Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and Racist Nationalism PDF

PART 1 Displacement Crisis, Not Border Crisis Copyri...

PART 1 Displacement Crisis, Not Border Crisis Copyright © 2021. Haymarket Books. All rights reserved. Walia, Harsha. Border and Rule : Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, Haymarket Books, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6184199. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2023-01-29 01:55:02.  CHAPTER 1 Historic Entanglements of US Border Formation The history of the US border is one of nearly unimaginable terror and grief, land theft, ethnic cleansing, forced marches, concentrated resettlement, war, torture, and rape. —Greg Grandin, “American Extremism Has Always Flowed from the Border” In the summer of 2019, a photo of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his toddler Angie Valeria went viral. The child had her tiny arm wrapped across her father’s back, as both lay facedown, dead, in the murky waters of the Rio Grande. That same summer, the world also watched in horror as images poured in of children in cages, bodies crammed on floors flooded with sewage, and families torn apart at the border. These images captured the cruelty of President Donald Trump’s restrictive and punitive immigration policies. The Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) reported from the Texas border: “Hundreds of migrants are locked up in what are akin to disaster relief camps the day after an earthquake. Families are cramped together, porta-potties and mylar blankets are strewn across an industrial wasteland. Cleaning facilities appear non-existent and families are forced to wait outside throughout the day in sweltering heat.”1 At least seven children died in US immigration custody in 2019, and thirty-three adults died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody between 2017 and 2019.2 When sixteen-year-old Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez contracted a dangerous flu while in Border Patrol custody in Texas, he was not taken to a hospital but quarantined in a cell instead. Carlos died in a pool of blood on May 19, 2019. A record 69,550 migrant children were incarcerated in the US in 2019, more children separated from their families and detained than in any other country on the planet.3 This mass caging was the culmination of Trump’s abominable “zero-tolerance” policy mandating Copyright © 2021. Haymarket Books. All rights reserved. criminal prosecutions of all migrants, including families, for irregular border crossings. Since July 2017, as many as 5,400 children have been separated from their caregivers at the border and detained, 89 percent of whom were from Guatemala and Honduras, and at least 207 were babies under the age of five.4 Young children have described devastating symptoms, like “every heartbeat hurts” or “I can’t feel my heart.”5 Beatriz, a young Maya girl, was beaten with the metal end of a belt while in custody at a child migrant shelter; she sustained bruises on her legs and a scar on her back. Her father, Jairo, was tricked into signing deportation Walia, Harsha. Border and Rule : Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, Haymarket Books, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6184199. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2023-01-29 01:55:02.  documents and deported without her. By the time Beatriz was reunited with her family, she could no longer speak her language and was unable to communicate with her mother.6 In addition to the zero-tolerance policy, Trump instituted a Muslim ban, issued an executive order to expand detention and expedite deportations, authorized greater local powers in immigration enforcement, and increased funding for thousands of additional miles of the border wall. He capped refugee admissions at the lowest level in decades, reserving spots for Iraqis and Afghans loyal to US war efforts. He also implemented new rules making it more difficult for refugees to establish “credible fear” and restricted asylum claims for women fleeing gendered violence. Furthermore, Trump attempted to cancel the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program impacting seven hundred thousand undocumented youth and ordered an end to Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for people from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Sudan. In 2020, weaponizing the coronavirus crisis, he issued an executive order to curb immigration green cards for permanent residents and implemented new border regulations so all migrants and refugees, including unaccompanied minors, crossing the US–Mexico border irregularly could be turned back. This unprecedented policy authorized an expedited deportation process, averaging ninety-six minutes, and over ten thousand migrants and refugees were summarily expelled from the border within the first eighteen days of its implementation.7 Between March and May 2020, only two people were able to exercise their right to seek asylum at the US–Mexico border.8 Even though most of these orders have been challenged in court and some even blocked, they have created a chilling effect in racialized communities and emboldened white supremacists. After Trump’s election, reported hate crimes increased by 17 percent, and by 2019 as many as 216 militia groups were active in the US.9 For the first time in its history, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was forced to admit that white nationalism is a major domestic threat, especially after the armed United Constitutional Patriots militia kidnapped and illegally detained hundreds of migrants at gunpoint in 2019.10 State- sanctioned white nationalism has also intensified. The Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, signed in 2018, was the largest border enforcement and immigration budget in history. Receiving a whopping $23.7 billion for Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and ICE, DHS became the country’s largest enforcement agency, with a budget 6,000 percent larger than in 1980.11 While Trump’s overtly malicious and cumulative policies of separating families, caging children, banning Muslims, building the border wall, and overturning minimal protections for Copyright © 2021. Haymarket Books. All rights reserved. refugees and undocumented migrants has garnered international condemnation, US immigration enforcement has been routine and bipartisan practice for over two centuries. Liberal lawmakers and their supporters may critique the overt, racist treatment of migrants under Trump’s reign, but they too naturalize the border’s existence and uphold the state’s right to exclude migrants through border rule. It is essential, however, that we ask how and why the border is made. US bordering practices traverse many land and maritime jurisdictions, and the US border is externalized far beyond territorial limits; this is explored further in chapters 2 and 4. This chapter conceptualizes the formation of the US–Mexico border through the historic entanglements of war and expansion into Mexico, frontier fascism Walia, Harsha. Border and Rule : Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, Haymarket Books, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6184199. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2023-01-29 01:55:02.  and Indigenous genocide, enslavement and control of Black people, and the racialized exclusion and expulsion of those deemed undesirable. The US–Mexico border must be understood not only as a racist weapon to exclude migrants and refugees, but as foundationally organized through, and hence inseparable from, imperialist expansion, Indigenous elimination, and anti-Black enslavement. US–Mexico border rule intersects with global and domestic forms of warfare, positioned as a linchpin in the concurrent processes of expansion, elimination, and enslavement, thus solidifying the white settler power of racial exclusion and migrant expulsion. We see the rhythms of these overlapping histories reverberate at Oklahoma’s Fort Sill army base, a former prison where hundreds of Chiricahua people including Geronimo were incarcerated, then a World War II internment camp for seven hundred Japanese Americans, and subsequently a detention center holding thousands of migrant children under President Barack Obama. Fort Sill made headlines again when Trump also considered using it as a detention facility for children. In response, the base became a site of regular protests bringing together Indigenous people, Japanese Americans, and Latinx community members, drawing connections between their experiences of forced family separation. In early 2019, DHS also floated the possibility of detaining migrant children at Guantánamo Bay, America’s first overseas naval base.12 This omnipotent symbol of US imperialism in Cuba is maintained by thousands of Jamaican and Filipinx migrant workers employed in construction, cleaning, and cooking. The gulag is a legal black hole, where thousands of Haitian refugees were detained in the 1980s and 1990s and a thousand Muslim detainees from thirty-five countries were imprisoned and tortured at the height of the war on terror. Lisa Lowe reminds us that “settler seizure and native removal, slavery and racial dispossession, and racialized expropriation of many kinds are imbricated processes, not sequential events; they are ongoing and continuous in our contemporary moment.”13 Conquest as Border Formation We may wish to rearticulate our understanding of white supremacy by not assuming that it is enacted in a single fashion; rather, white supremacy is constituted by separate and distinct, but still interrelated, logics. —Andrea Smith, “Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy” Copyright © 2021. Haymarket Books. All rights reserved. Interrogating the formation of the US–Mexico border exposes the moorings of the US as a settler, slaveholding, expansionist, and exclusionary state. The southern border has been particularly pivotal in the ideology of manifest destiny, a tenet of territorial expansionism wherein northern and southern US states found common ground in the belief that God had ordained frontier wars.14 Frontier fascism was most forcefully enacted by President Andrew Jackson, whose bloody reign from 1829 to 1837 included massacring Indigenous people and expanding slavery. Jackson also attempted to negotiate with the Mexican government for the purchase of Texas, while tacitly supporting the flow of white Anglo-American settlers into the region to mount a revolt. During the 1830s, Mexico’s decision to outlaw slavery and Walia, Harsha. Border and Rule : Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, Haymarket Books, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6184199. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2023-01-29 01:55:02.  refuse Anglo-settler immigration from the southern US fueled a white secessionist Texian movement. In 1837, Jackson officially recognized the independent Republic of Texas, where Texians affirmed slavery and free Black people required special permission to live.15 The US annexation of the Republic of Texas as a slave state in 1845 was followed by a full-blown US military invasion of Mexico and debt manipulation by President James Polk, eventually resulting in the forced annexation of half of Mexico through the imposition of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. The treaty forced Mexico to drop any claims to Texas and authorized the US to capture land comprising all or part of present-day Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. In total, the US seized more than 525,000 square miles of territory in Mexico, shifting the border south, and rendering Mexicans living in what was now the US “a conquered people.”16 An Anglo-American racial order of conquest was enforced. Mexicans in the captured territories were given the hollow option of US citizenship, while enduring systemic racial discrimination and segregation as alien citizens.17 Indigenous lands were seized, and sovereign nations, including the Comanche, Apache, Seri, Coahuilteca, and Kiowa, were forcibly assimilated into the US nation-state. Enslaved Black people were subject to the Fugitive Slave Act, while all Black people continued to be denied citizenship, a pillar of white supremacy in the expanding slavery frontier. Most mainstream analyses of US immigration ignore this history of border and state formation, even as it continues to animate US imperial ambitions and racial-capitalist rule. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz argues that the liberal narrative of a “nation of immigrants” is grossly inaccurate, erasing the violence of conquests and borders upon Mexican, Indigenous, Black, and colonized communities to produce the sanitized myth of a melting pot.18 In contrast to the inaccurate framing “We are a nation of immigrants,” the more subversive chant “We did not cross the border, the border crossed us” destabilizes the southern border by interrogating the assumption of “migrant” on seized lands and exposing the hypocrisy of colonizers calling people “illegals.” Subjugated communities, particularly Indigenous and Black (importantly, not mutually exclusive), are often folded into the liberal narrative of “racial minorities.” Further, Indigenous decolonial and Black abolition struggles are largely seen as disconnected from the immigrant rights movement, except in identifying shared struggles against racism. However, the war on migrants does not exist separate from or simply parallel to anti- Indigenous and anti-Black violence. Early US bordering practices were, in fact, conceived of as a method of eliminating Indigenous people and controlling Black people, and US border Copyright © 2021. Haymarket Books. All rights reserved. imperialism is structurally bound up in these genocides. Border Formation through Indigenous Elimination No one is illegal on stolen land except those who stole it. —Red Nation, “The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth” The US not only expanded beyond its borders to build its empire but was founded as a genocidal empire upon Indigenous nations. Originating from a series of papal bulls in the late Walia, Harsha. Border and Rule : Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, Haymarket Books, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6184199. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2023-01-29 01:55:02.  1400s, the Doctrine of Discovery declared that any and all lands uninhabited by Christians could be claimed. This colonial doctrine of conquest formed the socio-political justification for the dispossession of Indigenous lands and jurisdiction, and it was formalized in law in the 1823 unanimous Supreme Court decision Johnson v. McIntosh, wherein Chief Justice John Marshall wrote that “the principle of discovery gave European nations an absolute right to New World lands.”19 Within a few years of the decision, Jackson enacted the Indian Removal Act of 1830, forcing fifty thousand Indigenous people to relocate west of the Mississippi River to a specifically designated “Indian territory.” The militarily enforced process violently displaced eighteen thousand Cherokee and killed another four thousand, while opening twenty-five million acres of ethnically cleansed land to white settlement and cotton plantation slavery. An economy of dispossession was solidified, rooted in colonization and racial subordination to turn both land and people into property. This racialized economy of dispossession is described by scholars as “the multiple and intertwined genealogies of racialized property, subjection, and expropriation through which capitalism and colonialism take shape historically.”20 The Trail of Tears, as it came to be known, was but one part of the Indian Wars, marked by thousands of forced relocations and massacres by the US military and state-led militias, as Anglo-American settlement pushed violently westward and southward. Spanning two hundred years and continuing into the present day, extermination campaigns have been supplemented by a system of elimination that includes apartheid confinement on reservations; biological warfare and starvation; child kidnapping and forced assimilation in boarding schools; epidemics of missing and murdered women and two-spirit people; criminalization through the Court of Indian Offenses; control through the Bureau of Indian Affairs and imposition of tribal council governance; incarceration of Indigenous resisters; and evolving colonial technologies of land theft including the Homestead Act, the Dawes Act, and the Bureau of Land Management’s expropriation of millions of acres of land. Dispossession is gendered, and, as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson puts forward, land loss is enacted by attacking Indigenous nations through targeted violence against women and two- spirit people.21 Body sovereignty is intimately connected to land sovereignty, and 80 percent of Indigenous women in the US today experience violence, 97 percent of which is committed by non-Indigenous people.22 Patrick Wolfe articulates this totality of settler-colonial invasion as “a structure, rather than an event,” where “expropriation continues as a foundational characteristic of settler-colonial society.”23 Copyright © 2021. Haymarket Books. All rights reserved. Immigration and citizenship have been specifically weaponized to further the genocidal elimination of Indigenous political and social formations. Under the 1887 Dawes Act, for example, Indigenous people could become US citizens only if they agreed to live on individual plots of land, carved from the US government’s confiscation and violent partitioning of tribal lands. Forcing Indigenous people to relinquish collective land title and assimilate into the capitalist economy of the white settler state, citizenship was thus dependent on the legal regime of private property. Then, in 1924, the Indian Citizenship Act imposed US citizenship on Indigenous people.24 In the same year, the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act imposed national origins quotas based on existing census numbers, Walia, Harsha. Border and Rule : Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, Haymarket Books, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6184199. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2023-01-29 01:55:02.  drastically limiting especially Jewish and Slavic immigration from southern and eastern Europe. The purpose of this act was to maintain a white settler polity favoring settlement from northern and western Europe. The act additionally extended a prohibition on all Asian immigration and effectively excluded those from other non-European countries on the basis of racial undesirability.25 This restrictionist immigration policy, actively constructing national identity through race and racial difference, also prohibited the migration of Indigenous people from Canada to the US. This happened shortly after Crees and Chippewas from Canada and Yaquis from Mexico crossed into the US in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and launched political battles for federal tribal recognition to challenge the US state’s subjugation of them as “foreign Indians” and deportable “illegal immigrants.”26 The normalization of settler colonialism evades settler occupation as a method of imperialism and, instead, tries to produce Indigenous people as domesticated citizens of the US. Theories of domestication and claims to Indigenous lands, explains Dunbar-Ortiz, “obliterate the present and presence of Indigenous nations struggling for their liberation from states of colonialism.”27 The characterization of Indigenous people as a domesticated US “racial and ethnic minority group” not only omits the inherently anti-imperialist nature of Indigenous struggles, but also homogenizes a multiplicity of Indigenous nations into a pan- Indigenous identity and undermines Indigenous understandings of treaties as international diplomacy. Audra Simpson critiques the ways in which Indigeneity has become legible within liberal frameworks of “minorization” and “culture,” rather than analyzed as diverse and distinct jurisdictions captured by the “political project of dispossession and containment.”28 The dichotomy between “domestic minorities” and “foreign subjects” further unravels with the knowledge that the eliminationist Indian Wars laid the foundation for conquest abroad, becoming the template for genocidal warfare in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. Laleh Khalili emphasizes, “[W]hat was learnt in the Indian wars became the necessary, if unwritten, manual for subsequent overseas asymmetric warfare.”29 This continues into our present era; for example, the high-profile US operation to capture and kill Osama bin Laden was named “Geronimo.” As noted by Maggie Blackhawk, “The last three administrations have pointed to the Indian Wars as precedent to justify executive action in the war on terrorism.”30 Within this context, George Manuel coined the term “Fourth World” to expand the analysis of the Third World’s subject position to include Indigenous struggles that Copyright © 2021. Haymarket Books. All rights reserved. are geographically but not conceptually of the First World.31 Today, while continuing to affirm their own distinct and diverse political and social orders, Indigenous people remain occupied subjects of US empire. Many urban Indigenous people provocatively refer to themselves as refugees displaced from their homelands. The representation of Indigenous people in inner-city homeless populations is, after all, a crisis of colonial dispossession and displacement scaffolded by settler property relations under racial capitalism. Meanwhile, according to Nick Estes, “A quarter of adults alive today in the US are direct descendants of those who profited from Homestead Act’s legacy of exclusive, racialized property ownership and economic mobility, a legacy that categorically excluded Walia, Harsha. Border and Rule : Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, Haymarket Books, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6184199. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2023-01-29 01:55:02.  Black, Indigenous and other nonwhite people.”32 Jodi Byrd uses the term “arrivants,” borrowing from Kamau Brathwaite, to refer to racialized diasporic people in settler societies displaced by colonial and imperial acts of violence and thus differently positioned, though not necessarily innocent, within settler colonialism.33 Present-day immigration, alongside and atop settler colonialism, is bound up in the complicities of empire and its incessant negation of Indigenous sovereignty. A further obfuscation of the relationship between Indigeneity and US border rule takes place when contemporary immigration issues are relegated to the realm of domestic policy and further siloed as a homogenizing Latinx issue, obscuring the specific context of Indigenous dispossession and displacement across the Americas. For instance, the crushing poverty and horrific violence Central Americans are fleeing are most acute for Indigenous people. In Honduras, 88 percent of Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous children are impoverished compared to 10 percent of all children, while 74 percent of Indigenous people in Guatemala are impoverished compared to 56 percent of the general population.34 A large proportion of Central American migrants and a growing share of Mexican migrants to the US are Indigenous people colonized by the Spanish, captured by Mexico and Central American nation-states, subsumed into a pan-Latinx and mestizx identity, and criminalized through the imposition of borders on Abya Yala. Derived from Guna cosmology, Abya Yala refers to the whole continent of the Americas and transhemispheric Indigenous relations.35 As Maya Kaqchikel writer Silvia Raquec Cum tells it, “From the perspective of Indigenous peoples, migration has always existed as a form of exchange and communication within the dynamics and life of our communities. We have seen how the United States began to build its borders and divide towns, creating physical and ideological barriers, and how, in spite of this, people still continued to migrate.”36 Shannon Speed argues that the particular vulnerability of Indigenous women migrants is structural, with their migration representing a transit between Latin American and Anglo- American settler state structures both built on Indigenous elimination, including the brutal impacts of neoliberalism, militarization, and inequities generated by race and gender.37 Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal Maquin, a seven-year-old Q’eqchi’ Maya girl who died in US Border Patrol custody in 2018, for example, came from territories destroyed by the cumulative impacts of Spanish colonial invasion, genocidal massacres during the civil war targeting Q’eqchi’ communities, large biofuel and sugar plantations displacing Indigenous livelihoods, and now one of the areas in Guatemala most vulnerable to climate change. Copyright © 2021. Haymarket Books. All rights reserved. Claudia Patricia Gómez González, a twenty-year-old shot in the head by US Border Patrol in 2018, was also Maya. Claudia left her village in May 2018, hoping to find work to pay for a university accounting degree, but was killed within three weeks of beginning her journey.38 Her father, Gilberto Gómez, worked as an undocumented migrant in the US after the horrors of the civil war and was deported shortly before his daughter attempted her own journey. He has now filed a lawsuit against the US government for her wrongful death. “It’s a year since my daughter was killed and I want the same thing now as I did then: justice,” Gómez told media.39 The chant of “No borders on stolen land” ringing in protests elucidates a prescient Walia, Harsha. Border and Rule : Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, Haymarket Books, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6184199. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2023-01-29 01:55:02.  anticolonial analysis when considering the disproportionate displacements and migrations of Indigenous people today. Anti-Black Controls and Border Politics Pre-occupation with Black movement was central to the colonies and what would become American democracy. —Benjamin Ndugga-Kabuye and Tia Oso (Black Alliance for Just Immigration), “Forged in Struggle: How Migration, Resistance and Decolonization Shape Black Identities and Liberation Movements in North America” Immigration restrictions are described by Iyko Day as “Jim Crow in a transnational context,” whereby “immigration policy not only determined entry into the nation but could legally bar an immigrant from naturalizing, voting, owning, and transferring property, and working.”40 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. Especially after the despicably racist Dred Scott Supreme Court decision in 1856, upholding the denial of US citizenship to Black people, Black movements forced the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868.41 Rinaldo Walcott and Idil Abdillahi emphasize that the entire politics of migration is embedded in anti-Black racial logics. “Movements that we now call migration are founded in anti-blackness, taking their logic from transatlantic slavery,” they write.42 Indeed, the architecture of US border controls derives from anti-Black technologies regulating mobility. Shortly after the imposition of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and as part of the Compromise of 1850 between northern and southern states after the conquest of territories in Mexico, the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act allowed slaveholders to kidnap and Copyright © 2021. Haymarket Books. All rights reserved. capture Black people they claimed had escaped to the professed free states. Slave catchers and authorities would kidnap and transport Black people across state borders. After the annexation of Texas, slave owners in the state also formed militias to patrol the US–Mexico border to prevent Black people from escaping to Mexico. The border militias swelled their ranks from slave patrols and would conduct cross-border raids in the South in the quest to capture Black people. Robyn Maynard and Simone Browne put forward that similar racial technologies of spatial control were used in the North, such as “Birch certificates” (or “certificates of freedom”) issued by the British in the late 1700s, effectively operating as passports to scrutinize Black movement and prevent enslaved Africans from escaping to Walia, Harsha. Border and Rule : Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, Haymarket Books, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6184199. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2023-01-29 01:55:02.  Canada.43 Maynard argues, “[T]he global positioning of Black life as enslaveable placed Black migrants in a structural position that differs from other migrants of color.”44 These early laws and militias regulating and punishing Black movement constitute a foundational continuity of immigration enforcement today. Roberto Lovato claims that the contemporary design of racist immigration enforcement developed from these anti-Black practices of spatial control. Specifically, Lovato argues the federal ICE Agreements of Cooperation in Communities to Enhance Safety and Security (ACCESS) program, authorizing states to deputize local law enforcement to pursue and arrest undocumented migrants, is based on the Fugitive Slave Act.45 Philip Kretsedemas similarly contends the socioeconomic order of white rule established through state-level Jim Crow laws was later emulated in the devolution of federal immigration enforcement policy to the state level.46 This devolution to state and local law enforcement not only mimics the design of anti-Black laws but also disproportionately impacts Black migrants, who are most likely to be profiled by local police and law enforcement officers and then turned over to immigration authorities. I discuss this further in chapter 2. As the abolitionist movement grew in the early and mid-1800s, the weaponization of the border to control Black people took on a dual function. In addition to border militias ensuring enslaved Black people remained within the US, there were calls and plans, for example by the notorious American Colonization Society, for the mass deportation of non-enslaved Black people out of the US to Liberia and Sierra Leone. So-called free states like California, Illinois, Indiana, and Oregon, fearing an influx of Black people, also began codifying prohibitions on interstate Black migration in their constitutions, all of which occurred during the antebellum period and foreshadowed federal immigration exclusion.47 Shortly thereafter, beginning in 1865, the post-bellum Black Codes were enacted across southern states and became a de facto system of re-enslavement. Under the Black Codes, convict leasing was enforced through forced penal labor and debt peonage, surveillance was intensified through vagrancy laws, curfews and pass systems were implemented, and additional restrictions were placed on interstate Black migration. Saidiya Hartman observes how vagrancy statutes to contain Black emancipation maintained a continuity “from slave to servant, from servant to vagrant, from domestic to prisoner, from idler to convict and felon,” thus codifying the criminalization of free mobility through the racial logic of anti-Blackness.48 The criminalization of the presumed idleness and unemployment of Black people as “vagrancy” was a critical weapon to coerce Black people to sign exploitative labor contracts. Copyright © 2021. Haymarket Books. All rights reserved. This form of Black bodily dispossession encompassed yet completely exceeded the rubric of labor; as Frank Wilderson emphatically states, “[T]he point is we were never meant to be workers; in other words, capital/white supremacy’s dream did not envision us as being incorporated or incorporative.”49 Coerced labor as a result of the Black Codes, and racialized surveillance and enforcement of work in coal mines, plantations, and lumber camps, including the frequent requirement of residency on former slaveowners’ properties, anticipated the distinctly carceral bracero program with Mexico and the Caribbean migrant worker program (see part 3). After the Civil War, the KKK was also formally established, and during and after the Reconstruction era, white terror included extrajudicial violence and Walia, Harsha. Border and Rule : Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, Haymarket Books, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6184199. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2023-01-29 01:55:02.  around ten thousand lynchings.50 Zoé Samudzi writes of the white witnessing of lynching as “a reinscription of white supremacy: a reification of the boundary between the white self and the black ‘others’ through a passive bystander witnessing and the enforcement of race through public violence.”51 Anti-Black racial torture as a form of white supremacist public spectacle became a blueprint for border vigilantes, the Nazis, and for state torture at Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and the Metropolitan Detention Center. More recently, the workings of anti-Black warfare through mass displacement and carceral immobility were laid bare by the disaster of Hurricane Katrina. Black homes were most vulnerable to the storm, Black people were criminalized during the storm, and Black neighborhoods were abandoned by recovery efforts after the storm. Seventy-three percent of the eight hundred thousand dislocated people were Black residents, who then saw their neighborhoods policed and landscapes privatized, leaving most people permanently displaced.52 This era also saw the expansion of immigration enforcement through the war on drugs and war on terror. The war on drugs frames migrants as criminals and the war on terror frames them as security threats, both of which are a priori dependent on the anti-Black warfare of the prison industrial complex and the mass detention of Haitian refugees, described in chapter 2. Fred Moten, drawing on Cedric Robinson, depicts the position of Black people in the US as one of an “eternal internal alien.”53 Today, Black migrants and refugees face the brunt of anti-migrant criminalization with the triple threat of stop-and-frisk policing, convictions and incarceration stemming from the war on drugs, and subsequent deportation. As explained by the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), “Black people are far more likely than any other population to be arrested, convicted and imprisoned in the US criminal enforcement system—the system upon which immigration enforcement increasingly relies.”54 Combined with the overall increase in convictions for drug offenses and the imposition of mandatory minimums, Black migrants are twice as likely to be detained due to a criminal conviction.55 According to BAJI, even though Black immigrants make up 7.2 percent of the total undocumented population, more than 20 percent of all migrants in deportation proceedings due to criminal convictions are Black people.56 Jamila Osman legitimately indicts: “In an era where the word intersectionality has entered the public lexicon, the immigrant rights movement has failed at it. It is the deeply pervasive nature of anti-black racism that erases the existence of black migrants.”57 Most recently, just under half of the countries targeted by Trump’s Muslim ban are African, including Eritrea, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, and Tanzania, thus controlling the movement of hundreds of millions of Copyright © 2021. Haymarket Books. All rights reserved. Africans. The “afterlife of slavery,” as Hartman pens, means “black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.”58 State Formation through White Supremacy Border formation through the distinct but interrelated processes of expansion, elimination, and enslavement imposed a white polity, and racial exclusion and migrant expulsion further Walia, Harsha. Border and Rule : Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, Haymarket Books, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6184199. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2023-01-29 01:55:02.  solidified the white racial state. While Anglo-European settlers were welcomed, actually encouraged as part of the settler-colonial project to eliminate Indigenous jurisdiction, immigrants racialized as non-white faced marginalization. The distinction between settler citizenship and illegalized immigration was key to racial population politics. Racist citizenship can be traced to the first citizenship law, the Naturalization Act of 1790, which conferred citizenship on “any alien, being a free white person.” Similarly, the first federal immigration laws merged race-based exclusion with criminalization of sex work and drug prohibition in the imperial “yellow peril” era of the late 1800s. The Page Act and the Chinese Exclusion Act fused white, working-class sentiments against Chinese “coolie labor” with white, middle-class moral panics about Chinese “uncleanliness,” “prostitution,” and “opium dens” to ban Chinese laborers. Anti-Chinese sentiment was further sexualized by claims of both heterosexual luring of white women by Chinese men and the gendering of Chinese men as effeminate or gay. Chinese immigrants, as opposed to white settlers, were treated as suspicious agents of war, which, in turn, represented settler possession “as a form of protection rather than conquest.”59 As Nikhil Pal Singh documents, in 1889 the US Supreme Court upheld Chinese exclusion on the basis that “foreigners of a different race” were “potentially dangerous to peace and security.”60 Similarly, the criminalization of poverty through vagrancy laws deporting the poor, especially single women migrants deemed to be promiscuous, attacks on labor unionism through the expulsion of communists and anarchists dating back to the Palmer Raids, maintenance of a cisheteronormative sexual order through sodomy laws and bars on queer migrants, and medical examination as a basis for excluding disabled migrants were all integral to constructing narratives of productive citizens versus deviant others. The border was thus a central modality for state formation, hierarchical social ordering, and population control through exclusions and expulsions. White power has shaped state formation and border controls, particularly in Texas and California. In Texas, the paramilitary militia Texas Rangers was initiated through violent attacks on the mighty Indigenous Comanches and mass executions to clear the frontier for Anglo-American settlement.61 Kelly Lytle Hernández writes that the Texas Rangers “battled Indigenous groups for dominance in the region, chased down runaway slaves who struck for freedom deep within Mexico, and settled scores with anyone who challenged the Anglo- American project in Texas.”62 After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the advent of the railroad brought in more settlers to both sides of the Rio Grande, land was mass-appropriated from Tejanx (Mexicans in Texas). State officials, the army, and Texas Rangers enforced these Copyright © 2021. Haymarket Books. All rights reserved. land grabs with brute force. Within a decade, and in just two counties, 187,000 acres of land were expropriated from Tejanx for Anglo-settler ranchers.63 During the decade-long Mexican Revolution that began in 1910 against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz and the landowning oligarchy, Anglo settlers were terrified the uprising would spread into Texas and result in the re-appropriation of property they now claimed. In the middle of the revolution, President Woodrow Wilson deployed 130,000 National Guardsmen and 30,000 troops along the border, the largest concentration of state forces since the Civil War.64 Texas Rangers and armed forces were also deployed in the Lower Rio Grande Valley to patrol the borderlands and suppress revolutionary actions. Vigilantes and Walia, Harsha. Border and Rule : Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, Haymarket Books, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6184199. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2023-01-29 01:55:02.  state officials acted in concert using sheer force to enforce a color bar in the labor force and terrorize Mexicans and Mexican Americans through beatings, torture, shootings, and mass decapitations. Thousands of Mexican Americans were killed during La Matanza (the period of massacres) and in the Porvenir Massacre of 1919, fifteen men and boys were executed, their corpses left to rot. Formed in 1924, the US Border Patrol’s first generation of agents was recruited from the ranks of the Texas Rangers and Klansmen, laying the ground for the culture of racism, militarism, and violence still prevalent in the agency. Today’s migrant killings by border agents in the borderlands and the tens of thousands of apprehensions at the Texas–Mexico border are a continuity of the Anglo-settler violence permeating the heart of Texas. We also see it in the use of violent terminology like “tonks,” referring to border crossers; the word is derived from the sound border agents’ flashlights supposedly make when hitting migrants over the head. Organized vigilantes capturing Black people, paramilitaries hunting Indigenous people, and militias apprehending migrants laid the foundation for our irredeemable modern-day police and border forces. At California’s inception as a state, white settler violence also instantly structured its bordering practices, beginning with two dozen state-funded militia expeditions authorized to kill Indigenous people.65 Justin Akers Chacón and Mike Davis argue that the first US border formation predated the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and actually took place in California during the years of genocidal conquest.66 Vigilantes inspired by these militia expeditions killed 6,460 Indigenous people beginning in 1846, and 100,000 Indigenous people were later killed during the California Gold Rush.67 Throughout the height of the gold rush, hundreds of Mexicans, including miners, were also lynched by vigilante mobs.68 During the subsequent period of economic decline, state-backed vigilante forces relentlessly waged lethal attacks on immigrant workers. Anti-Chinese race riots and massacres, including the 1871 massacre where white vigilantes killed 10 percent of all Chinese people in Los Angeles, the formation of the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League, and the KKK’s “Swat a Jap” campaign were all expressions of “Keep California white” efforts to consolidate white settler imperial jurisdiction and citizenship.69 Pressure for racial exclusion by white power vigilantes subsequently led to a California law prohibiting the employment of Chinese workers (bluntly titled An Act to Protect Free White Labor against Competition with Chinese Coolie Labor), the federal Page Act prohibiting East Asian “coolie labor” and Chinese women deemed to be sex workers, and the Copyright © 2021. Haymarket Books. All rights reserved. federal Chinese Exclusion Act banning all Chinese laborers. After the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, armed watchmen on horseback, alongside the Texas Rangers, patrolled the southern border from California to Texas and the northern US–Canadian border to prevent Chinese migration. Authorized by the Bureau of Immigration and calling themselves “Chinese catchers,” they became a de facto border patrol until its official formation in 1924.70 That same year, the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act was passed; spurred on by a national march of forty thousand Klansmen demanding immigration restriction, it barred all Asian immigration and imposed a national origins quota.71 Alexis Goldstein summarizes: “In a terrifying feedback loop, vigilantism both pressured politicians to pass oppressive federal Walia, Harsha. Border and Rule : Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, Haymarket Books, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6184199. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2023-01-29 01:55:02.  policy, and then, once the discrimination was law, even more violent vigilantism followed.”72 White entitlement remained a bedrock of California, as the state later led the country in race- science eugenics and narratives of “inferior immigrants,” and twenty thousand women were sterilized in state institutions between the 1920s and 1950s.73 More recently, racist rhetoric about “illegals” culminated in punitive policies such as Proposition 187, a ballot initiative in 1994 to deny undocumented migrants access to most California state services and impose a screening and reporting system based on immigration status. Though many parts of the law were found to be unconstitutional, Proposition 187 had a chilling effect and created a precedent for an avalanche of reactionary state-level immigration policies across the country over the next two decades. While the early anti-immigrant vigilante mobs in California were often made up of white working men, they were primarily organized and funded by capitalist interests to break class solidarity and protect agricultural grower profits. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which emphasized solidarity with migrant Chinese, Filipinx, and Japanese farmworkers, was consistently attacked over the course of three decades by the anticommunist American Protective League and the white supremacist KKK operating in the state. In one incident, over one hundred vigilantes attacked three hundred IWW members and their families and submerged young children in cauldrons of boiling coffee.74 Under the aegis of the Growers and Shippers’ Protective League, the Imperial Valley Anti-Communist Association was created in 1934 to tag unionization drives on the farms and fields as “a red menace.”75 At the time, close to seventy thousand Mexican, Black, and Filipinx workers in the Cannery and Agricultural Workers’ Industrial Union were staging almost fifty different workplace walkouts, including the historic cotton strike, during which twelve thousand mostly Mexican cotton pickers walked off the fields and shut down three hundred square miles of production.76 These strikers faced farmer-organized and state-deputized vigilante beatings, arson of their labor camps, arrests, and murder. As the Great Depression set in, the Placita raid in Los Angeles and the nationwide deportation of between 1 and 1.8 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans (60 percent of them US citizens) broke working-class unity, and racial expulsion emerged as a jingoist solution.77 Nearly 20 percent of the entire Mexican population in the US was deported, a move described by Mae Ngai as “a racial expulsion program exceeded in scale only by the Native American removals of the nineteenth century.”78 The foundations of anti-immigrant terrorism and anti-labor red-baiting were laid in tandem. Not coincidentally, in order to Copyright © 2021. Haymarket Books. All rights reserved. control Mexican mobility and labor, the Department of Labor oversaw the US Border Patrol from its inception until World War II, when the department’s role shifted to overseeing the advent of the bracero program. Border enforcement thus became entrenched as a key method for labor regulation and racial-capitalist accumulation, detailed in part 3. Indeed, capitalism has always required the social differentiation and hierarchization of race. Cedric Robinson theorized the linkage between racialized expropriation and capitalist plunder as “racial capitalism” to make clear that the social differentiation of race is not a secondary outcome of capitalism but, rather, the racial expropriation of land, labor, and life is Walia, Harsha. Border and Rule : Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, Haymarket Books, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6184199. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2023-01-29 01:55:02.  innately constitutive of capitalism.79 Capitalism is based on private ownership of property and production, expropriation and exploitation to guarantee accumulation, and market profit over human or ecological needs. Capitalism does not produce a universal relation of waged labor; capitalism actually requires and reproduces the racial hierarchies that underpin all the processes of territorial expansion, dispossession, enslavement, ownership, proletarianization, surveillance, and border rule. Capitalist plunder is, therefore, inextricable from racial dispossession and the unequal expropriation structuring state and social formation. Conclusion Even today, the work of the US Border Patrol extends beyond immigration enforcement. The entanglements of border formation in imperial expansion, anti-Black enslavement, and Indigenous elimination are mirrored in our contemporary moment with border agents patrolling alongside the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, policing Black neighborhoods in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, repressing Indigenous water protectors at Standing Rock, and using counterinsurgency tactics, including the snatching of protestors in Portland in July 2020, to suppress uprisings across the US after the cold-blooded police murder of George Floyd. War veterans, in fact, comprise one-third of Border Patrol agents.80 This is not a coincidence; there is a homology to domestic and foreign conquest. The formation of the US–Mexico border and immigration as a race-making regime cannot be analyzed outside the reciprocal processes of empire building and genocidal violence. Singh explains, “The United States developed its forms of democratic politics and capitalist economics from processes of imperial expansion, colonial dispossession, and racial domination.”81 As migrant children are separated from their families at the border, communities within the US also endure family separation through the web of child protective services and prison incarceration. Indigenous children are removed into foster care at a rate 2.7 times greater than their representation in the general population, and Black families are torn apart by prison incarceration 50 percent more often than white families.82 Hernández writes, “This tangle of alienated citizens and criminalized immigrants is a deeply historical construct that reaches up from the unfinished abolition struggle of the 19th century and across the 20th century experience with race and inequity to define today’s caste of felons and illegal immigrants.”83 Framing immigration restrictions as solely “anti-migrant racism” ignores the ways in which immigration policy is foundationally constituted through and intertwined in anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, and Copyright © 2021. Haymarket Books. All rights reserved. imperialist warfare to consolidate the US as a nation-state and empire. The links between empire, race making, and the border are perhaps best symbolized in the construction of the border wall itself: wire mesh recycled from a Japanese-American internment camp, repurposed Air Force landing strips and ground sensors from the Vietnam War, and Elbit Systems’ “virtual wall” surveillance technology field-proven on Israel’s apartheid wall. By excavating mutual histories and interlocking logics, we replace narrow frameworks of immigration with a more expansive analysis, illuminating the border as a tool of population management and racial ordering that is at once domestic and global. Radhika Mongia observes, “The modern economy of migration, grounded in race and imperialism, is Walia, Harsha. Border and Rule : Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, Haymarket Books, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6184199. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2023-01-29 01:55:02.  fundamental to the creation of a geopolitical space dominated by the nation-state.”84 The next chapter explores how the US border regime was consolidated at the turn of the twenty-first century, within a constellation of imperial interventions, neoliberal capital flows, policies of carceral containment, and migration controls. Copyright © 2021. Haymarket Books. All rights reserved. Walia, Harsha. Border and Rule : Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, Haymarket Books, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6184199. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2023-01-29 01:55:02.  CHAPTER 2 US Wars Abroad, Wars at Home I will not dance to your war drum. I will not lend my soul nor my bones to your war drum. I will not dance to your beating. I know that beat. It is lifeless. I know intimately that skin you are hitting. —Suheir Hammad, “What I Will” In 2014, a hunger strike and protest by mostly Mexican and Central American detainees resounded through Tacoma’s Northwest Detention Center, which is run by the private prison company GEO Group. Seven hundred detainees faced threats of forced feedings and denial of their asylum cases as a result of their political action, but they pushed forward their demands for better conditions and release on bond. “Without a bond,” they collectively wrote, “we spend months, even one-to-two years locked up without knowing what’s going to happen to us and our families and without being able to economically support our families.”1 The US has the world’s largest immigration incarceration system and, contrary to the myth of being overburdened by generosity, accepts less than 1 percent of the world’s displaced population. More important than this disgracefully low percentage, however, is the question of US reparations and responsibility for displacement and migration. US politicians preoccupied with border fortification hypocritically violate the borders of the places they bomb, mine, and pollute. Hondurans, El Salvadorans, and Guatemalans make up the fastest-growing proportion of Copyright © 2021. Haymarket Books. All rights reserved. people crossing into the US. Over the past decade, migration from these countries has increased fivefold.2 The US Border Patrol apprehended 432,838 adults and children between October 2018 and July 2019, with families from these countries constituting 92 percent of all family-unit border apprehensions.3 These perilous migrations, generating white anxieties about the border, are portrayed by liberal media as “not our problem” and stemming from “over there.” However, these migrations from “over there” are “our problem” because they are inextricable from displacements created by US dirty wars backing death squads and the counterinsurgency terror of the neoliberal war on drugs. The US border crisis is thus more Walia, Harsha. Border and Rule : Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, Haymarket Books, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6184199. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2023-01-29 01:55:02.  accurately described as a crisis of displacement generated by US policies. Frequent media coverage of migrants fleeing MS-13 gang violence, for example, rarely explains that the street gang formed among marginalized Salvadoran refugee youth incarcerated in the US, many of whom were later deported, eventually becoming a more organized syndicate under Ernesto Deras, a former Salvadoran special forces member trained by the US Green Berets.4 This chapter chronologically explicates how immigration exclusion over the past five decades, from the war on drugs to the war on terror, correlates with global dispossessions caused by US empire and voracious capitalism, as well as with domestic forms of warfare, including neoliberalism, prison and detention expansion, and welfare retrenchment—all underwritten by racialized and gendered hierarchies. Faced with multiple crises beginning in the 1960s, including a deep recession, military defeat in Vietnam, and an enormous wave of social protests and strikes, the US ruling class set out to restore US capitalism and empire. They did so by adopting and exporting neoliberalism, rolling back social movement gains by normalizing carceral governance, and reimposing imperial supremacy beginning with genocidal wars in Central America and culminating in the global war on terror. Consequently, a growing number of people were displaced and then contained by the US through its expanding border imperialist regimes across maritime space with Haiti and at the land border with Mexico. US immigration policies were not only parallel to but a fulcrum between domestic and global warfare. Repressive border policies served as a thread braiding together social warfare, mass destabilization and displacement, capitalist extraction, and militarized carceral control, both at home and abroad. War on Drugs: Criminalization, Crackdowns, and Counterinsurgency It is possible for prison walls To disappear, For the cell to become a distant land Without frontiers. —Mahmoud Darwish, “The Prison Cell” President Richard Nixon’s government was the first iteration of the US ruling class’s drive to expand neoliberal carceral governance. In the 1960s and 1970s, Nixon’s southern strategy, expansion of the war in Vietnam, and operations at the border converged. The southern Copyright © 2021. Haymarket Books. All rights reserved. strat