Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism

by Harsha Walia, Robin D.G. Kelley (Foreword), Nick Estes (Afterword)

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 conquest, capitalist globalization, and climate change 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, ruling class, 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 exclusion. 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 far-right nationalism is escalating deadly violence 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, History, Race, Social Justice, Theory, Philosophy

200 pages, Paperback

First published February 9, 2021

About the author

Harsha Walia is an author and activist who is formally trained in the law. She immigrated from India and currently resides in Vancouver, on the lands of the Indigenous Coast Salish people, and works as an advocate in the poorest postal code in Canada.

Harsha has been named one of the most influential South Asians in BC by the Vancouver Sun and one of the ten most popular left-wing journalists by the Georgia Straight in 2010. Award-winning author Naomi Klein has called Harsha “one of Canada’s most brilliant and effective political organizers.” She is the winner of the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives "Power of Youth" award.

Harsha's writings have appeared in over fifty academic journals, anthologies, and magazines, including Briarpatch, Canadian Dimension, Dominion, Feministing, Fuze, Left Turn, Mondoweiss, People of Color Organize, Rabble, Racilicious, Sanhati, Z Magazine, and others. She has contributed essays to academic journals including Race and Class, as well as chapters in the anthologies Power of Youth: Youth and community-led activism in Canada; Racism and Borders: Representation, Repression, Resistance; Beyond Walls and Cages; Stay Solid; Broken Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution; Organize! Building from the Local for Global Justice, and the Winter We Danced.

As an activist, Harsha is a cofounder of the migrant justice group No One Is Illegal and the progressive South Asian network Radical Desis. She is also an organizer in the Annual Women’s Memorial March Committee, Defenders of the Land Network, Housing Justice Coalition, and sits on the boards of the South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy as well as Shit Harper Did. She is a youth mentor for Check Your Head and an editorial collective member at Feminist Wire. Harsha has made a number of presentations to the United Nations on social and economic justice issues and is a commentator and speaker at conferences, campuses, and media outlets across North America.

Reviews

[Wick Welker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Immigration: legal human trafficking.

This is probably the most profound and well-researched non-fiction book I’ve read in 2021. Border and Rule is an in depth analysis of the root cause of migrant displacement and the subsequent commodification of human labor as a means of controlling a nation’s labor force as well as maintaining ethnic and racial hierarchy. Immigration, legal or illegal, is not an accident but a deliberate tool used by states for economic, social, wealth and ethnic control.

Both liberal and conservative media narrative present us with a grand paradox: immigrants are both needed to revitalize economies yet they also compete for jobs from native citizens, crowding out the job market. How can both occur at the same time? The answer is how the media and state narratives frame immigrants. Western cultures tend to categorize immigrants as migrants, “illegals”, refugees or asylum seekers. We build a construct based on their country of origin, political and economic pressures as well as their race and ethnicity. After all the input, we then spit out a binary narrative about immigrants: worthy or unworthy. The reality, as Walia explains, is dramatically different and exposes immigration policies for what they really are: mitigation of the global human disaster of neoliberal policy fallout. Regardless, all media paints a completely racially skewed picture of who is in the US illegally: the largest group of immigrants who overstay their visas are Canadians. In fact, ½ of all illegal immigrants are from Canada and Europe. So when someone like Donald Trump talks about ‘bad hombres’ it is a clear and inaccurate racist dog-whistle politics to scapegoat Mexicans, rile up his racist base and gain the electoral advantage. Racial panic is foundational to not only Trumpism but the politics of Netanyahu and Modi in India, to mention only a few. The name of the game is the same: scapegoat the impoverished and destitute and leverage that animosity into political and legislative power.

While he certainly capitalized on it, caging children and detaining families did not start with Trump. Clinton opened the door for harsh immigration policies and both Bush and Obama perpetuated the same policies. Many Trump supporters seemed to forget (or not know because of their propaganda) that Obama was responsible for massive deportation and child detainment ushering an all time high of illegal deportation. Trumpists already had their anti-immigrant savior in the form of Obama. Additionally, while being honored as a Nobel peace laureate, Obama was dropping 26,000 bombs on Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan and Pakistan creating death and massive displacement. The US has never been a melting pot of culture and has always been a nation of white euro-ethnic conquest over black and brown cultures. The US was quite literally founded upon a genocidal empire and the current immigration policy is an extension of this legacy.

Neoliberalism (mass privatization, business deregulation and social austerity) is what causes immigrant displacement in the first place. In the US, people aren't just showing up at the Mexico border because they’ve made some bad career decisions and now seek more economic opportunity in the US. This is what conservative media would have us believe; that it is their choice to show up at the border and thus they deserve whatever harsh consequences that await them whether that is sexual exploitation or death. The liberal narrative is hardly any better: in our benevolence we have created a work program for “worthy” migrants to obtain economic prosperity by stripping them of worker rights, paying them less than a living wage and denying healthcare coverage while also exposing them to sexual exploitation and threatening them with deportation if they don’t work 18-20 hours a day. While the conservative brand of immigration is an abject human rights violation, the liberal brand is human exploitation and marginalization all while providing a pop-off valve for the labor economy.

As stated above, neoliberal globalization is the cause of migrant displacement AND migrant exploitation. It’s a multinational corporate merry-go-round of human misery and exploitation. This is occurring in all major countries, from the US to EU, India, Australia and Canada. All rich countries are complicit. Let me explain, there are zones set up called EPZs (Export Processing Zones) wherein labor is performed under a suspension of environmental and labor laws where the impoverished are exploited for their labor. Worldwide, 27 million people (90% of whom are female) work in EPZs where they are not paid a living wage, labor in poor working conditions and have no benefits. EPZs are great for US consumption and corporate wealth by having lax regulations and duty free taxing but create unbearable working conditions that force displacement and mass immigration. In this way, consumerism can be seen as the driving force for mass displacement to begin with. EPZs are the author of dispossession and are proliferating around the world. Climate change caused by neoliberal forces also cause mass displacement and the UN or other countries do not recognize climate change displacement as a legitimate need for asylum of refugees.

More about EPZs: https://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-...

Speaking of neoliberal corporate control, immigration detention camps are privatized. 75% of detainees are in privately owned facilities. This morally reprehensible practice literally puts a dollar value on immigration detainees. By selling government contracts to companies like GS4 and CoreCivic, human trafficking becomes a legal practice. CoreCivic grew by 134% after Trump ramped up deportation. ¼ of all CoreCivics profits are from ICE contracts. In this way, the taxpayer is literally funding a privately owned carceral state where human beings are commoditized, not for their labor, but for their very imprisonment. And make no mistake, detainees are very lucrative: ICE holds $200M in immigrant bond money.

The other side of immigrant detainment is migrant worker programs wherein immigrants legally enter under a contractual agreement to sell their labor with zero rights afforded. Migrant programs help labor shortages in the domestic job market while being able to deny the rights of citizenship in what becomes a very lopsided agreement. Migrant programs are the liberal “humane” approach to immigration for the “worthy” immigrants to help them “assimilate”. This arrangement is to the benefit of the country of origin as well as it helps their economy siphon off unskilled labor surplus. Under the threat of deportation, legal migrant workers work long hours, little sleep, little food and with low wages. There is nothing humane about legal migrant programs, they are only a way for the native country to control key labor markets and also racial demographics--to make it culturally prohibitive to ever be part of the citizenship and always be viewed as foreign. Military contracts, like Black Water, use migrant workers in this way. Migrant programs are essentially state-sanction indentured servitude with the impact of legalized segregation and racial stratification. It is also the flipside of outsourcing: neoliberal insourcing that brings cheap labor domestically to exploit foreign workers.

The aim of legal and illegal immigration is to create a stateless populace. Trump rescinding DACA was a classic move of creating a dispossessed people, to deny citizenship and act aloof about where they should go. Muslims all over the world have suffered this stateless existence, especially in India and China. Immigration is not something that just happens to developing countries, it is a state tool used to control the work force and the racial makeup of its people by subsidizing a privatized carceral state. Make no mistake, some men somewhere are profiting greatly from the incarceration of the dispossessed.

This was truly a phenomenal read up there with Naomi Klien and others. HIGHLY RECOMMEND.

[Natalie Lerner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh my god this book is SO GOOD. It’s honestly a perfect analysis of everything and I cannot overemphasize how well Harsha Walia synthesizes global issues of climate catastrophe, white supremacy, capitalism, and how they relate to migration and immobilization. Everyone should read this book.

[JC · Rating 5 out of 5]

Walia was a co-founder of “No One Is Illegal” back in 2001. That organization was one of my earlier memories of left-wing politics while I was still trying to navigate my way through my own political convictions. NOII was a major presence at my first May Day Rally, and they came prepared with a lot of protest placards and handed them out to stragglers like myself. Hilariously enough I was planning to try to find the SCM (Student Christian Movement) group at the meeting point at Allan Gardens but never did find them among the various communist and anarchist groups there. This was my first encounter with highly confrontational anti-police chants, which I found rather delightful for some reason, haha. I think it was the Ryerson OPIRG group that was leading some “No justice, no peace, no racist police!” chants and the old Chilean slogan “The people united will never be defeated!” I believe I saw Tings Chak there giving one of the speeches when the parade arrived at Queen’s Park (I think she was an MA student in Architecture then, and now works with Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research).

More recently Walia has been in the news because she was recently attacked mercilessly by right-wing pundits for tweeting “Burn it all down” in light of the recent church building fires that were ignited after the revelations of mass unmarked grave sites at various residential schools on Turtle Island. Walia was forced to resign from her job at the BC Civil Liberties Association, and I was just finishing up this book before that whole debacle began. I should just mention that ironically, two thousand years ago, there was another agitator that was pinned up on similar charges. He was accused of being a terrorist threatening to tear down a temple. He had said: “Destroy this temple and I will raise it up in three days.” No one believed him when he tried to explain what he meant in court; they eventually crucified this revolutionary on a cross. But not before he had a chance to say: “I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already burning.” You’d think people who care about churches would understand this. A prophet has no honour in her own country.

This book was a very important read with a fantastic introduction by Robin D.G. Kelley and an afterword by Nick Estes. It covered all sorts of countries and their migration systems and explained why Canada’s immigration and migrant worker system, despite being considered a ‘gold standard’ internationally, is still an exploitative system that functions for the purpose of capital as all borders do under global capitalism. Borders are very convenient instruments to deprive workers of labour rights and protections. If labour unions fought hard for rights in one place, borders contain the spread of those rights and allow capital to freely flow elsewhere to hire people without such rights and protections.

While Canada's 'multicultural' liberal humanist migrant worker program has been framed as belonging to the opposite side of the spectrum from the 'modern slave system' of Saudi Arabia's, Walia shows how they are actually two perfected manifestations of the same system of exploitation. She points out that “far-right Alternative für Deutschland party, for instance, calls for German immigration policy to be based on the Canadian model.” These are some other comments Walia has on the Canadian migrant worker system:

“Through the Caribbean SAWP, employers also controlled the totality of workers’ lives through a carceral regime, including curfews, bans on telephones and television, and limiting mobility off the farm.18 Robyn Maynard stresses that “the very inception of these worker programs was informed by the devaluation of Black life and labour under slavery,” which she argues are “an extension and consolidation of Jim Crow-style labour practices in Canada.”19 Even after slavery was abolished, the persistence of anti-Black racism meant that at least 80 percent of Black women in Canadian cities were domestic workers.

...Every year, more than thirty thousand migrant farmworkers from the Caribbean, Central America, and Mexico come to Canada annually for a maximum of eight months per year, but they can be selected by employers to return without limit... Agribusiness interests wield enormous influence over immigration policy to meet their needs of “flexible labour with reductions in regular farm employment, an extension of growing/harvesting seasons, a move away from on-farm employment, deepening gender and racial segmentation, and the intensification of work.” Because of the power of this lobby, farmworkers are excluded from many labor protections, including health and safety regulations. Working in concert with the state, agribusiness corporate interests have also secured successive reservoirs of racialized low-wage workers, including Chinese Canadian workers, interned Japanese Canadians, and Indigenous people, who all toiled on Canadian farms and fields prior to the heavy reliance on labor migration programs...

The most striking example of the commodification and expendability of migrant farmworkers is medical deportation. Racist and ableist, the medical deportation of workers unable to continue working due to health conditions is ubiquitous and casts Canada’s renowned reputation as a provider of universal healthcare in a different light. Take the situation of Sheldon McKenzie, a Jamaican man who had been going to Canadian farms for twelve years. He was working on a farm in Leamington—Canada’s tomato capital—when he sustained a severe injury in January 2015, leaving him in a coma. While on life support, he was stripped of his work visa and healthcare coverage as officials attempted to deport him. Only after McKenzie’s cousin, Marcia Barrett, launched an advocacy campaign was his deportation temporarily delayed. He passed away shortly after, in September 2015, leaving behind his wife and daughters.”

There was a very interesting paragraph on Malaysia, which I care a lot about because past generations of my family are from there, and it’s so fascinating how the same anti-communist paramilitary forces that hunted down communists in previous decades now hunt down migrant workers:

“ In Malaysia, for example, migrant workers mostly from Bangladesh, Indonesia, India, Nepal, Vietnam, and Myanmar constitute one-fifth of the country’s workforce. In addition to enduring dangerous working conditions, they survive vigilante abuse at the hands of Ikatan Relawan Rakyat Malaysia (RELA), a 500,000-strong paramilitary group hunting down migrants.29 This volunteer militia was created in the 1970s to track communists and in 2005 was given legal authority to stop people to check identification, raid homes, make arrests without warrants, use firearms, and even take over management of detention centers.30 After scores of testimonies of assault and extortion, a new law was passed in 2012 that limits RELA’s enforcement powers but maintains the militia’s role in surveilling migrant workers. As such, RELA serves a key function in the Malaysian political economy: maintaining social and economic control over a large section of the workforce, discouraging migrant workers from leaving the employer to whom they are bound, ensuring fast deportability in moments of economic downturn, and entrenching the “foreignness” of all migrant workers, regardless of their length of residency and legal status.”

There were so many really fascinating things in this book and it was an extremely important read. There was on more excerpt that I really couldn’t stop thinking about after reading it because I studied Nepal for my Master’s thesis and did a whole regression study for one of my economics courses on how significantly Nepal relies on migrant work and remittances for its own economic development and poverty alleviation especially compared to foreign aid assistance (which makes up a tiny fraction compared to those remittances). And it is this desperation of poverty that compels things like this to happen that Walia brings to light in her book:

“In one gruesome incident, thirteen Nepalese workers were contracted by a Halliburton subsidiary, under false pretenses, to cook and clean for US forces. Nepal had already banned migrant workers from going to Iraq and these workers thought they were being recruited to Jordan, but their passports were confiscated upon arrival in Jordan and a Halliburton recruiter forcibly transported them to Al Asad Air Base in Iraq. There, twelve of the workers were kidnapped, shot, and beheaded by the Ansar al-Sunna Army. The families of the slain workers were barred from pursuing liability claims against the military contractors after a US federal judge found the deaths occurred extraterritorially, beyond US legal jurisdiction.”

I think this book is such an important read and Walia is a true treasure that has really just been thrown under the bus. Her work is so important and as a revolutionary Sikh, she embodies the spirit of Jesus more than any of those right-wing broods of vipers and whitewashed sepulchres ever have. I’ll finish with something Sara Miles once wrote:

“Back in the early 1970s, when I was Gabriel’s age, the country had been on fire: the cities were burning; the streets were full of marchers and National Guardsmen; the country was convulsed by assassins, drugs, and riots. Everything was turning over: women left their husbands, young men defied the law and the elders, inmates took control of prisons, poor people refused to obey the cops, parents and children were at each other’s throats. I was young and fiercely antiauthoritarian and had no sense at all. My favorite chant at the demonstrations—not today’s stage-managed events, but the ones that wound up with tear gas and running with your heart in your mouth—was Two, four, six, eight; smash the family, church, and state.

I had absolutely no idea, back then, that this was Jesus’ chant. That it would turn out to be such a fundamentally Christian thing to say. Smash the family—smash the relations of power between men and women, young and old. Smash the church—break the relations of power between an official priesthood and the people of God, between manipulators of mystery and its helpless objects. Smash the state—break the relations of power that owe their existence to official violence, destroy the armies of the empire, break the iron bars of the prison house.

I could just hear Jesus chanting this. Or, to quote another saying I grew up with: ‘‘Burn, baby, burn.’’ And how I wish, says Jesus, that the fire were already kindled.”

[Corvus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent and important, especially the section on fascist alliances that seem counterintuitive (eg white supremacists partnering with hindu fascism or israeli zionism) and the section on ecofascism.

[Ashley Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

An intensely grim piece that nevertheless highlights How We Got Here and how interwined our societal issues are. Capitalism, racism and white supremacy, misogyny, classism and poverty, the climate crisis, all of it. Belongs on the shelf alongside Michelle Alexander's THE NEW JIM CROW and Angela Y Davis's WOMEN, RACE, AND CLASS.

Includes an excellent afterword by Nick Estes.

Well read by Cindy Kay.

[Rhys · Rating 5 out of 5]

A solid book on im/migration, exploitation and racialized capitalism.

The author has a proclivity to engage in run-on atrocities when describing our system, but it's not inaccurate.

"… the border cannot work against globalized capital because the border is itself a 'method for capital.' Free capital requires bordered and immobilized labor."

That's what it is about. And the border can be anywhere: "The second strategy of border governance is territorial diffusion through the internalization and externalization of border enforcement. Territorial diffusion relies on biometric surveillance and disciplinary practices within the state, as well as imperial outsourcing beyond the state’s borders. Put another way, the border is elastic, and the magical line can exist anywhere."

[anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Given that globalized capital relies on the organization of the state, nationalisms bound to the state cannot be a real opposition to neoliberalism. Subsidies for the corporate sector and national markets, particularly through imperialist state protection, have long formed a disciplining pillar of international markets. Ninety-six percent of the world’s largest corporations are incorporated in just eight countries. Lisa Lowe notes, “Capital has maximized its profits not through rendering labor ‘abstract’ but precisely through the social productions of ‘difference,’ of restrictive particularity and illegitimacy marked by race, nation, geographical origins, and gender.” Instead of racist nationalism defining who constitutes the nation-state or the working class, we need a robust and internationalist struggle committed to dismantling the conjoined forces of capitalism, the state, racism, and all hierarchized relations, while nurturing a kinship of relationality and place-based stewardship.

[Zach Carter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Urgent. Unsparing.

Harsha Walia has produced here a text that expertly describes the relationship between racial capitalism and border imperialism, the rise of far-right fascist movements in the US, Israel, India, the Philippines, Brazil, and more.

You'd be hard-pressed to find a book that pulls from more incredible scholars. Walia cites (off the top of my head): Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, Robin D. G. Kelley, Edward Said, Gerald Horne, Christina Sharpe, Angela Davis, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Nick Estes, Arundhati Roy, Naomi Klein, Howard Zinn, Mariame Kaba, Stuart Hall, and Vincent Bevins.

This was such a well-researched book, and really covered EVERYTHING. It completely changed my thinking about class, race/class relations, migration, and the urgent crisis of border imperialism.

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 5 out of 5]

As others have written more eloquently, this is a truly incredible book that ought to be required reading for...well, the human species as a whole. Walia links so many disparate, yet mutually-dependent struggles in a historically situated analysis of capitalism and border imperialism. She’s a truly excellent writer, making this book a smooth — if difficult, given the subject matter — read. I want more books from her, like, yesterday; this will easily be a favorite of 2021.

[A Yusuf · Rating 5 out of 5]

A most excellent, and necessary book for all of us as humans.
Harsha's previous book is such a necessary text, but this one is just as crucial and joins my library as essential reading for every person. Please buy this book and read it, it is so crucial and the systems and oppressions named need to see the light of day so that more of us can join the struggle and live to us all liberated.

[Zala · Rating 5 out of 5]

rtc

[priya ☁️ · Rating 3 out of 5]

"While workers are declared illegal, the surplus value they create is never deemed illegal."

"International phenomena such as "Overseas Friends of BJP" or "Hindus for Trump" are best explained through the prism of Hindutva’s brahminical supremacy and adjoining Islamophobia, rather than typical explanations of whitewashed, model minorities or upward class mobility; savarna caste supremacy and Islamophobia tether but are not synonymous with these symptoms."

"The appropriation of gender and sexuality in the service of power has a capacious trajectory: imperial feminism justifies military interventions to save women from patriarchy, homonationalism claims to liberate queers from sexually repressive cultures, carceral feminism vindicates prison expansion under the guise of victims’ rights, trans-exclusionary feminism reduces gender to biological determinism, and secular femonationalism unveils migrant women from their allegedly primitive religions."

[giada · Rating 5 out of 5]

A detailed analysis of the truth behind migration, described by the author as a legalised form of human trafficking.
Spanning centuries and countless countries, we see how every border inflicted on people is first of all a racist wall; Walia unravels the knot of racism, capitalism and ecofascism and how they built a system to easily control and exploit countless populations.
I've been wanting to read this book ever since it came out and only recently got the audiobook through Libby: I wish I had more time to read it, I had to rush through it before the loan expired, but even the quick experience fueled me with righteous rage. A must read for everyone.

[Bronwyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very well researched and comprehensive look at the politics and ideologies surrounding borders and migration. Focuses specifically on how borders are a tool of oppression for states self-interest, rather than a way to address historical and systemic issues resulting migration.

[Quin Rich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant and radical. Much better and more compelling than so much of what passes for (implicitly white, male, global North) Marxism. A necessary response to the absolutely wrongheaded calls for “leftwing nationalism” or “patriotic socialism” (fascist dog whistles and paradoxes both). This book incorporates feminist, anti-racist, LGBT, decolonial, and anti-ableist struggles into a unified, radical Marxist politics of true solidarity. A new North Star for contemporary leftist politics.

[Jenia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good. Relatively short and very much to the point. Every time Walia discussed Fortress Europe felt like a kick to the guts. I guess my only "issue" is that I feel like I didn't learn anything particularly new to me? But I'm a no walls, no borders person anyway haha, so I knew I'd likely agree with all the points..

[Brian Mcquaid · Rating 5 out of 5]

Walia explains in detail the political economics of global migration. She shows how migration is rooted in displacement caused by the Intensification of capital accumulation and how this economic system, and the cultural forms which conjoin it, are not new phenomena, but rooted in the imperial world order. Her analysis of the labor relations which are formed by bordering regimes are integral for understating modern economics and politics. The scope of this book is expansive, but Walia manages to go into detail about her main argument and the ways they are related to one another. Despite my 5 star review, i am not without criticism, including lack of analysis of the ongoing regime change operation in Syria and the tendency to bring up analytic frameworks without delving into them that i feel do not add to her argument. This being said, her primary arguments were laid out with extraordinary detail and clarity which make this book an indispensable tool for anyone seeking a better world.

[Elly · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow wow wow i honestly loved this book. although very bleak/depressing, it is such a well-written, comprehensive analysis of imposed borders and migration. i appreciated how it addressed how various different governments and political leaders, regardless of party, facilitate exploitation (despite their claims of protecting migrants/refugees), as i had previously only had familiarity with the how this has happened in the US in the past decade. 10/10 would recommend:)

[Faith · Rating 5 out of 5]

remarkable read. everyone should pick this up. explains in understandable terms capitalist and racist systems that led us to today and did a deep dive of the entire world and how our plight is really with white supremacy and elitism who will drive us to the ground for their own greed. thank you thomas for gifting me this, you were spot on in your recommendation.

[Orissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

A challenging but worthwhile read. Very grateful to Harsha Walia for everything that went into this book. The research and time is evident.

I recommend giving yourself a lot of time to dive into this book as it covers a lot. Walia demonstrates the linking threads between everything - white supremacy, exploitation, capitalism, racism, nationalism, climate change, current political events - and connects them to the main topic of migration and immobilization.

[Sarah Flynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

First of all, I'm not gonna lie: I feel an immense sense of pride and accomplishment at being one of the few who has read this book from start to finish. It is unbelievably dense, nuanced, and comprehensive, and I know that I would not have been able to read it and finish it if not for the two amazing, brilliant, ethical young women with whom I read it. In our trio, we are one Canadian, one American, and one Netherlander- so we had experience of each of the three big capital-imperial nation states among us. It was quite an experience to be challenged on so many ideas, and having friends along the way made it so much more possible. So just a moment of gratitude to know and read with such women.

And now on to the book.

Walia has tackled a big project, and I'll just tell you right now: in my opinion, she succeeded. This book examines the many forces that currently govern border practices around the world. She considers racism, gendered violence, climate chaos, capital flow, and probably several other things that I am not remembering right now. Tracing the histories, national stories, myths, cultural norms, etc Walia shows how the current border regime is a violent, exclusionary, anti-humane tool that punishes the world's poor for the crimes of the world's wealthy; indeed, it is not the de facto obvious edge-of-nation that we are given to believe. While we grow up imagining borders to be the same as the doors to our homes, quite a sensible and relatively benign concept, it turns out they are carefully crafted to transform much of humanity into a sub-human, utterly disposable free or cheap labour force for the purpose of accruing and hoarding capital on the part of a few key players. So, in essence, she lays capitalism as the cornerstone of this border regime that consume people and planet. It is a thorough and damning argument Walia makes.
If you're skeptical about how something so simple and obvious as national borders can be something so sinister and biased, I would strongly urge you to read the book. I can try to spell out some of the key steps in her arguments here, but I could never do justice to the book. Her work cannot be reproduced here in a little book review, especially not by me! Just as a teaser, think Economic development zones on the shores of poorer countries where powerful corporations have factories and employ local workers outside of any local labour or environmental laws; think imported foreign workers labouring within wealthy countries but not eligible for citizenship, no access to health care, held outside of local labour laws and fully tied to one employer so that any self advocacy means deportation; think Indigenous land dispossession on behalf of and by powerful extractive interests; think capital accumulation at the expense of environment and social order; think wealthy and powerful driving many countries to adopts austerity regimes; think austerity then being blamed on "immigrants taking jobs," and much, much more. All of these things and many more are mediated through border practices that enforce a capito-fascist regime globally, which in turn subjugates the earth itself and many of the earth's inhabitants to servitude, desperation, poverty, indignity, and death.
It's a great book!

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

In short: excellent, but almost too much.

The border is central to the organisation of our world.

This is Walia's argument, and she backs it up completely: the border is central to capital and cheap labour, to resource exploitation, gender, race, and environmental crisis. For anyone interested in those things but who hadn't previously considered borders as a factor, please read this. It is impassioned, meticulously and wide rangingly researched, obviously coming from deep organising experience.

However, there is so much in here that it's overwhelming, and is written in a style of "list of awful things", rather than theory heavy, but it's not incorrect. I would seriously suggest taking 1 chapter at a time, doing your own research, and coming back to it. It also contains a slight element of propagandaistic simplicity: e.g References to "liberals", "the elite" without defining these terms or allowing nuance in how oppressed people act either.

Overall very rich!

[Vibhor Jain · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a tough one to rate.
5 Stars for the awareness the book creates
1 Star for the remedies

The writer does a wonderful job of highlighting the issue of migrant exploitation. What I found odd was that the writer counters one extreme with another. Eliminating borders all together is no solution.
I would still rate this book as a good read on the basis of expansion of viewpoint and learning achieved.

[Sean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Politically sharp and well-nigh Hegelian in scope. I've never read anything like the depth and breadth of this book, all with revolutionary, abolitionist politics. So urgent and necessary.

[Daniel Z. · Rating 2 out of 5]

How can a book this short be so packed with repetitive jargon?

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Walia is very smart and this is both well researched and well written, but I was left feeling a little lost as to the the purpose. It’s neither new research nor a policy intervention.

[Molly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Walia herself summarizes it best: “I align with a leftist politics of no borders, since the borders of today are completely bound up in the violences of dispossession, accumulation, exploitation, and their imbrications with race, caste, gender, sexuality, and ability. A no borders politics is not abstract; it is grounded in the material and lived impacts of our world, scarred by warfare and warming. Like the regime of private property, borders are not simply lines marking territory; they are the product of, and produce, social relations from which we must emancipate ourselves” (213).

This book is incredibly ambitious—in arguing that borders uphold unjust power relations by managing, creating the conditions for, preventing, forcing, and criminalizing migration, Walia covers an extraordinary amount of ground both physical (from Australia’s horrific system of offshore detention to temporary labor migration in Canada to far-right Hindu nationalism in India) and topical (weaving in critiques of systems ranging from special economic zones to ecofascism to the shallow multiculturalism of “refugees welcome” rhetoric). As a result, the book is dense; it felt kind of like a sequel to the The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism in its articulation of a broad, global theory of how things work, grounded in history and with surprisingly many tentacles, but did all of this in 220 pages rather than 600. (I'm afraid The Shock Doctrine is my new A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, by which I mean I am no longer able to have a conversation without mentioning it.) At one point, my lovely roommate saw Border and Rule on the kitchen table and commented that the title sounded like the name of a college history class, and indeed, reading it kind of felt like taking a college history class—definitely an “eat your vegetables” kind of book, but one that felt well worth it all the way through.

Walia is an amazing thinker and a fairly clear writer, especially impressive given how academic some of the material was. It is a testament to her thinking and writing that, when I look back on the things I underlined toward the beginning of the book, they now seem too obvious to be worth underlining: arguments about the “systems of power that create migrants yet criminalize migration” (2), for example, or that “the free flow of capital requires precarious labor, which is shaped by borders through immobility” (6). Most interesting to me were the places where Walia took a seeming contradiction and elegantly resolved it. Early on, she explains that it makes sense for borders to be open to capital but closed to most people, because the free flow of capital requires precarious labor, which is managed by borders (6). Later on, she explains the weird alliance of Zionists and anti-Semites, whose missions come together around the shared vision (mirage?) of a world of ethnonationalist states (169-173). She explains “commodified inclusion” of migrant workers through programs like temporary labor migration as “‘in a continuum with exclusion, rather than in opposition to it,’ as border controls channel irregular migration into temporary labor migration” (7). And she argues that “Though the commodities migrant farmworkers produce are deemed essential, the workers themselves are underpaid and disposable, unprotected and deportable—revealing not a contradiction but rather a central function of border imperialist rule” (12). Walia’s ability to make complicated ideas seem self-explanatory made reading the book feel—again—like taking a really good class.

I ended up underlining like a third of the book, and I probably would get more out of it if I were to read it a second time, especially in a book group or classroom setting where someone can explain stuff to me. In the meantime, though, it feels like it’s time for a nice fluffy dessert book.

[warren · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is an astonishing book. the scope of it is incredible and is so deeply researched and well rounded in its analysis. its spot on all the time and moves on so quickly from thing to thing that it can be disorienting to read a little — i made it thru 2 chapters a year ago and picked it up again a week or 2 ago and finished it. but thank god 4 it.

Harsha Walia analyzes:
— the causes of displacement and irregular migration in the first place: neoliberal economics, imperialist aggression, and climate change to name a few
— how borders are not just territorial boundaries ,, but central tools of global capitalist markets, racial/gendered/class orderings, state formation, and more
— that borders are really happening everywhere,, enforced internally through citizenship regimes and pushed externally by making other countries hold the west's detention centers, border guards, refugee camps, etc
— historical foundations of bordering in settler colonialism, colonization, chattel slavery, indentured servitude, and more (depending on place)
— migrant worker programs across the globe
— right wing movements and nationalisms, and how they relate to liberal multiculturalism (she explains how liberalism kind of creates right wing movements ... "the frankenstein of liberalism" she aptly says)

and ALL the while shes constantly highlighting feminist analyses, tying things back to their historical foundations, and mentioning grassroots resistance movements.

she isn't US centric as many armchair analyses of empire are — she spends whole chapters on europe, australia, and canada as imperial cores. she also doesn't flatten the global south, analyzing the right wing movements of India and Brazil, the brutal migrant worker programs of the Gulf countries, and other ways empire operates through neocolonial governments and client states. all the while she highlights the movements and actions being taken by oppressed peoples, not denying their agency and not making empire seem inevitable.

would 10/10 recommend reading it. really does demonstrate the deep and wide terror of borders, global capitalism, and empire, and deeply affirms the belief that ... while there is so much more to it and so much complexity to the world .... whatever we can do to weaken or destabilize the regimes of the US, europe, canada, and australia is gonna do a LOT of people a LOT of good.

[Jada · Rating 5 out of 5]

the year's not done yet, but this was definitely my top nonfiction book of the year. it framed the migrant crisis not simply in terms of a humanitarian crisis, but rather as a systemic thing, caused by capitalism, imperialism, and climate change, among other things. I learnt so much about oppressive border policies around the world, and how exactly migration is illegalised. I've always wondered what the world would be like without borders, with mobility rather than migration (that's almost a direct quote from the book), and although the book didn't really cover future plans except for a bit in the afterword, understanding the true nature of border policies made me realise how unjust they are. The scope of the book was much wider than I would've thought based on the title, but unlike the CIA book, that wasn't a bad thing. It covered stuff from the formation of the US border, the war on drugs, Australian and EU border policy, Canadian and Kafala migrant programs, and the ways in which fascism and authoritarianism intersect with the illegalisation of migration. these seemingly disparate topics all coalesced into one coherent thesis centred around the idea that borders are a state tool and we can't look at migration as an isolated phenomenon without first analysing the underlying causes.

ngl this review didn't really do the book justice but it's definitely an informative read.

[Ishan Daya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow such a great book - would highlyyy recommend for anyone that is thinking about the concept of borders and how they interact with nationalism and xenophobia. This book does such a good job of offering concrete frameworks to think through the effects of displacement, dispossession, and the underlying capitalist / drive for capital accumulation principles that work for the illegality of peoples, the strengthening of borders, etc.

A couple really great snippets: “...we should assert that migrant workers don’t suppress wages; bosses and borders do”, how welfare nationalism (ie scandinavian neo-socialist states) has been and is often used as a form of bordered exclusion to control social services rather than an actual egalitarian institution based on social solidarity, reminders that calls for any type of justification of immigrants implicitly states that some humans are of less worth and because those are generally in the Global North, it is centered around racial nationalist power that centers white citizenship.