outside their reach.
Decolonization is a framework that offers a positive and concrete prefigurative vision. Prefiguration is the notion that our organizing reflects the society we wish to live in—that the methods we practice, institutions we create, and relationships we facilitate within our movements and communities align with our ideals. Many activists argue that prefiguration involves envisioning a completely “new” society. But as a prefiguring framework, decolonization grounds us in an understanding that we have already inherited generations of evolving wisdom about living freely and communally while stewarding the Earth from anticolonial commoning practices, anticapitalist workers’ cooperatives, antioppressive communities of care, and in particular matriarchal Indigenous traditions. As theorists Aman Sium, Chandni Desai, and Eric Ritskes forcefully assert, “Decolonization demands the valuing of Indigenous sovereignty in its material, psychological, epistemological, and spiritual forms.”(14)
Enacting a politics of decolonization also necessitates an undoing of the borders between one another. Queer feminist philosopher Judith Butler unmasks and celebrates human vulnerability and interdependency: “Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one’s best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other.”(15)
In the face of omnipresent physical and psychological colonialism, decolonization traverses the political and personal realms of our lives, and honors diverse articulations of nonhierarchical and nonoppressive association. Decolonization movements create an alternative to power through committed struggle against settler colonialism, border imperialism, capitalism, and oppression, as well as through concrete practices that center other ways of laboring, thinking, loving, stewarding, and living. Ultimately, decolonization grounds us in gratitude and humility through the realization that we are but one part of the land and its creation, and encourages us to constitute our kinship and movement networks based on shared affinities as well as responsible solidarities.
Why No One Is Illegal?
What would be the implications of acting out of love rather than the dictates of the nationalistic mind?
—Shivam Vij, “Of Nationalism and Love in Southasia”
I have been active in the migrant justice movement, specif-
ically through No One Is Illegal (NOII) groups in Canada, for over a decade. NOII is a migrant justice movement that mobilizes tangible support for refugees, undocumented migrants, and (im)migrant workers, and prioritizes solidarity with Indigenous communities. Grounded in anticolonial, anticapitalist, ecological justice, Indigenous self-determination, anti-imperialist, and antioppression politics, NOII groups organize and fight back against systems of injustice through popular education and direct action.(16) NOII groups exist across Canada, but are organized autonomously as a loose network with shared values and some ad hoc coordination. It was only in 2012 that the existing NOII groups drafted a joint statement of unity, in which we describe ourselves as “part of a worldwide movement of resistance that strives and struggles for the right to remain, the freedom to move, and the right to return.”(17)
Mapping the currents of NOII’s mobilizing and movement-based practices is critical for five reasons. First, NOII offers a systemic critique of border imperialism. This stands in contrast to more mainstream immigrant rights movements that ignore the centrality of empire and capitalism to the violence of displacement, migration, and border controls. Second, NOII’s systemic critique, as an organizing framework, facilitates a convergence of a range of social movements. Links are forged between antidetention and antiprison activists, between antipoverty movements and nonstatus communities to ensure public access to basic services, between local anticolonial organizing and anti-imperialist international solidarity organizing, and between gender justice movements’ defense of our bodies and environmental justice movements’ defense of the land.
Third, the work of NOII is multilayered. While organizing from an antistate framework, NOII also strategically navigates the state apparatus in order to win tangible victories for those facing detention and deportation. This kind of mobilizing cannot easily be dismissed as simply being reformist since it ensures that we are engaging with people who are directly impacted by the injustices of border imperialism. Being rooted and relevant in such a way amplifies the struggle for structural change and collective freedom. The careful and thoughtful balance of strategies is explored throughout this book as it is foundational to earning trust and respect for NOII’s organizing among affected community members and radicals alike.
Fourth, the mobilizing of NOII provides lessons on maintaining principled political positions while expanding communities of resistance through effective broad-based alliances. A major corporate newspaper begrudgingly acknowledges the force of NOII: “The once fringe community group . . . has grown in popularity. . . . Its crusade for undocumented migrants have made headlines and earned it recognition in the mainstream.”(18) In a time of the expansion of the nonprofit-industrial complex, NOII is an example of all-volunteer, radical, and grassroots community organizing that is sustainable, with a growing ability to capture people’s imaginations and a capacity to win victories. After nine years of grassroots organizing, for example, NOII-Toronto has not only popularized migrant justice issues but also mobilized to make Toronto the country’s first Sanctuary City, where city services are guaranteed to all regardless of their citizenship status. In an effort to discredit the cross-country popularity and effectiveness of NOII, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Jason Kenney recently denounced NOII in Parliament as “not simply another noisy activist group but hard-line anti-Canadian extremists.”(19)
Finally, returning to the words of Kelley, NOII offers a prefigurative vision for a different kind of society. The very name and its various invocations, such as “No Human is Illegal,” “Personne n’est illegal,” and “Nadie es illegal,” emphasize that all humans are inherently worthy and valuable, and that policies that illegalize human beings are legal and moral fictions. Undoing border imperialism requires that we undo power structures, while prefiguring the social relations we wish to have and the forms of leadership we wish to support. Within NOII, we take leadership from marginalized communities, particularly communities of color and Indigenous nations impacted by state controls and systemic oppression. Such methods of organizing within NOII aim to reflect our vision of antioppressive, egalitarian, and noncoercive societies.
For these reasons, an analysis of NOII’s decade-long history offers relevant insights for all organizers on effective strategies to overcome state-imposed borders as well as the barriers within movements in order to cultivate fierce, loving, and sustainable communities.
About This Book
I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend—to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.
—bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress
Undoing Border Imperialism merges different forms of theory that tend to be relegated to separate spheres: academic, movement, and experiential theories. While societal structures legitimize academic discourse as the most rigorous and objective type of theory, all three kinds of theory are invaluable. Together these forms help us to understand systemic injustice from different angles, and empower us to take action against authoritarian and oppressive systems. This book is primarily embedded in movement theory, which stems from the praxis of organizing, and experiential theory, which is based in lived realities and resistances.
The first chapter, “What Is Border Imperialism?” relies on academic theory. Drawing on critical race theory, feminist studies, Marxist analysis, and poststructuralism, this chapter theorizes and evaluates border imperialism from
