Ron shortened his Sanskrit name to make it translatable over emails sent to and from Silicon Valley. He crosses the Indian border with a newly purchased Person of Indian Origin card that conceals his grudging disdain for the nation’s poor, and his Lonely Planet accent. Ron skips across electronic sidewalks from New Jersey to New Delhi, the clip of his Italian leather shoes impatiently tapping in border security lines.
Faraz sees India from the rooftops of Pakistan. Delicate Ghazal heard across fault lines of nations resonate with him, like the songs of mothers singing mother tongues. At the border his name is translated into an electronic ledger of suspects and detainees. Curves of prophetic name turns to hard English letters and prison numbers, as unforgiving as passport photos and the harsh lights of shopping malls and interrogators.
The irony of our time perhaps lies in efforts to tighten borders and fix authenticity, while bodies and voices change, exchange, and multiply, leaving little trace or truth of origin. The world is made up of imposters.
—Tara Atluri
What Is Border Imperialism?
The world was born yearning to be a home for everyone.
—Eduardo Galeano, “Through the Looking Glass: Q & A with Eduardo Galeano”
For the past several years, Indigenous organizations in Australia have been issuing “Original Passports” to asylum seekers who have been detained or denied legal status by the Australian government. Most recently, in May 2012, passports were issued to two detained Tamil asylum seekers. During the ceremony, Ray Jackson of the Indigenous Social Justice Association said, “The Australian Government must stop imprisoning Indigenous people, and they must stop imprisoning asylum seekers. I am proud to welcome people in need into our community.” Indigenous elder Robbie Thorpe commented, “The Australian Government has no legitimate right to grant or refuse entry to anyone in this country, let alone lock up people fleeing war and persecution.”(1)
Such moments of solidarity between Indigenous people and migrants represent not only growing networks of understanding and alliance between marginalized communities, but also a fundamental challenge to the authority of settler-colonial governments and the sovereignty of Western statehood. Western governance and statehood is constituted through multiple modes, including the primacy of the border that delineates and reproduces territorial, political, economic, cultural, and social control. As activists Alessandra Moctezuma and Mike Davis write, “All borders are acts of state violence inscribed in landscape.”(2) Constantly being redefined, borders represent a regime of practices, institutions, discourses, and systems that I define as border imperialism.
In this chapter, I establish the broad theoretical groundwork for conceptualizing border imperialism and its four overlapping structurings referenced in the introduction. Border imperialism is characterized by the entrenchment and reentrenchment of controls against migrants, who are displaced as a result of the violences of capitalism and empire, and subsequently forced into precarious labor as a result of state illegalization and systemic social hierarchies.
Border imperialism is a useful analytic framework for organizing migrant justice movements in North America. It takes us away from an analysis that blames and punishes migrants, or one that forces migrants to assimilate and establish their individual worth. Instead, reflecting Thorpe’s words, it reorients the gaze squarely on the processes of displacement and migration within the global political economy of capitalism and colonialism. I argue that circulations of capital and labor stratifications in the global economy, narratives of empire, and hierarchies of race, class, and gender within state building all operate in tandem to lay the foundation for border imperialism.
An analysis of border imperialism encapsulates a dual critique of Western state building within global empire: the role of Western imperialism in dispossessing communities in order to secure land and resources for state and capitalist interests, as well as the deliberately limited inclusion of migrant bodies into Western states through processes of criminalization and racialization that justify the commodification of their labor. Western states thus are major arbiters in determining if and under what conditions people migrate.
I use the term West not only to denote the geographic site of the global North (that is, Europe, Australia, and North America) but also to reference the dominance of Western political, economic, and social formations and ideologies that have led to the foundation of other settler-colonial states such as Israel, and that are increasingly adopted by neoliberal states in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Though political and economic governance are not uniform across these states, as Japanese scholar Naoki Sakai comments about the West as an ideology, “Unlike all the other names associated with geographic particularities, it also implies the refusal of its self-delimitation or particularistic determination. . . . In short, the West must represent the moment of the universal, which subsumes the particular.”(3) Border imperialism works to extend and externalize the universalization of Western formations beyond its own boundaries through settler colonialism and military occupations, as well as through the globalization of capitalism by imposing financial agreements and exploiting human and natural resources. Simultaneously, the reinforcement of physical and psychological borders against racialized bodies is a key instrument through which to maintain the sanctity and myth of superiority of Western civilization.
Displacements and Secured Borders
The itinerary was stamped in our palms at birth.
—Monika Zobel, “The Immigrant Searches the Map for Countries Larger Than His Palm”
Butterflies have always had wings; people have always had legs. While history is marked by the hybridity of human societies and the desire for movement, the reality of most of migration today reveals the unequal relations between rich and poor, between North and South, between whiteness and its others. As the Frassanito Network observes, “To speak of autonomy of migration doesn’t mean to remove from the center of the political debate the mechanisms of domination and exploitation which determine the migrants’ life.”(4) The International Organization for Migration and the United Nations (UN) estimate that there are a billion migrants around the world, 740 million of who are migrant workers inside or outside their own countries.(5) According to figures published by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, there are 43.7 million forcibly displaced people in the world, including 27.5 million people who are internally displaced within their own countries.(6) Half the world’s refugees are women, and approximately 45 percent of forcibly displaced people are under the age of eighteen.(7)
The first defining process within border imperialism is displacements as a result of the coercive extractions of capitalism and colonialism, and the simultaneous fortification of the border—often by those very same Western powers that are complicit in these displacements—which renders the migration of displaced people as perilous. Large-scale displacements and the precarious conditions into which migrants are cast are not coincidental but rather foundational to the structuring of border imperialism.
Western imperialism is a major cause of mass displacements and migrations. Due to the dispossession of 750,000 Palestinians from their homelands in 1948 and the ongoing illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine, stateless Palestinians form one of the world’s largest refugee communities, now numbering almost five million people.(8) Following two invasions and subsequent military occupations,