Geographer and critical race theorist Mary Pat Brady describes border deaths as “a kind of passive capital punishment,” where “immigrants have been effectively blamed for their own deaths.”(19) Women are particularly vulnerable to sexualized violence at the border. According to a representative of the Latin America and the Caribbean section of the UN Development Fund for Women, at least 60 to 70 percent of undocumented women migrants who cross the border experience sexual abuse.(20) The unfreedom for migrants and concurrent freedom of capital across borders is a defining element of the constant warfare of border imperialism. For example, immediately after 9/11, the Canadian and US governments signed the Canada-US Smart Border Accord to ensure that border restrictions on migrants would not impair the economic necessity of ensuring the free flow of goods, services, and capital across the border.
These instances highlight how mass displacements and precarious migrations are not random but rather largely a result of structural dictates. Within border imperialism, the dual processes of displacement and migration are manufactured through the specific trajectories of colonialism and capitalism. Wark points to the injustice of the system that creates displacement and migration: “Migration is globalisation from below. If the ‘overdeveloped’ world refuses to trade with the underdeveloped world on fair terms, to forgive debt, to extend loans, to lift trade barriers against food and basic manufactured goods, then there can only be an increase in the flow of people.”(21) Border imperialism also illuminates the management of these migrations. Political geographer Reece Jones documents how, under the guise of fighting “illegal immigration” and “terrorism,” three countries alone—United States, India, and Israel—have built over 3,500 miles of walls on their borders.(22) Border controls are used to deter those for who migration is the only option to the plundering of their communities and economies due to the free license granted to capital and militaries.
Capitalism destroys land-based subsistence cultures and concentrates wealth and property into the hands of a select few. Production within capitalism is disconnected from human need, collective creativity, and the natural world—all of which become commodities to be bought and sold on the market. As the dominant global economic system, capitalism is based on a model of private property, production for profit, waged labor, and private ownership of the means of production and distribution. During the Industrial Revolution in late eighteenth-century England, peasants were displaced from their farmlands and forced to migrate to cities and work for scant wages in growing privately owned industries. Neoliberal capitalist globalization, as the current formation of capitalism, intensifies these processes of dispossession and impoverishment.
A central feature of neoliberalism is the increased mobility of capital across borders. The mobility of capital is aided by the multinational nature of corporations, which defy and evade labor and tax regulations through subcontracting, outsourcing, and transnational banking systems. Global economic regimes such as multilateral trade agreements and structural adjustment programs also facilitate the mobility of capital by imposing measures such as privatization, austerity cutbacks, and user-pay social services.
While guaranteeing capital flows, neoliberalism concurrently guarantees labor flexibility. Waged labor is ever-more synonymous with labor flexibility, which necessitates creating a pool of precarious workers. Precarious labor is characterized by poor wages, insecurity in the continuity of work, and lack of protection by even minimal labor regulations. Casual, part-time, and contract labor—which have been termed the “Walmartization” of labor—are increasingly stratified further from more formal and secure forms of employment, and instead are stratified toward indentured and sweatshop labor. The precarity of both labor and social organization are intertwined and cyclic: capitalism requires precarious and exploitable workers to facilitate capital accumulation, and creates those precarious lives through hierarchies of systemic oppression along with its extractions of labor and land. As discussed later in this chapter, a fundamental feature of border imperialism within neoliberalism is to facilitate capital flows across borders while also ensuring labor flexibility by legalizing an exploitable migrant labor workforce.
Analyses of capitalism have generally ignored the central role of land and the colonization of Indigenous societies in the development of capitalism. In Karl Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation, capitalist modes of production explicitly require conquest, enslavement, and the dispossession of communities from the lands on which they subsist. Glen Coulthard, an Indigenous scholar, explains that colonialism “forcefully opened-up what were once collectively held territories and resources to privatization (dispossession), which, over time, came to produce a ‘class’ of workers compelled to enter the exploitative realm of the labor market for their survival (proletarianization).”(23) Colonial and capitalist interests continue to expropriate Indigenous lands, dispossessing Indigenous nations of their territorial base and livelihood, particularly within but not limited to settler-colonial states. Within Canada, there has been a recent push to convert communally held reserve lands—what capitalists refer to as “dead capital”—into fee simple private proverty.(24) This privatization of Indigenous lands would ensure both the colonial state’s interests in extinguishing Aboriginal title, and corporate capitalist interests in extracting and commodifying natural resources.
Such analysis reveals a critical connection between the Western state and capitalism, with the state serving as a key instrument to accumulate capital. Contrary to the suggestion by some analysts that the Western state’s jurisdiction is withering under the power of multinational corporations, I would contend that the state is not eroding under transnational capitalist globalization. The state, along with its forms of governance including through border imperialism, is evolving to continue to meet the needs of capitalist expansion through more flexible means of governance and accumulation.
The state maintains an economic infrastructure for capital flows, including stock exchanges, tax regulations, and banking systems. The state also creates the political and legal framework that protects private property, enables the status of corporations as legal entities, sanctions the extraction and commodification of natural resources, and guarantees support for disciplining the workforce. Financial analyst Mike Konczal describes this succinctly: “When the state intervenes in the functioning of markets, it isn’t to rectify injustices but instead to further create and maintain the rigor of the economy itself.”(25) The Western state thus can be characterized as organizing, facilitating, and in many instances, enforcing capitalism.
The Canadian economy, for example, is largely based on the expropriation of natural resources internally, while the state-corporate nexus also profits from capitalist development projects imposed globally. Canadian mining corporations, which represent 75 percent of the world’s mining and exploration companies, are protected and enabled by the Canadian state in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, even though they have been responsible for, and in some cases charged with, environmental destruction, human and labor rights violations, and the forced displacement of surrounding communities.(26)
Likewise, multinational corporations are welcomed by the Canadian state to exploit and export tar sands, the world’s most environmentally destructive industrial project that disproportionately impacts Indigenous nations. In a submission to the United Nations, the Indigenous Yinka Dene Alliance writes, “Canada has indicated that it is contemplating conduct that would infringe our Aboriginal Title and Rights. . . . [I]t is manifestly clear that the Canadian government has already reached a decision to push through this project regardless of the serious adverse effects on Indigenous peoples and lands and without their free, informed and prior consent.”(27)
In settler-colonial states such as Canada and the United States, the encroachment on Indigenous lands is compounded by genocidal attempts to subjugate Indigenous governance and assimilate Indigenous cultures. Diné scholar Jennifer Nez Denetdale notes how Indigenous women have been intentionally targeted. “The rape and prostitution of Native women,” she explains, was “integral to colonial conquest,” as was “the imposition of a modern state formation . . . [which] reconfigured gender roles to mirror American gender roles.”(28) This annihilation of Indigenous societies is justified through racist
