Contents
Foreword, Andrea Smith ix
Introduction 1
“Pick One,” Jessica Danforth 23
Chile Con Carne, Carmen Aguirre 26
The Bracelet, Adil Charkaoui 28
Imposters, Tara Atluri 30
1 What Is Border Imperialism? 35
The Door of No Return, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 81
Enemy Alien, Lily Yuriko Shinde 85
Grassroots Wet’suwet’en, Toghestiy, Mel Bazil, and Freda Huson 87
Chronologies, Rafeef Ziadah 90
Seeking Refuge, Karla Lottini 92
2 Cartography of NOII 95
Working alongside Migrant Farmworkers, Aylwin Lo 159
To Prevent a Deportation, Cecily Nicholson 161
Serendipity, Nassim Elbardouh 164
No Easy Victories, Mostafa Henaway 167
3 Overgrowing Hegemony: Grassroots Theory 171
4 Waves of Resistance Roundtable 205
5 Journeys toward Decolonization 247
Epilogue, Syed Khalid Hussan 277
Notes 285
Foreword
Harsha Walia demonstrates the importance of rearticulating the immigrant rights movement as a struggle against settler colonialism. Within the United States, the immigrant rights movement is gaining traction. These movements, however, often do not question the settler-colonial logics that make “immigration” an issue to begin with.
For instance, many activists in the United States have organized around the Dream Act, which provides pathways to citizenship for those who attend college or join the military. Immigrant rights thus become articulated at the expense of those who are the victims of US imperialist wars abroad. In addition, while increasingly more people, even conservatives, have started to support easier pathways to citizenship, they do so by simultaneously calling for increased border enforcement. This increased border enforcement then negatively impacts Indigenous nations that straddle the border, such as the T’ohono O’odham nation, which has become essentially a US militarized zone.
What remain unquestioned are the capitalist and colonial logics that make immigration an issue in the first place. To begin with, for immigration to be a problem, people must live in a propertied relationship to land. That is, land is a commodity that can be owned and controlled by one group of people. Yet as many Indigenous scholars and activists including Leanne Simpson, Glen Coulthard, Mishuana Goeman, Patricia Monture Angus, and others have pointed out, we all have a responsibility to care for the land that cares for us. Land does not belong to “us”; we belong to the land. A proprietary understanding of land is what settler colonialists used as the excuse to invade Indigenous nations. Because Indigenous peoples did not individually own the land, they were thought to not be properly developing the land, and hence land could become commodified by settlers.
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. Again, many Indigenous scholars and activists have criticized this assumption. Renya Ramirez and Myla Vicenti Carpio have argued that the concept of “urban Natives” presumes that Indigenous peoples never traveled before colonization; that Indigenous peoples must be in a fixed location. If they go somewhere else, they have left their place of authenticity and are on a one-way road to assimilation.
Indigenous activists have been organizing in Arizona against SB 1070—which further criminalizes undocumented peoples—by questioning the “immigrant” paradigm. On May 21, 2010, Indigenous activists occupied the Border Patrol headquarters at Davis-Monthan Airforce Base in Tucson to protest SB 1070. Among their demands were the following:
On this day people who are indigenous to Arizona join with migrants who are indigenous to other parts of the Western Hemisphere in demanding a return to traditional indigenous value of freedom of movement for all people. Prior to the colonization by European nations (spaniards, english, french) and the establishment of the european settler state known as the United States and the artificial borders it and other european inspired nation states have imposed; indigenous people migrated, traveled and traded with each other without regard to artificial black lines drawn on maps. U.S. immigration policies dehumanize and criminalize people simply because of which side of these artificial lines they were born on. White settlers whose ancestors have only been here at most for a few hundred years have imposed these policies of terror and death on “immigrants” whose ancestors have lived in this hemisphere for tens of thousands of years, for time immemorial.
In addition, the migration that the U.S. government is attempting to stop is driven more than anything else by the economic policies of the U.S. Free trade agreements such as NAFTA have severely reduced the ability of Mexicans and others from the global south to sustain themselves by permitting corporations to extract huge amounts of wealth and resources from these countries into the U.S. This has led to millions of people risking the terror and death that so many face to cross into the U.S. looking for ways to better support their families. Thousands of women, men, children and elders have died crossing just in the last decade. If the U.S. really wants to reduce migration it should end its policies of exploitation and wealth extraction targeted at the global south and instead pursue policies of economic, environmental and social justice for all human beings on the planet, thus reducing the drive to immigrate.
The protesters are demanding:
—An end to border militarization
—The immediate repeal of SB1070 and 287g
—An end to all racial profiling and the criminalization of our communities
—No ethnic cleansing or cultural genocide
—No border patrol encroachment/sweeps on sovereign native land
—No Deportations
—No Raids
—No ID verification
—No Checkpoints
—Yes to immediate and unconditional regularization (“legalization”) of all people
—Yes to human rights
—Yes to dignity
—Yes to respect
—Yes to respecting Indigenous Peoples inherent right of migration.(1)
As their statement indicates, they articulate not migration but the nation-state and its reliance on control and ownership of territory as the problem. They are arguing that immigration is an Indigenous
