Undoing Border Imperialism
Reviews
"Migrants, particularly undocumented migrants or asylum seekers arriving irregularly, are punished, locked up, and deported for the very act of migration. In order to justify their incarceration, the state has to allege some kind of criminal or illegal act. Within common discourses, the victim of this criminal act is the state, and the alleged assault is on its borders. The state becomes a tangible entity, with its own personhood and boundaries that must not be violated. Butler describes the policing of the state and its national subject as a "relentlessly aggressive" and "masculinist" project. Within this concept of sexualized nationhood, borders are engendered as needing protection, or as cultural theorist Katrina Schlunke puts it, "vulnerable shores that must be kept intact and secured against the threat of un-negotiated penetration by strangers." By invoking the state itself as a victim, migrants themselves are cast as illegals and criminals who are committing an act of assault on the state. Migrants become prisoners of passage; their unauthorized migration is considered a trespass, and their very existence is criminalized." "The power of state control and the insidious nature of racism force us to metabolize our own oppression, and many of us become "the good Indian" or "good immigrant" who is silent, complicit, and grateful to the colonial master." "Migrants, many once Indigenous to their own lands, but often displaced due to Orientalist crusading and corporate plundering, are thrown into capitalism’s pool of labor and, in a cruel twist, violently inserted into the political economy of genocide: stolen labor on stolen land." "Even an intersectional approach that acknowledges the overlapping and layered nature of power and privilege can lead to a flattening of all oppressions—a simple "additive effect" rather than "entirely different conceptions of people’s lived realities."
Highlights
The International Labor Organization estimates that there are eighty-six million migrant workers across the world.(79)
Corporations that run private prisons and detention centers made over five billion dollars in combined annual profits in the United States over the past decade.
Canada detains approximately nine to fifteen thousand migrants every year, more than one-third of whom are held in provincial prisons.(51)
In the United States, undocumented migrants comprise one of the fastest-growing prison populations with over two hundred detention facilities, representing an 85 percent increase in detention spaces, and approximately three million detentions since 2003.(47)
By invoking the state itself as a victim, migrants themselves are cast as illegals and criminals who are committing an act of assault on the state.
The effects of Western colonialism and capitalism have created political economies that compel people to move, and yet the West denies culpability and accountability for displaced migrants.
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)
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)
Abraham in Ethiopia cannot cross the border, but his beans carry the fragrant aromas of coffee down the sparkling Western city streets.
policies that illegalize human beings are legal and moral fictions.
borders are the nexus of most systems of oppression.
Borders also factionalize heterogeneous communities and rigidify allegiances to artificially homogenized statist nationalisms.
The racist, classist, heteropatriarchal, and ableist construction of the legal/desirable migrant justifies the criminalization of the illegal/undesirable migrant, which then emboldens the conditions for capital to further exploit the labor of migrants.
Second, let us consider even the term immigrant. This term presumes that people must naturally be bound to one place, and if they travel, then they are where they do not belong.
This book appears on the shelf ingrisz
