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

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

• 
  Wick Welker

  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

  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

  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.”
• 
  Rhys

  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."
• 
  Ashley Marie

  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.
• 
  Corvus

  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.
• 
  Sarah Cavar

  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.
• 
  Zach Carter

  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.
• 
  A Yusuf

  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.
• 
  priya ☁️

  
  "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

  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

  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.
• 
  Jenia

  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..
• 
  Elly

  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

  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.
• 
  J

  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!
• 
  Paco

  an excellent analysis of why the world sucks. the way topics like racism, foreign policy, immigration, capitalism, etc., are talked about in more mainstream news outlets and books often makes it seem like these are all separate issues, but Walia does a really incredible job of connecting the threads between imperialism, capitalism, racism, nationalism, and xenophobia, and showing how they're all part of the same web that makes the world shitty. you can't solve the 'border crisis' without stopping forced displacement via wars, climate change, and unfettered capitalism; you can't stop anti-Black and anti-Indigenous police practices without stopping the US's and europe's imperial machine. there's a lot of information in this relatively short book and i'm sure i'll be coming back to it often.
• 
  Sean

  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.
• 
  warren

  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

  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.
• 
  David

  "A political and economic system that treats land as a commodity, Indigenous people as overburden, race as a principle of social organization, women’s caretaking as worthless, workers as exploitable, climate refugees as expendable, and the entire planet as a sacrifice zone must be dismantled."
  
  "...the political ideology of liberalism, the economic dogma of neoliberalism, and right-wing nationalism inflected by race, gender, and citizenship are all connected and must be dismantled together."
  
  "Our movements must refuse both the vicious far right and the banal liberal center. Status-quo liberalism upholding neoliberal capitalism is interwoven with right-wing nationalism inflected by class, race, caste, gender, sexuality, ability, and citizenship."
  
  Harsha Walia
• 
  Wessal Mahmoud

  HIGHLY RECOMMEND!! Such a thought-provoking read.
  
  "A political and economic system that treats land as a commodity, Indigenous people as overburden, race as a principle of social organization, women’s caretaking as worthless, workers as exploitable, climate refugees as expendable, and the entire planet as a sacrifice zone must be dismantled."
  
  Border and Rule offers a examination of migration, capitalism, and racism, shedding light on the interconnected struggles of our era. Harsha Walia's urgent narrative challenges conventional wisdom, urging readers to confront systemic oppression head-on. A timely and essential read for those committed to justice and equity
• 
  Zoë Siobhan Baillie

  "Empires crumble, capitalism is not inevitable, gender is not biology, whiteness is not immutable, prisons are not inescapable, and borders are not natural law."
  
  This is the hardest book I have read in a long time, both in terms of academic density and heavy heavy subject matter. Had to read in short bursts because each page is so packed with information and almost all of it is extremely depressing.
  
  That said, the book is definitely worth a read if you want an in-depth analysis of the history of borders, an understanding of their presents workings, and an examination of their impacts. I hadn't really ever given much thought to the many mechanisms by which mass migration is created, and the writing around special economic zones was particularly interesting to me as I am interested in global textile and fashion supply chains.
  
  As with literally every left wing book I ever read, this book does a great job of analysing the problem and then seems to add in a tiny chapter at the end of "but it doesn't have to be this way, look these people all had protests* and there is hope!
  
  *These people have all since been deported and/or murdered".
• 
  ayşe

  "A political and economic system that treats land as a commodity, Indigenous people as overburden, race as a principle of social organization, women's caretaking as worthless, workers as exploitable, climate refugees as expendable and the entire planet as a sacrifice zone must be dismantled."