transition away from the settler-colonial lineage of the capitalist political-economic system, the nation-State regime, the expropriation of land and destruction of life-making societies, Matike Mai invites tangata whenua and tauiwi alike to question what it means to bring our whakapapa into constance with each other to build a balanced relationship with land as the basis of material relationships in Aotearoa. Echoing Mātua Moana Jackson, the most central whakapapa value is a balanced, relational and loving relationship with the land that is not premised on ever-expanding profit, but rooted in a material reality where the reciprocal relationship with Papatūānuku is restored, allowing other social relationships to be premised on what is called a whakapapa relationship with the land. It is only through this process of decolonization where whakapapa values of mana (status), manaakitanga (nurturing the mana of others), kotahitanga (unity), utu (restoration of balance) and hohou rongo (establishing peace) can be nurtured to strike the settler colonial State and its border regime. ■