Border and Rule Quotes

“Empires crumble, capitalism is not inevitable, gender is not biology, whiteness is not immutable, prisons are not inescapable, and borders are not natural law.”
― Harsha Walia, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism

“Right-wing nationalism is a bourgeois nationalism, and in our struggles against capitalist austerity we must emphasize that our enemy arrives in a limousine, and not on a boat.”
― Harsha Walia, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism

“It is no coincidence that the rise of the far right is happening in the after-math of the Great Recession and has emerged as a reactionary alternative to neoliberalism and liberalism, both suffering a profound legitimacy crisis. Though they are distinct ideologies, the far right is the Frankenstein of liberalism. The prevailing liberal ideologies of individualism, freedom of opportunity, tolerance, respectability, and techno-solutionism have cultivated the far-right mobilizations now calling for the very destruction of liberalism.”
― Harsha Walia, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism

“The criminalization of migration today is not analogous to but has been inescapably structured through the legal trafficking of millions of Africans during the slave trade, the policing and regulation of Blackness as constitutive of white supremacy and racial capitalism, and the anti-Black production of vagrancy and alienness within the nation-state. Contemporary immigration enforcement and border controls draw heavily from the foundational terror of anti-Black violence, particularly the regulation of Black movement, as evidenced in the borrowing of both a structural logic of racial control and a punitive legal architecture. Similarly, the current protections of legal citizenship on which many immigrants in the US rely, such as birthright citizenship for their children, originate in Black struggles to defend the constitutional principle of birthright.”
― Harsha Walia, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism

“A proclamation like “Immigrants steal our jobs,” and its rejoinder, “Our economy needs immigrants” treats immigrants as commodities to be traded in capitalist markets and discarded if deemed defective. Migrant justice must not endorse categories of desirable or undesirable, expectations of gratitude or assimilation, gestures of charitable humanitarianism, tropes of migrating to modernity, the commodification of labor to benefit capital accumulation, or state borders and other carceral regimes as legitimate institutions of governance.”
― Harsha Walia, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism

“While migrant workers are temporary, temporary migration is permanent.”
― Harsha Walia, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism

“Territorial diffusion relies on biometric surveillance and disciplinary practices within the state, as well as imperial outsourcing. Put another way, the border is elastic, and the magical line can exist anywhere. Crossing the border does not end the struggle for undocumented people, because the border is mobile and can be enforced anywhere within the nation-state. Internal bordering differentiates those within the nation-state who are citizens from those who are not.”
― Harsha Walia, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism

“Ensuring labor protections and citizenship status is the most ethical and effective counter to the far right's anti-migrant racism. Otherwise, attacks on migrant workers -- buttressed by ubiquitous anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, anti-Muslim, anti-Roma and anti-Latinx racism -- will continue to work as intended for capitalist interests: channeling irregular migration into precarious migration, lowering the wage floor for all workers, and expanding carceral governance.”
― Harsha Walia, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism