and legal right for colonial powers to conquer supposedly barren Indigenous lands.
The world over, Indigenous communities are at the forefront of resisting dispossession while facing the brunt of displacement, particularly from rural areas into urban centers. The forced privatization and neoliberalization of subsistence farming has resulted in the loss of rural land for millions across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. These displacements bring astounding numbers of people to the centers of capital in order to survive. Forced to endure grinding poverty and stigmatization, displaced people make up the mass in urban slums and low-income neighborhoods. UN figures reveal over one billion slum dwellers across the world in 2005.(29) Women are overrepresented in these statistics, forced into the informal economies of sex work, domestic work, and street vending. This is what border imperialism, embedded in colonialism and capitalism, engenders.
The Canary Islands, off the coast of Morocco, are a critical convergence of colonial displacement, forced labor, capitalist circulation, and border securitization within border imperialism. Spain colonized the Indigenous Guanches of the Canary Islands in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and imposed a plantation economy that used forced labor to produce sugarcane and cochineal as cash crops. Today, as the outermost region of the European Union, the islands are a major gateway for African migrants into Europe. Migrants from the western regions of Africa—born of a legacy of slavery, civil wars fueled by Western geopolitical interests, and the colonial Scramble for Africa with its contemporary expression of landgrabs—flee to the Canary Islands in the tens of thousands every year. This is one of the most dangerous and heavily patrolled migration routes in the world, with a Spanish official estimating that 40 percent of those attempting the journey die en route.(30) Even according to conservative estimates cited by the Red Cross, approximately fifteen hundred migrants died trying to reach the Canary Islands in just a five-month period in 2005.(31)
Border securitization operates not at a fixed site but rather through structures and technologies of power across geographies. On the Canary Islands and elsewhere in Europe, the border is pushed outward to secure an external border around what has been called “Fortress Europe.” Created in 2004, Frontex is a European Union regulatory agency tasked with integrated border security and fortification of the European Union’s external border. As noted by Marxist philosopher Étienne Balibar, “Borders are vacillating . . . they are no longer at the border,” and surveillance measures, including military aircrafts, are employed offshore to deter migrants from leaving Africa.(32) Border imperialism therefore excludes migrants through the diffusion of the state’s jurisdiction beyond its actual territorial borders. The European network UNITED for Intercultural Action has documented 16,264 refugee deaths across Europe, most due to drowning at sea and suffocation in containers.(33) Like migrant deaths at the US-Mexico border, this number represents the human face of border militarization policies as people are forced to seek out more clandestine and perilous routes.
The ecological crisis is another recent manifestation of how capitalism propels migration. According to statistics by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, by the year 2020 there will be fifty million climate refugees displaced by climate-induced disasters including droughts, desertification, and mass flooding.(34) It is well documented that climate change correlates directly with carbon and greenhouse gas emissions, with the industrialized, consumption-based economies of the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada topping in emissions per capita and consumption per capita emissions.(35)
Tuvalu is one of dozens of low-lying Pacific Island nations threatened with total submersion as climate change and global warming cause ocean levels to rise drastically. Since 2007, the government of Tuvalu has been urging countries within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Kyoto and the UN General Assembly to heed the impending disaster in Tuvalu. Over one-fifth of Tuvaluans have already been forced to flee their country, many to poor neighboring islands such as Fiji, and others to New Zealand.(36) Despite having the world’s highest emission per capita at 19.6 tons of carbon dioxide per person, Tuvalu’s other neighbor, Australia, has so far refused to accept Tuvaluans as climate refugees.(37) Border imperialism again denies justice to migrants who are its own casualties.
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. Liz Fekete of the Institute of Race Relations sums up the argument against borderlines that normalize protectionism within the West: “This isn’t a separate world. Globalization isn’t a separate world. I’m using words like ‘First World’ [and] ‘Third World’ as easy ways into this argument, but they’re a lie—there is one world and there is one economic system. And that economic system is dominated by Europe, the United States and Japan. This economic system is creating these huge displacements of people, it’s rampaging through the world.”(38) Border imperialism, marked by forced displacements and precarious migrations from rural peripheries to urban cores as well as within and across state borders, is inextricably linked to the global circulations of capital and Western imperial dictates, even as the West seals itself off from these bodies.
Criminalization and the Carceral Network
all around, and creeping
self righteous, let’s say it, fascism,
how else to say, border,
and the militant consumption of everything,
the encampment of the airport, the eagerness
to be all the same, to mince biographies
to some exact phrases, some
exact and toxic genealogy.
—Dionne Brand, “Inventory”
The second defining process of border imperialism is the criminalization of migration and the deliberate construction of migrants as illegals and aliens. The celebrated multiculturalism of Western governments’ carefully handpicked (professional elite or investor class) diaspora exists parallel to what migration researcher Peter Nyers terms the “deportspora”—a vastly larger and more diverse group of migrants.(39) According to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement statistics, deportations under President Barack Obama skyrocketed to a total of 1.4 million people.(40) As researcher and author Anna Pratt writes, “Detention and deportation and the borders they sustain are key technologies in the continuous processes that ‘make up’ citizens and govern populations.”(41)
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.(42) 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.”(43)
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. In a telling representation, one of the principal detention centers in Canada is the Canadian Immigration Prevention Center (Laval). Migrants are not seen for their actual humanity but instead as a problem to be prevented, deterred, managed, and contained. They become stereotyped by politicians, media, and within popular consciousness as floods of people from “over there” who are “disease ridden,” “fraudulent,” or “security
