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, the world’s largest recent refugee populations come from Afghanistan and Iraq.(9) With decades of foreign intrusion, including the US and NATO occupations that began in 2001, these two countries have been subjected to the destruction of their infrastructure, privatization of their economies, interference in their governance, and military missions that have killed and tortured over one million people.(10) These interventions are best described as imperialist, defined by Said as “the practice, the theory and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory.”(11) Border imperialism, then, represents the extension and imposition of Western rule, with the current dynamics of global empire maintaining unequal relationships of political, economic, cultural, and social dominance of the West over its colonies.
Border imperialism not only makes possible the transgression and violation of non-Western communities’ autonomy in order to maintain the interests of Western empire, it also denies any accountability for its own victims. For example, despite its incessant rhetoric of humanitarian intervention, which political geographer Derek Gregory characterizes as the “velvet glove wrapped around the iron fist of colonialism,” the United States accepted only 328 refugees from Afghanistan in 2009.(12) This is a shockingly low number, and even more so considering the direct responsibility of the United States in displacing Afghans. Of a staggering total of 4.7 million displaced people in Iraq and Afghanistan, the majority of refugees crossed into bordering countries such as Pakistan and Iran.(13) Contrary to popular belief about Western generosity and openness to refugees, over 80 percent of the world’s refugees reside in neighboring countries within the global South.(14)
Capitalism is another root cause of mass displacements and migrations. A salient example of the impact of capitalist mobility on migration trends in North America is the effects of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which has displaced millions of Mexicans, and the parallel fortification of the U.S.-Mexico border against migrants. Under NAFTA, the Mexican government was forced to eliminate subsidies to corn while corn produced in the United States remained subsidized, thus making US corn cheaper to buy inside Mexico than Mexican corn. As a result, over 15 million Mexicans were forced into poverty, and 1.5 million farmers who lost their farms migrated to the United States to work in low-wage sectors.(15) Professor William Robinson summarizes this dynamic: “The transnational circulation of capital and the disruption and deprivation it causes, in turn, generates the transnational circulation of labor. In other words, global capitalism creates immigrant workers. . . . In a sense, this must be seen as a coerced or forced migration, since global capitalism exerts a structural violence over whole populations and makes it impossible for them to survive in their homeland.”(16)
While such conditions push millions of Mexicans into low-paid work in the United States, the migration from Mexico into the US southwest (itself illegally annexed territory since 1846) is made perilous. Similar to the lack of hospitality toward Afghan and Iraqi refugees, displaced Mexican migrants contend with a heavily fortified border. “We never thought that we’d be in the business of helping to identify remains like in a war zone, and here we are,” says Isabel Garcia, cochair of Tucson-based Coalición de Derechos Humanos.(17) Since millions of dollars were put into increasing border patrols and surveillance on the U.S.-Mexico border through Operation Gatekeeper, which went into effect the same year as NAFTA, the American Civil Liberties Union estimates
