A CONVERSATION WITH HARSHA WALIA
In this conversation recorded for The Funambulist podcast in April 2021, Léopold talks with Harsha Walia about the research deployed in her book, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (Haymarket, 2021), which draws an international map of the border imperialist regime in its geographic, historic, and legal complexities. They then proceed in trying to envision the various forms of internationalist solidarities that emerge in the struggle against this globalized border regime, taking cues from Indigenous and/or Black resistance.
LÉOPOLD LAMBERT: I read your book as if I was looking at a complex and detailed map. While most national state myth envisions borders as perfect and immovable geometric lines that demarcate non-conflicted sovereign lands, you show in so many ways that these lines often move, they duplicate their thickness, and quite often, they reinforce the settler colonial conditions in which they have been traced. They are only one part of a carceral archipelago that counts islands, detention centers, jails, prisons, courts, etc. Those islands are inside, but also outside the nation state. The book also shows that these borders delineate a legal milieu in which the various markers of racialization are explicitly or implicitly turned into laws that creates the conditions in which some will be deemed as law abiders or citizens, and others as criminal and/or undocumented. And, of course, labor and the various regimes of capitalist exploitation are also front and center of the reality you’re describing. Could you address this very geographical dimension of your book?
HARSHA WALIA: When we think about borders, we often think about securitization as happening at the site of the border: that line drawn on the map. But bordering regimes, as you note, are multiplying: they’re everywhere, they’re internalized within the nation state, they’re externalized beyond the nation state. I’m not the first person to say it but this is central to understanding bordering regimes because borders are not only about demarcating space and territory, these regimes are also about reproducing and maintaining racial capitalism, racial citizenship, imperialism, and more.
So the ways in which bordering regimes multiply are as important, if not more important than, thinking about the securitization that’s happening at the site of the border itself. Here I’m thinking about how there is so much focus only on the symbol of the border wall at the US–Mexico border, for example. The multiplication and the elasticity of the border under the last several US administrations (extending the border further and further south) is just as, if not more harmful, as the militarized border wall itself. And so thinking about how that operates in various places around the world, like Europe’s borders everywhere, helps us to see how the border multiplies and thickens and globalizes border violence. To do so, we need to address both the internalization and the externalization of the border.
The internalization of the border designates the ways in which bordering regimes exist within the nation-state. When a migrant or refugee or an undocumented person crosses the border, the struggle doesn’t end once they have entered within the nation state because the border follows them everywhere.
This is evident in a number of ways: one is how the entire state apparatus is oriented towards immense precarity for people without full immigration status, even in supposedly social democratic states like Canada or European Nordic countries. In these countries, the public welfare systems (from hospitals, to child care, to schools) become a kind of frontline for immigration enforcement. Teachers, doctors, childcare workers, social workers, all of whom we tend to view as the public care sector, can often mutate into becoming border guards. Whether they like it or not, or do it intentionally or not, part of their job becomes to police people’s immigration status, to deny them access to public services, and to turn them into immigration enforcement if they’re undocumented. So even if migrants are within the nation state, they’re not able to access any of those kinds of much-lauded social welfare pillars of the nation state.
Parallel to this is the massive carceral system of policing and prisons, which often becomes a pipeline for deportation and expulsion. The racist convergence of the criminal legal system and the immigration enforcement system is often referred to as “double punishment.” Highly surveilled and criminalized Black and/or Muslim and/or Indigenous people are most likely to be profiled by police and the criminal legal system, and are then targeted throughout the policing to prison to deportation pipeline. Again, we see how the border is internalized and immigration enforcement operates beyond the border itself.
The other way in which the border is internalized is through temporary migrant worker programs. These programs are becoming a template to resolve some of the contradictions for global racial capitalism. We know that outsourced labor in the peripheries is deliberately cheapened and exploited through centuries of extortion, colonialism and capitalism. And now, increasingly, the border also works to magnify conditions of exploitation within the core. Insourced migrant labor is made cheap through the very function of the border. The border acts as a spatial fix to capital accumulation—I am following David Harvey here—and effectively segments migrant workers as a different pool of labor. So when migrants come on temporary visas that are tied to their employer to work in farms or in construction or in the logistics economy or as domestic workers, it is effectively a form of indentureship. Even though they are technically “legally” in the nation-state, they are not afforded basic rights, like family reunification, or access to many public services, or pathways to citizenship, or protections under labor laws. If migrant workers organize, try to unionize, or try to assert their rights, it makes them incredibly susceptible both to termination and deportation. On a discursive level, they are called “migrant workers,” or “temporary workers,” or “foreign workers,” all of which are euphemisms for cheap and disposable labor. In Canada, for example, they are essentially marked as “Third World workers”—the flipside of outsourced workers.
Some domestic workers are also locked and surveilled and contained in the homes of their employers. There’s a report that was done in Lebanon about the Kafala system that was called “Their Home is My Prison,” because many domestic workers experienced the employer’s home as a literal prison. Similarly, many agricultural workers around the world are forced to work and live in segregated labor camps, where they work under conditions of extreme exploitation and live under conditions of curfew and surveillance and confinement. A United Nations Special Rapporteur recently called these kinds of employer-specific migrant worker programs “a contemporary form of slavery.”
These are some of the ways in which the border is internalized, where that kind of exclusion and precarity and surveillance and policing of migrants is happening within the nation-state, far beyond the site of the border itself.
The other side to internalization is border externalization. All the technologies of border control that we associate as happening only at the border, like drone surveillance, border concentration camps, mass expulsions, militarized walls, drowning and dehydration at the border, etc., are all happening increasingly in countries other than the ones designing them (see TNI’s extensive work on this). Immigration enforcement is being externalized or outsourced to countries in the Global South.
For example, the US increasingly externalizes its border to Mexico through a number of trade, security, and immigration agreements. We see in the news that Mexican immigration authorities or Mexican government officials are tear gassing and detaining Central American migrants at the behest of American immigration authorities. Mexico now deports more Central Americans than the US does. This was championed under the Obama administration, and is accelerating under the Biden administration. Biden has externalized the US border even further south, into Colombia and Panama in efforts to prevent migration through the Darien. And in the EU, we see the externalization of the border increasingly into the Sahel region. Billions of euros are going into providing funding for migration controls in Mauritania, Tunisia, Libya, Niger, Rwanda, Mali, Sudan, and beyond. Australia uses trade agreements, and dangles them in a contemporary form of imperialism, to force countries like Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and Nauru, to accept border controls and migration prevention campaigns and to outsource detention centers.
One of the arguments of the book is that the new frontiers of border militarization are not necessarily the high-income, imperialist countries, like the US, Canada, Western European countries, or Australia. Rather, these countries outsource migration prevention and border controls to countries in the periphery in the South. They maintain and exacerbate the dynamics of imperialism by forcing countries like Libya, Papua New Guinea, Nauru, Tunisia, Mexico, Turkey, and so on, to enact border control methods and border militarization. Importantly, several of these countries, like Turkey, are also junior partners to larger imperial powers and/or are geo-political powers in an increasingly multipolar world, and their governing regimes are not just complicit or compelled but are actual active perpetrators in repression.
Those are some of the ways in which we can think about the spatiality of borders as existing beyond a line on the map, and really just increasingly encompassing the totality of the planet.
LL: Importantly, you’re not fetishizing that border line, but you’re also not saying that nothing is happening there. You’re showing how the thickness of this line is a murderous thickness, whether it’s in the desert between Mexico and the US, or the Caribbean Sea, or we could add to it the Mozambique Channel, or indeed, the offshore of Australia. If we go back to the specific line that separates the two settler colonies of the United States of America and the United Mexican States, you show how this colonial line has been splitting Indigenous nations, quoting someone saying, “It’s not us who cross the border, it’s the borders that crossed us.” To me, that’s a very important quote because it simultaneously talks about the arbitrariness and violence of the colonial border, but also about the fact that a significant number of people who are deemed “migrants” in the north side of this border are actually Indigenous people of the continent.
HW: Yes, I appreciate that question because I think one of the things that I was trying to do in this book comes from a necessary critique of migrant justice movements, including those I have been active in, about anti-Indigenous and anti-Black erasure and racism. Migrant justice struggles here have often been conceptualized and represented as the struggle of non-Indigenous and non-Black ‘brown migrants,’ and not paid particular attention to the ways anti-Black and anti-Indigenous genocides uniquely shape experiences/violences of displacement and immobility.
So it is not only important to highlight the dispossession, displacement, and migration of Indigenous and Black peoples (not mutually exclusive), but also how anti-migrant racism is necessarily constituted through Indigenous elimination, anti-Black enslavement, and imperialist expansion. And so I aimed to think through and learn from organizers and scholars—for instance, the Red Nation, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Haitian Bridge Alliance, UndocuBlack Network, Nick Estes, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Audra Simpson, Shannon Speed, Dionne Brand, Robyn Maynard, Katherine Mckittrick, Paul Gilroy, SA Smythe, Rinaldo Walcott, Idil Abdillahi, Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Vilna Bashi Treitler, and many others who have been thinking about borders and migration in relationship to settler colonialism and anti-Blackness.
For example, in the North American context, so many people from Mexico and Central America who are displaced from their lands, as a result of ongoing colonialism and extraction and capitalism, are Indigenous (including Afro-Indigenous) peoples.
And globally, a significant majority of people who are being displaced from their homes and lands are Indigenous and/or Black communities, so it’s really important not to erase that reality. We see this converging in real time at the US-Mexico border. The Assembly of African Migrants in Tapachula in the US-Mexico border region was organizing with more than three thousand people from Angola, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Republic of Congo, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo. Robyn Maynard argues that “the global positioning of Black life as enslavable placed Black migrants in a structural position that differs from other migrants of color.”
And as you note, in the US context, a number of communities that are impacted by Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” protocols are Indigenous people. When we are thinking of who is being immobilized, we tend to think of Central Americans through this kind of pan-Latinx or mestizx kind of identity. But as Shannon Speed would remind us, it is important to highlight the particular struggles of Indigenous peoples as there’s a structural vulnerability especially for Indigenous women migrants, because their migration represents a transit between Latin American and Anglo-American settler state structures, both of which are built on Indigenous elimination. And so it’s really important to recognize that a large proportion of Central American migrants and also Mexican migrants are Indigenous peoples who were colonized by the Spanish, captured by Mexico and various Central American nation states (who also imposed borders throughout Indigenous lands), and now experience intense land dispossession and criminalization of migration.
The second point is that if we interrogate the very formation of the southern US border, it would show us that bordering regimes were conceived as a method of eliminating Indigenous people and controlling Black people. Without going into a whole history, I’ll just point out a few things. One is that the entire formation of the US–Mexico border was born out of conquest when the US seized more than 525,000 square miles of territory in Mexico. In 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo forced the annexation of half of Mexico by the United States. This, of course, includes the conquest of Indigenous peoples who were forcibly assimilated into the US nation state, and later forcibly assimilated into US citizenship. Shortly after, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act granted slaveholders legal powers to kidnap and capture Black people that they claimed had escaped to the so-called “free states” or to Mexico.
Slaveowners would form border militias and conduct cross border raids in the quest to capture Black people to prevent them from escaping to Mexico. These early border militias swelled their ranks from slave patrols.
So one of the earliest methods of border controls in the United States was actually to keep Black people in. These early laws and militias regulating and punishing Black movement constitute a foundational continuity of immigration enforcement today. Benjamin Ndugga-Kabuye and Tia Oso of BAJI note how preoccupation with Black movement is central to mobility control in the US. And writing globally, Rinaldo Walcott and Idil Abdallahi emphasize how it is impossible to think about the politics of migration outside of anti-Black racial logics.
I think these are some of the ways in which we’re being pushed to think of borders as constituted through empire, enslavement, and elimination, which thus helps orient us in thinking about migrant justice struggles, abolitionist struggles, decolonial struggles as intertwined.
LL: Your book describes two interconnectedness: on the one hand, that of the imperial fascist regimes of violence in India, Brazil, Palestine—we could say Modi’s India, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and Netanyahu’s Israel, but that would really be pointing at straw men rather than at the actual structures—and on the other hand, another that constructs internationalist solidarity, which, of course, we want to push forward. Can you talk about those?
HW: Internationalism is necessary because oftentimes we either tend to focus on, you know, particular right-wing leaders, like Trump or Netanyahu or Modi without interrogating the more structural aspects of state and/or right-wing ideological formations, and the ways in which, for example, Zionism or Hindutva travel. Internationalism is also necessary because sometimes we can become focused on a particular nation state and wonder which state is the worst. Is the US worse than the UK or is Australia worse than Canada, etc. And that doesn’t really give us that transnational or structural lens that we need because structures are often shared. For example, settler colonial states like Canada and Australia are violent products of European empires with almost equivalent histories and policies (as Brenna Bhandar’s work shows) of dispossession, enslavement, indentureship, land theft, and capitalist accumulation.
LL: Yes, I feel that this way of thinking is still quite nationalist, like “No you’re not the worst; we’re the worst!”
HW: Yes, it’s a sort of perverse left exceptionalism, not a “We’re the best!” sort of exceptionalism, but rather a “We’re the worst!”—I am being a bit flippant here, but I hope you get the point. And, of course, depending on the position of particular nation states in the current global economy and world order, they may actually be worse in terms of their capacity to enact violence, so that is important to always highlight. But sometimes that kind of myopic view on the United States leaves Europe off the hook, for example, or Canada.
For those reasons, it’s really important that we see and understand the ways in which, despite the important differences and sometimes contradictions between forces on the right, that there are homologies and similarities. One that I trace in the book is relationships between white nationalism, Zionism, and Hindutva, which may seem contradictory at first glance because white nationalists are completely racist and antisemitic, but if we think about them as fascist supremacist ideologies, we see how they converge, especially at the nation-state level. The relationships between the United States, Israel, and India are some of the most dangerous alliances in the world—see, for example, Azad Essa’s work—as these are countries that control the world’s largest and most powerful militaries, regardless of who those figureheads are, and that are enacting some of the most brutal colonial occupations, from Palestine to Kashmir, which is the most militarized zone in the world. So these homologies are important to understand so that we don’t allow countries like India to get away with this kind of rhetoric of “post-colonialism” as a shield. For example, during the farmer protests in Punjab (with a long legacy of repression by the Indian state), Modi was telling people outside the country not to “interfere” and weaponized anti-colonial struggle to actually further repression and counter-insurgency. We also see how Zionist and Hindu supremacists forces are mobilizing liberal left ideas like multiculturalism and shallow anti-racism in the US, Canada, and the UK to introduce concepts like “Hinduphobia,” as well as the IHRA definition on anti-Semitism to shut down critiques of Hindu supremacy and caste oppression, and Zionism and Israeli apartheid, respectively. This kind of global escalation of the right has to be countered by a radical internationalist left.
The last thing I’ll mention on internationalism that is particularly important in relation to the border is anti-migrant xenophobia. So many forms of right-wing nationalism really hinge on this xenophobia and fear-mongering about the dividing line between the “us” and “them.” Fascism is actually constituted through the border; fascist tendencies and the violence of seemingly fringe far-right groups requires the quotidian violence of the border. To be anti-fascist is to abolish the border. The social organization of difference through the border and anti-migrant xenophobia maintains race and class and more, and feeds the rhetoric of “protect our borders,” “protect our jobs,” “protect our culture” etc. This dangerous jargon is a unifying issue among conservatives and fascists and liberals alike, so I think it’s really important that left movements get very clear on migrant justice.
For example, some labor unions and segments of the left are calling for the expulsion of migrant workers and more border controls in order to supposedly protect jobs for citizen workers: a logic that constructs migrants as an attack on the working class, rather than a central component of the working class. And that is not just right-wing rhetoric that is racist, it is also a misreading of how borders work. Borders work in the service of capital, not the other way around. More border controls will only segment the working class further and allow capital to super-exploit cheapened labor. To think that the border will protect against a lowered wage floor, and to think that migrant workers (not the border and bosses) are somehow responsible for lower wages, is a really misplaced, and frankly, racist nationalist rhetoric that we have to counter in the spirit of internationalism.
LL: You finish the book with a vision of abolition and solidarity weaving futures. Could you describe them to our readers?
HW: Following on the idea that the border is more than a line on the map, an abolitionist vision is rooted in a vision of the abolition of all bordering and ordering regimes. It’s not enough to open the borders, we have to call for no borders and radically alter social relationships of power at and beyond the border. In order to dismantle borders, we have to abolish the divides that they entrench between the so-called core and periphery, between sites of extraction and sites of consumption, between the wealthy and the impoverished. This reality of global apartheid of who lives where and under what conditions can only be eliminated through a radical transformation of our entire world.
To abolish the border is to also abolish all the conditions that give rise to the border.
So that means fighting for migrant justice as part of and alongside movements for an end to imperialism, an end to occupation, an end to capitalism, an end to hierarchies of domination. The freedom to move and the freedom to stay are necessary corollaries of each other: people have the right not to be displaced from their lands and homes, and people have the right to move to seek safety and dignity. We want an end to imperialist wars, to conquest, to extractive capitalist trade agreements, to corporate-fueled climate change: all of this must end.
Racial citizenship and racial capitalism and the nation-state are seamlessly connected. And so for me, an abolitionist vision that demands no borders, no wars, no policing, no sweatshops: these are all connected visions of freedom and liberation, and completely transform both the world and our consciousness by allowing us to dream and build outside of the confines of the structures we are currently trapped in. ■