in the essays that follow! Twice, over the years, we reproduced Myers’ prediction, which is to say, we attempted to turn its shock value to our own ends. Even though those ends are generosity and the destruction of borders, the mobilization of outsized statistical fears was a failure on our part. We no longer feel the provocative power of the number “200 million by 2050” can be legitimized by those who share our politics. As such, Myers’ transfixing numbers were a means that contravened and undermined the ends we sought, for, as a statistical incitement to border violence, it can never be replicated in defense of migrants.
We have chosen to leave the numbers in our interview below so as to be accountable for our mistakes. Equally, such an action demonstrates the dangerous allure these numbers hold. They are a reminder of the need for relentless critique, not only of the work produced by others, but of that which we write ourselves. It is clear we must resist both the nativist-racist fear embodied in these predictions and the cognitive border operation inherent in the distinction between “migrant” and “climate refugee.”
The essays in this section reflect our collective sense that the differentiated catastrophe of climate change is nowhere more in evidence than in the border practices of states. Climate change makes it increasingly impossible to live in places largely occupied by the racialized, the colonized, and the impoverished. The border seeks to retain or return or to break migrants down enough that they are willing to perform grueling labor at lower rates of pay. Committing to the ongoing struggles against the operation of the border is therefore essential to any practice against climate disaster.
These struggles demonstrate that the border is not confined to the site of the frontier, but rather is a structural part of the nation-state.6 During the blockades of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities across the United States in 2018—attempts by activists to disrupt detention and deportation efforts—activists immediately encountered the all-pervasive nature of the border. In Philadelphia, the summer-long Occupy ICE encampment mutated rapidly into a multi-issue movement characterized as “Black-led autonomous revolutionary organizing of the unhoused.”7 This mobilization was capacious, featuring actions in solidarity with Puerto Ricans, people with addictions, nonimmigrant prisoners, and victims of police violence.8 In the UK, recent organizing has confronted the border in schools, as part of a successful mobilization against the gathering of pupil nationality data.9 While this particular state initiative was defeated, the fact that similar practices persist in healthcare, higher education, and housing demonstrates the unconfined reality of border operations.10
State and capitalist actors frequently dither about or outright deny the climate crisis. Too often, however, this serves as a useful distraction from the fact that they are, all the while, actually preparing for the imminent reality of mass displacement. For instance, states are investing massive amounts of money in technologies that exacerbate existing geospatial inequalities and keep these increasingly unequal populations separate. Ecological dystopia for the many, in other words, could still be utopia for the few. The trend towards global movement north will likely intensify efforts to cordon off these relatively privileged zones: the astonishingly self-described “military-environmental-industrial complex” is already plotting new forms of violence to defend European, North American, and Australian borders and to expand profits.11
It is important, however, not to mistake the increasing omnipresence of the border for omnipotence. The reason that the state must constantly attempt to maintain control over borders—and their futile attempt to categorize and separate people, often through violence—is because they are brittle. We must hold onto victories so as to remember the border is not all-powerful and can be abolished. In these essays we return to an example from Glasgow in the nineties, where a buddy scheme partnering recent migrants with locals built bonds of solidarity and kinship.12 The scheme was such a success that when the state attempted to detain some of the migrants in dawn raids, they found themselves confronting a working-class community united in defense of their friends. Dawn raids ceased.
The bunker-network of the planetary ruling class is by no means a fait accompli. Proliferating borders can be—and are every day being—opposed. Communal efforts to combat such violence, such as those in Glasgow, will form some of the most important struggles against ecological disaster. The essays in this section, more than anything, seek to explore border struggles as ecological struggles.
This section begins with an interview with two of our members by BASE Magazine. Contextualizing border politics in terms of care, the conversation ranges widely over questions of natures, futures, and strategies. It also serves as an introduction to our conceptualization of borders as a means of differentiating the impacts of climate change and to our thought and politics more generally. Alex tweaks a formulation from the geographer and prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore which might serve as the foundation for our politics: climate change is the group-differentiated destruction of the means of our survival.13
Alex also draws on the work of the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, who has written evocatively about the use of state violence to produce “death-worlds” of populations exposed to violence. This is a theme taken up in the second piece, “Refuges and Death-Worlds,” in which we seek to find spaces of survival which can serve as antonyms and antidotes to the ongoing production of disaster. A politics of refuge is, for us, a planetary politics which insists that everyone has a right to a habitable place. Again, to quote Gilmore, “freedom is a place.”14 So, if the habitable zones of the Earth retreat pole-ward without regard for the sovereignty of nation-states, then we must look beyond nation-states and the white supremacist “lifeboat ethics” we identify in Section II of this book.
In “Infrastructure Against Borders,” we argue for building webs of mutual aid across borders and migrant/citizen divides. Creating such infrastructures of solidarity over the coming decades is vital for undermining the currently prevailing “build the wall” mentality which has turned the Texas desert and the Mediterranean Sea into mass graves, and the island of Nauru into a detention camp.15 These are material infrastructures as well as infrastructures of feeling—the “consciousness-foundation, sturdy but not static, that viscerally underlies our capacity to … select and reselect liberatory lineages” of ancestors and their capacious and expansive struggles.16 It is difficult to give a full account of the radical potential of such infrastructural practices. China Medel describes how humanitarian aid in the desert by the direct-action group No More Deaths undergirds an “abolitionist care”:
In our practices of care, No More Deaths actively works against the neoliberal process of strategic abandonment, in which governing bodies carefully eschew responsibility for a minoritized social group deemed valueless by a logic of racialized criminalization. Sequestered in the Sonoran Desert, the camp wakes up each day committed to practices of taking care, not only of migrants in distress, but also of one another. In the practice of care, desert aid workers prefiguratively build a world in which hierarchies of human value are abolished, where migration is an expression of life making, and where food, shelter, medical, and emotional care are available to all, regardless of notions of deservedness. This care work becomes an abolitionist gesture of direct action that builds alternative forms of recognition and inclusion against the logic of criminalization and the production of valueless life functioning to “protect” the United States.17
Such actions actively work against the weaponization of the desert accomplished by the US’ “prevention through deterrence” policy, which in many ways, might be seen as analogous to the UK’s “hostile environment” policy. Broadening the understanding of environment here, our essay “A Hostile Environment” seeks to demonstrate how contemporary British and American border imperialisms are tied to the maintenance of white supremacy. Having established our analysis of xenophobia in the North as a racist reproductive politics steeped in old fears of sexual defilement and miscegenation, we advance the usefulness of a concept of “critical dystopia” to think though the bleakness of this political moment without foreclosing the prefigurative, even utopian,
