Border and Rule
Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
Ratings5
Average rating4.6
15
Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
Ratings5
Average rating4.6
In Border and Rule, one of North America’s foremost thinkers and immigrant rights organizers delivers an unflinching examination of migration as a pillar of global governance and gendered racial class formation. Harsha Walia disrupts easy explanations for the migrant and refugee crises, instead showing them to be the inevitable outcomes of the conquest, capitalist globalization, and climate change that are generating mass dispossession worldwide. Border and Rule explores a number of seemingly disparate global geographies with shared logics of border rule that displace, immobilize, criminalize, exploit, and expel migrants and refugees. With her keen ability to connect the dots, Walia demonstrates how borders divide the international working class and consolidate imperial, capitalist, and racist nationalist rule. Ambitious in scope and internationalist in orientation, Border and Rule breaks through American exceptionalist and liberal responses to the migration crisis and cogently maps the lucrative connections between state violence, capitalism, and right-wing nationalism around the world. Illuminating the brutal mechanics of state formation, Walia exposes US border policy as a product of violent territorial expansion, settler-colonialism, enslavement, and gendered racial ideology. Further, she compellingly details how Fortress Europe and White Australia are using immigration diplomacy and externalized borders to maintain a colonial present, how temporary labor migration in the Arab Gulf states and Canada is central to citizenship regulation and labor control, and how racial violence is escalating deadly nationalism in the US, Israel, India, the Philippines, Brazil, and across Europe, while producing a disaster of statelessness for millions elsewhere. A must-read in these difficult times of war, inequality, climate change, and global health crisis, Border and Rule is a clarion call for revolution. The book includes a foreword from renowned scholar Robin D. G. Kelley and an afterword from acclaimed activist-academic Nick Estes.
Reviews with the most likes.
This book delves into the intricacies of border patrol policies around the world. Walia shows the reader, through extensive research, the effect racist border patrol policies have on marginalized peoples throughout the world.
Most of these border policies are based on racist people trying to make sure only “good” immigrants come into their countries. Marginalized people seeking to immigrate are only allowed if they are “beneficial” to that country, meaning they can do cheap, often dangerous labor without any rights. Most of these people don't have a path to citizenship, and their lives are tied to their employer. They don't have the same rights in terms of minimum wage, maximum hours, etc. Asylum seekers are often denied due to extraneous reasons that are intentionally set in place by these countries to curb the migration of “undesirable” immigrants.
I'm not doing nearly as well at explaining these concepts as Walia does in this book. I highly recommend this book to everyone to read. It really opened my eyes to how unnecessary, racist, and cruel these imaginary lines we've created are. Please read this book. It is brilliantly researched and formatted, and should be taught in schools.
