Harsha Walia has been involved in anti-colonial and anti-capitalist migrant justice movements for the past two decades. Her first book, Undoing Border Imperialism, offered a movement analysis of the foundational connections between migration, borders and imperialism, with insights into the grassroots organizing her work comes out of. Building on this, her latest work, Border and Rule offers a crucial resource for going beyond nation-based thinking about border regimes around the world and building an internationalist movement for their abolition.

In Border and Rule, Walia avoids comparisons of one border regime or another as “worse” or “better,” focusing on how borders are consistently a “method of capital” involved in seizing and holding territory and in the segmentation of the working class. Capitalism has always depended on the racialized ordering of social groups and the restriction of pools of labor. Border regimes are the institutional form of a racist logic that sees certain lives as more or less valuable, more or less disposable.

She shows how both right-wing and liberal perspectives converge on the idea that we are living through a “migration crisis,” only differing on whether they see this as more of a threat or a tragedy. Rejecting this crisis image as inaccurate and alarmist, Walia frames the current situation as a crisis of displacement and immobility. The true crisis is around why people move — dispossession, war and spiraling ecological destruction — and the mechanisms designed to then keep them out of sight and out of mind.

Grounded in her own experiences in solidarity struggles and the dedicated study of an array of radical thinkers and movements, Border and Rule helps us to grasp the deep links between forms of violence that are too often thought of as separated from each other: the connections between borders and racial citizenship, settler colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy and environmental destruction.

The book pushes for a no border politics that involves imagining and fighting for a genuine alternative to the world in its current shape. This means creating alternatives not only to the besieged visions of the right wing, but also to the already murderous and profitable border regimes as developed under neoliberalism. We need to build confident movements and organizations with the ambition of radically changing this world. Border and Rule is a challenging and aspirational work that urges us to aim for that kind of global solidarity and liberation, and it should be studied closely.

— Liam Hough

Liam Hough: In looking at the US-Mexico border, you show how it has always had three functions in “processes of expansion, elimination and enslavement.” Regarding people on the move, on the other hand, you talk about migration as a form of reparations. Could you elaborate on these points please? How unique is the US-Mexico example in terms of how border regimes function?

Harsha Walia: I think the southern US border with Mexico is illustrative in terms of thinking about border formations and also how we think of contemporary social movements. In the US and Canadian context, anti-migrant border controls are often seen as separate from anti-Indigenous and anti-Black genocide. Those forms of violence are often seen as parallel to each other — where the shared connection is systemic racism and white supremacy — but generally migrant justice, Indigenous rights and Black liberation are seen as distinct struggles. Black and Indigenous organizers and scholars such as Audra Simpson, Shannon Speed, Robyn Maynard, Black Alliance for Just Immigration and the Red Nation, however, have repeatedly pointed out that is not the case and highlighted the problems with such an approach.

First, bordering practices are structurally bound up in anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism, as well as imperialist expansion. Often, we think of the border as a kind of domestic issue that is separate from global politics. The example of the US-Mexico border, however, is of a border that was formed as a direct result of conquest and the forced annexation of over 525,000 square miles of territory from Mexico. The US seized all of that territory in 1848 after the imposition of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which followed the full-blown military invasion of Mexico. This is the history of numerous nation-state borders: they demarcate territory in ways that are bound up in the workings of empire. The British, the French, the Dutch were literally creating borders wherever they went in the so-called post-colonial era when borders were imposed by these European powers. We often naturalize the existence of borders, which removes them from this entanglement with empire. This is why Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz argues that pervasive liberal rhetoric like “a nation of immigrants” is part of a narrative that erases the violence of conquests and borders upon colonized communities.

Further, the formation of the US-Mexico border in the 1840s and 1850s is bound up in Indigenous genocide and anti-Black controls. When the US forcibly annexed territory from Mexico, sovereign Indigenous nations — including the Comanche, Apache, Seri, Coahuilteca and Kiowa — were forcibly assimilated into the US nation-state. This is, in fact, the entire history of settler citizenship in places like the US, Canada and Australia. Immigration and citizenship were weapons to further the genocidal elimination of Indigenous political and social formations. The Dawes Act and the Indian Citizenship Act in the US basically imposed US citizenship on Indigenous peoples, and a condition of this violent assimilation was that Indigenous peoples had to agree to live on individual plots of land that were carved from the US government’s confiscation and partitioning of their tribal lands.

Around the same time as the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act was passed. This allowed slaveholders to kidnap and capture Black people they claimed had escaped. After the 1848 annexation, slave owners also formed militias to patrol the US–Mexico border to prevent Black people from escaping to Mexico. Some of the earliest bordering practices at the US-Mexico border were not only to keep migrants out but were also to control enslaved Black people and keep them in. Contemporary immigration enforcement draws heavily from this foundational terror of anti-Black violence, particularly the regulation of Black movement. Rinaldo Walcott and Idil Abdillahi write in their book BlackLife: Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom that “Movements that we now call migration are founded in anti-blackness, taking their logic from transatlantic slavery.”

Much of this migration is a result of ongoing colonialism and imperial displacement.

A final point is that today migrants are also, of course, Indigenous and Black people (importantly, not mutually exclusive). So, in our thinking about who is a migrant and who is a refugee, it is very important that we do not erase the experiences and often disproportionate violence against Indigenous and Black migrants and refugees. A large proportion of Central American and Mexican migrants and refugees to the US are Indigenous; a huge number of migrants and refugees trapped in Mexico are from Haiti and from the African continent, many of whom now organize through the Assembly of African Migrants; and the historic and contemporary material relations and roots of anti-Blackness form the basis of today’s murderous European border policies — as described in the expansive formulation of the “Black Mediterranean.” And here, returning full circle to the first point, so much of this migration is a result of ongoing colonialism and imperial displacement, underwritten by anti-Indigenous and anti-Black violence: whether military occupations, land thefts, resource extraction, capitalist trade agreements, labor exploitation or climate change.

As Stuart Hall put it, “Migration is increasingly the joker in the globalization pack.” As such, we can understand migration as both an act of individual self-determination and as an expression of decolonial reparations and redistribution long due.

Your analysis is rooted in the theorization of racial capitalism, which has become a more prevalent term thanks to many disparate struggles of the past few years. You stress that this perspective sees racism as both “a manipulative tactic of divide-and-conquer and the basis of material social relations.” Could you give a summary of how you interpret and use this framework and how it should challenge and deepen leftist understandings of capitalism?

The framing of racial capitalism that I draw on is rooted in the works of Cedric Robinson, Neville Alexander, Robin D.G. Kelley, Angela Davis and the larger Black Marxist tradition. Cedric Robinson theorized the linkage between racial expropriation and capitalism as racial capitalism — so as to make clear that the social construction and the real differentiation of race is not a secondary outcome of capitalism, but rather that racism is constitutive of capitalism.

What is crucial here is that the racial expropriation of land, labor and life itself is innate to capitalism. Capitalism actually relies on, requires and reproduces racial hierarchies. In that sense, there can be no anti-capitalism that is not also anti-racist and there can be no anti-racism that is not also anti-capitalist. Contrary to the claims of liberal market orthodoxy — and the core assumptions of much of the left, past and present — capitalism does not produce a universal relation of waged labor. Racism is a material structure that is foundational to labor exploitation, to conquest, to territorial expansion, to dispossession, to enslavement, to corporate ownership, to surveillance, to bordering regimes — really to the entire maintenance of the so-called Global North vis-à-vis the Global South.

These are necessary understandings to move us away from the constant debates about whether race or class is more important, or whether race is simply identity and class is material. The forefront of global class struggles are struggles against racial capitalism and its various tentacles: whether it’s migrant domestic workers leading struggles as workers, as feminists and as migrants; struggles against police because they are the enforcers of racial capitalism; struggles against gentrification and evictions led by low income communities of color; or strikes against Amazon, Uber and the whole gig economy — while seemingly disparate, these are all fundamentally part of the fight against racial capitalism.

We are repeatedly presented with the idea of a “migration crisis” or “border crisis.” You reject these terms, arguing that the reality is a crisis of displacement and immobility — a position that would echo the claims of people on the move everywhere. Could you elaborate on this please? How does this focus on displacement and immobility also go beyond simply reframing how we think about crossing state borders, say in relation to gentrification?

I, alongside others, reframe the term “migration crisis” for a number of reasons. I think the global migration crisis is more accurately described as a crisis of displacement and immobility. The emphasis on displacement forces us to interrogate the root causes of conquest, capitalism and climate change that are the real culprits and drivers of displacement. And, further, when we say “migration” crisis, we tend to assume that most people are actually able to move in the search for safety — when in fact most people are immobilized. Jennifer Hyndman and Wenona Giles note that less than 1 percent of refugees living in camps around the world find a permanent home. People are not able to move because border controls are deadly and people are being contained at border sites, in refugee camps, through interdiction, pushbacks, restrictive visa requirements and smart borders etc. So, I think reframing the migration crisis as a displacement and immobility crisis illuminates that most migrants are forcibly displaced and systematically immobilized. Displacement and immobility, then — not free movement — is the reality of racial imperial management in our contemporary era.

There can be no anti-capitalism that is not also anti-racist and there can be no anti-racism that is not also anti-capitalist.

Second, language such as “migrant crisis” or “refugee crisis” is a pretext to shore up further border securitization and repressive practices of detention and deportation. Images and language of swarms, floods, caravans or invaders all depict and villainize migrants and refugees as the cause of a “border crisis.” Whenever the state claims a crisis, its responses end up in service to the state and reconfigurations of state power. Perhaps most ironically and offensively, the migration crisis is declared a new crisis with Western countries positioned as its primary victims, even though for four centuries nearly 80 million Europeans became settler-colonists across the Americas and Oceania, while four million indentured laborers from Asia were scattered across the globe and the transatlantic slave trade kidnapped and enslaved 15 million Africans. Colonialism, genocide, slavery and indentureship are not only completely erased as continuities of violence in current invocations of a “migration crisis” — they are also the very conditions of possibility for Western notions of bordered sovereignty.

Finally — and this is more semantics but important nonetheless — is that questioning who is considered a “migrant” within the narrative of “migration crisis” blows open the lid on global asymmetries of power. We never talk about business travelers, expats, diplomats, vacationers etc. as migrants. Even though there are millions of people on the move today, including people Columbusing all around the world on luxury yachts, people hopping on airplanes in first-class every week, people with investor class immigrant visas, that kind of movement is not surveilled, scapegoated, scrutinized or considered problematic. In fact, under our system of colonialism and capitalism, that kind of movement — representing power and dominant race, class, caste, settler status in the empire — is actually celebrated and sought after.

Gentrifiers, for example, are the new colonial pioneers, usurping land and property and building gated communities enforced through policing. So, when we say, “migration crisis,” we are not actually talking about all kinds of movement or anyone on the move. In fact, embedded in the language of “migration crisis” is the anti-Black idea of a certain kind of inherently undesirable movement: the unregulated, ungovernable movement of predominantly racialized poor and oppressed peoples. When the state and mainstream media invokes a “migration crisis,” it is not all movement or any and all people crossing borders that they have in mind. Rather, it is specifically displaced and immobilized people on the Other side of whiteness and capital and empire who are being dehumanized, who are being contained and who are being surveilled and captured by carceral systems and borders.