Undoing Border Imperialism. Harsha Walia
Iraq.(9) With decades of foreign intrusion, including the US and NATO occupations that began in 2001, these two countries have been subjected to the destruction of their infrastructure, privatization of their economies, interference in their governance, and military missions that have killed and tortured over one million people.(10) These interventions are best described as imperialist, defined by Said as “the practice, the theory and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory.”(11) Border imperialism, then, represents the extension and imposition of Western rule, with the current dynamics of global empire maintaining unequal relationships of political, economic, cultural, and social dominance of the West over its colonies.
Border imperialism not only makes possible the transgression and violation of non-Western communities’ autonomy in order to maintain the interests of Western empire, it also denies any accountability for its own victims. For example, despite its incessant rhetoric of humanitarian intervention, which political geographer Derek Gregory characterizes as the “velvet glove wrapped around the iron fist of colonialism,” the United States accepted only 328 refugees from Afghanistan in 2009.(12) This is a shockingly low number, and even more so considering the direct responsibility of the United States in displacing Afghans. Of a staggering total of 4.7 million displaced people in Iraq and Afghanistan, the majority of refugees crossed into bordering countries such as Pakistan and Iran.(13) Contrary to popular belief about Western generosity and openness to refugees, over 80 percent of the world’s refugees reside in neighboring countries within the global South.(14)
Capitalism is another root cause of mass displacements and migrations. A salient example of the impact of capitalist mobility on migration trends in North America is the effects of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which has displaced millions of Mexicans, and the parallel fortification of the U.S.-Mexico border against migrants. Under NAFTA, the Mexican government was forced to eliminate subsidies to corn while corn produced in the United States remained subsidized, thus making US corn cheaper to buy inside Mexico than Mexican corn. As a result, over 15 million Mexicans were forced into poverty, and 1.5 million farmers who lost their farms migrated to the United States to work in low-wage sectors.(15) Professor William Robinson summarizes this dynamic: “The transnational circulation of capital and the disruption and deprivation it causes, in turn, generates the transnational circulation of labor. In other words, global capitalism creates immigrant workers. . . . In a sense, this must be seen as a coerced or forced migration, since global capitalism exerts a structural violence over whole populations and makes it impossible for them to survive in their homeland.”(16)
While such conditions push millions of Mexicans into low-paid work in the United States, the migration from Mexico into the US southwest (itself illegally annexed territory since 1846) is made perilous. Similar to the lack of hospitality toward Afghan and Iraqi refugees, displaced Mexican migrants contend with a heavily fortified border. “We never thought that we’d be in the business of helping to identify remains like in a war zone, and here we are,” says Isabel Garcia, cochair of Tucson-based Coalición de Derechos Humanos.(17) Since millions of dollars were put into increasing border patrols and surveillance on the U.S.-Mexico border through Operation Gatekeeper, which went into effect the same year as NAFTA, the American Civil Liberties Union estimates that 5,600 migrants have died while attempting to cross that border.(18)
Geographer and critical race theorist Mary Pat Brady describes border deaths as “a kind of passive capital punishment,” where “immigrants have been effectively blamed for their own deaths.”(19) Women are particularly vulnerable to sexualized violence at the border. According to a representative of the Latin America and the Caribbean section of the UN Development Fund for Women, at least 60 to 70 percent of undocumented women migrants who cross the border experience sexual abuse.(20) The unfreedom for migrants and concurrent freedom of capital across borders is a defining element of the constant warfare of border imperialism. For example, immediately after 9/11, the Canadian and US governments signed the Canada-US Smart Border Accord to ensure that border restrictions on migrants would not impair the economic necessity of ensuring the free flow of goods, services, and capital across the border.
These instances highlight how mass displacements and precarious migrations are not random but rather largely a result of structural dictates. Within border imperialism, the dual processes of displacement and migration are manufactured through the specific trajectories of colonialism and capitalism. Wark points to the injustice of the system that creates displacement and migration: “Migration is globalisation from below. If the ‘overdeveloped’ world refuses to trade with the underdeveloped world on fair terms, to forgive debt, to extend loans, to lift trade barriers against food and basic manufactured goods, then there can only be an increase in the flow of people.”(21) Border imperialism also illuminates the management of these migrations. Political geographer Reece Jones documents how, under the guise of fighting “illegal immigration” and “terrorism,” three countries alone—United States, India, and Israel—have built over 3,500 miles of walls on their borders.(22) Border controls are used to deter those for who migration is the only option to the plundering of their communities and economies due to the free license granted to capital and militaries.
Capitalism destroys land-based subsistence cultures and concentrates wealth and property into the hands of a select few. Production within capitalism is disconnected from human need, collective creativity, and the natural world—all of which become commodities to be bought and sold on the market. As the dominant global economic system, capitalism is based on a model of private property, production for profit, waged labor, and private ownership of the means of production and distribution. During the Industrial Revolution in late eighteenth-century England, peasants were displaced from their farmlands and forced to migrate to cities and work for scant wages in growing privately owned industries. Neoliberal capitalist globalization, as the current formation of capitalism, intensifies these processes of dispossession and impoverishment.
A central feature of neoliberalism is the increased mobility of capital across borders. The mobility of capital is aided by the multinational nature of corporations, which defy and evade labor and tax regulations through subcontracting, outsourcing, and transnational banking systems. Global economic regimes such as multilateral trade agreements and structural adjustment programs also facilitate the mobility of capital by imposing measures such as privatization, austerity cutbacks, and user-pay social services.
While guaranteeing capital flows, neoliberalism concurrently guarantees labor flexibility. Waged labor is ever-more synonymous with labor flexibility, which necessitates creating a pool of precarious workers. Precarious labor is characterized by poor wages, insecurity in the continuity of work, and lack of protection by even minimal labor regulations. Casual, part-time, and contract labor—which have been termed the “Walmartization” of labor—are increasingly stratified further from more formal and secure forms of employment, and instead are stratified toward indentured and sweatshop labor. The precarity of both labor and social organization are intertwined and cyclic: capitalism requires precarious and exploitable workers to facilitate capital accumulation, and creates those precarious lives through hierarchies of systemic oppression along with its extractions of labor and land. As discussed later in this chapter, a fundamental feature of border imperialism within neoliberalism is to facilitate capital flows across borders while also ensuring labor flexibility by legalizing an exploitable migrant labor workforce.
Analyses of capitalism have generally ignored the central role of land and the colonization of Indigenous societies in the development of capitalism. In Karl Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation, capitalist modes of production explicitly require conquest, enslavement, and the dispossession of communities from the lands on which they subsist. Glen Coulthard, an Indigenous scholar, explains that colonialism “forcefully opened-up what were once collectively held territories and resources to privatization (dispossession), which, over time, came to produce a ‘class’ of workers compelled to enter the exploitative realm of the labor market for their survival (proletarianization).”(23) Colonial and capitalist interests continue to expropriate Indigenous lands, dispossessing Indigenous nations of their territorial base and livelihood, particularly within but not limited to settler-colonial states. Within Canada, there has been a recent push to convert communally held reserve lands—what capitalists refer to as “dead capital”—into fee simple private proverty.(24)