Undoing Border Imperialism. Harsha Walia
cast migrants of color as eternal outsiders: in the nation-state but not of the nation-state. Coming full circle, border imperialism illuminates how colonial anxieties about identity and inclusion within Western borders are linked to the racist justifications for imperialist missions beyond Western borders that generate cycles of mass displacement. We are all, therefore, simultaneously separated by and bound together by the violences of border imperialism.
Discussing border imperialism also foregrounds an analysis of colonialism. Colonially drawn borders divide Indigenous families from each other. Just as the British Raj partitioned my parent’s homeland, Indigenous communities across Turtle Island have been separated as a result of the colonially imposed Canadian and US borders. Indigenous lands are increasingly becoming the battleground for settler states’ escalating policies of border militarization. In southern Arizona, for example, the O’odham have been organizing against the construction of the US-Mexico border wall, part of which would run through the Tohono O’odham reservation and make travel to ceremonial sites across the border more difficult. Alex Soto, a Tohono O’odham arrested for occupying US Border Patrol offices in 2010, states that the
Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Border Patrol, Immigration Custom Enforcement, and their corporate backers such as Wackenhut, are the true criminals. . . . Indigenous Peoples have existed here long before these imposed borders, and Elders inform us that we always honored freedom of movement. . . . The impacts of border militarization are constantly being made invisible in and by the media, and the popular culture of this country. . . . Border militarization destroys Indigenous communities.(6)
Borders also factionalize heterogeneous communities and rigidify allegiances to artificially homogenized statist nationalisms. Multiracial Indigenous feminist Jessica Danforth writes, “What the border has done to far too many of our First Nations communities is horrific and atrocious on so many levels—and it has poisoned our minds to think in singular factions, instead of a full circle. . . . We belong to Mother Earth in whom no one has claim over—and where there aren’t any borders.”(7)
Rather than conceiving of immigration as a domestic policy issue to be managed by the state, the lens of border imperialism focuses the conversation on the systemic structuring of global displacement and migration through and in collusion with capitalism, colonial empire, state building, and hierarchies of oppression. These interrelated and overlapping forces of political, economic, and social organization shape the nature of migration, and hence inform the experiences of migrants and displaced peoples. Australian author McKenzie Wark reminds us, “Those who seek refuge, who are rarely accorded a voice, are nevertheless the bodies that confront the injustice of the world. They give up their particular claim to sovereignty and cast themselves on the waters. Only when the world is its own refuge will their limitless demand be met.”(8) From May Day marches of millions of undocumented migrants in the United States and riots of immigrant youths in France to weekly detention center protests in Australia and daily mobilizations against the Israeli apartheid wall, localized resistances are manifestations of a global phenomenon affirming the freedom to stay, move, and return in the face of border imperialism. Indigenous Secwepemc artist Tania Willard observes, “Fences and borders can’t stop the flow of rivers, migration of butterflies, or the movement of people, and won’t stop the spirit of freedom.”(9)
Undoing border imperialism would mean a freer society for everyone since borders are the nexus of most systems of oppression. While this book focuses on mobilizing against state borders, borders and the violences they enforce surround us. Much like immigration laws criminalizing migrants for transgressing state borders, trespass and private property laws outlaw squatting and the common use of space, while legalizing the colonial occupation and division of Indigenous lands. Interrogating such discursive and embodied borders—their social construction and structures of affect—reveals how we are not just spatially segregated but also hierarchically stratified. Whether through military checkpoints, gated communities in gentrified neighborhoods, secured corporate boardrooms, or gendered bathrooms, bordering practices delineate zones of access, inclusion, and privilege from zones of invisibility, exclusion, and death. Everywhere that bordering and ordering practices proliferate, they reinforce the enclosure of the commons, thus reifying apartheid relations at the political, economic, social, and psychological levels. Palestinian scholar Edward Said writes, “Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imagining.”(10)
Decolonizing Movement Borders
Maybe home is somewhere I’m going and never have been before.
—Warsan Shire, “To Be Vulnerable and Fearless: An Interview with Writer Warsan Shire”
Beyond conceptualizing border imperialism, this book is about migrant justice movements undoing border imperialism. As queer black educator Darnell Moore remarks, “To live, we must put an end to those things that would, otherwise, be cause for our own funerals.”(11) The process of grassroots community organizing—resisting together and building solidarities against the various modes of governance constituted through borders—leads to the generation of transnational relations, which novelist Kiran Desai calls “a bridge over the split.”(12) It is through this kind of active engagement against imperialism, capitalism, state building, and oppression—along with the nurturing of emancipatory and expansive social relations and identities, forged in and through the course of struggle—that visionary alternatives to border imperialism can be actualized.
All movements need an anchor in a shared positive vision, not a homogeneous or exact or perfect condition, but one that will nonetheless dismantle hierarchies, disarm concentrations of power, guide just relations, and nurture individual autonomy alongside collective responsibility. In the prophetic words of black historian Robin Kelley, “Without new visions we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down. We not only end up confused, rudderless, and cynical, but we forget that making a revolution is not a series of clever maneuvers and tactics but a process that can and must transform us.”(13) This necessitates creating concrete alternatives and strengthening relations outside the purview of the state’s institutions and its matrices of power and control. Such alternatives unsettle the state and capitalism by functioning outside their reach.
Decolonization is a framework that offers a positive and concrete prefigurative vision. Prefiguration is the notion that our organizing reflects the society we wish to live in—that the methods we practice, institutions we create, and relationships we facilitate within our movements and communities align with our ideals. Many activists argue that prefiguration involves envisioning a completely “new” society. But as a prefiguring framework, decolonization grounds us in an understanding that we have already inherited generations of evolving wisdom about living freely and communally while stewarding the Earth from anticolonial commoning practices, anticapitalist workers’ cooperatives, antioppressive communities of care, and in particular matriarchal Indigenous traditions. As theorists Aman Sium, Chandni Desai, and Eric Ritskes forcefully assert, “Decolonization demands the valuing of Indigenous sovereignty in its material, psychological, epistemological, and spiritual forms.”(14)
Enacting a politics of decolonization also necessitates an undoing of the borders between one another. Queer feminist philosopher Judith Butler unmasks and celebrates human vulnerability and interdependency: “Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one’s best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other.”(15)
In the face of omnipresent physical and psychological colonialism, decolonization traverses the political and personal realms of our lives, and honors diverse articulations of nonhierarchical and nonoppressive association. Decolonization movements create an alternative to power through committed struggle against settler colonialism, border imperialism, capitalism, and oppression, as well as through concrete practices that center other ways of laboring, thinking, loving, stewarding, and living. Ultimately, decolonization grounds us in gratitude and humility through the realization