“HEY, What a wonderful kind of day.”
Introduction
Trinidad and Tobago is the dual island Caribbean
country I live in that sits a mere 11 kilometres off the coast of northeastern Venezuela. Our
northern range, literally called Northern Range, is an extension of Venezuela’s Maritime Andes
Mountains. But the connections don’t end there. Human settlement in Trinidad dates back at least
7,000 years. In fact, the oldest human settlement discovered in the Eastern Caribbean, the Banwari
Trace site, was found in southeastern Trinidad. And the various indigenous groups that have
settled in Trinidad over the millenia have, for the most part, migrated up the
Orinoco river in what’s now Venezuela. Exchange and migration between the continent and
the island continued undisturbed for thousands of years before the arrival of the Spanish.
Today, in our “free”, “post-colonial” world, what was once the norm is now criminalized. Now you
have to go through “the proper process” in order to migrate, asking permission from governments who
draw invisible lines and demand your deference. Still, migration has continued, legal and illegal.
Refugees desperate to escape the pressing thumb of American imperialism and Venezuelan government
mismanagement flee to Colombia, Brazil, the Dutch Caribbean islands, other Latin American countries,
and of course, Trinidad. Much of this migration is extorted by opportunists or facilitated by
the organized crime of human traffickers.
These refugees struggle with mounting xenophobia
and gross exploitation as they struggle to find work and secure the basic necessities of
life. Those who do get jobs struggle to support themselves in their new countries while they send
money back to their families back in Venezuela. The Venezuelan refugee crisis is a disaster
I’ve seen unfold before my own eyes. One I have witnessed first hand. And
one that is facilitated and exacerbated by the existence of borders.
The History of Movement & Borders
To the Delphic priests in Ancient Greece, one
of the four freedoms that distinguished liberty from slavery was the right of unrestricted
movement. For most of the world and for most of human existence really, free movement
has been the status quo. Traders, migrants, hunter-gatherers, and nomads freely traversed
this little blue marble. Of course, many ethnic groups maintained relationships with particular
lands, but even when city states and such rose, it was rare for rulers to delineate precisely
where their realm ended and another’s began.
Sure, the Romans threw up some
limestone along Britannia’s north, but Scottish shepherds continued to shepherd
the sheep on both sides of the wall. Hadrian’s Wall was primarily a military installation,
meant to slow down invaders and project power, not prevent people from crossing. Of
course it still sucked, it was a military installation, but between the various medieval
realms, no man’s lands were still common, where rulers and laws were fuzzy and vague. The
first large scale restrictions really arose under the Roman Emperor Constantine in the 4th century,
forbidding serfs from leaving their lord’s land. Documents requesting safe passage,
what one may call the first “passports” became more commonplace. The medieval era
bound large parts of Europe’s population in place by serfdom and movement was viewed by
rulers as ruinous to their law and order.
However, serfdom wouldn’t last forever. With
its decline, wage labour arose in the 15th and 16th centuries. That didn’t mean free movement
came back though. Now, people were a commodity that a country’s government wanted to keep within
its borders. Rulers offered citizenship and tax incentives in order to encourage immigration.
Yet at the same time, countries like Spain and France were executing or expelling
ethnic and religious minorities en masse. Nationalism would begin to develop in the
subsequent centuries, attempting to unite a vast range of cultural groups and classes under the
state while defining themselves against outsiders. Of course, this ruling class metanarrative exists
as a mechanism of manufactured, meaningless loyalty in order to control you. I digress. Watch
my video on National Liberation for more. With this era also came what historians have dubbed the
largest involuntary migration in human history. The Trans-Atlantic slave trade trafficked
an estimated 12.5 million enslaved African people between the 16th and 19th centuries.
There was a key moment in the history of borders that would have lasting effects today.
At the end of the Thirty Years’ War, The Peace of Westphalia was signed by a hundred and nine
principalities and duchies and imperial kingdoms, which agreed, in 1648, that states’ borders were
inviolable, and an absolute sovereign state could not interfere in the domestic affairs of another.
Westphalian sovereignty would go on to influence international relations for centuries, though the
measure to which it has been consistently observed is rather debatable. Still, while the Westphalian
era did lead to some interesting looking maps, the actual inhabitants weren’t really made privy
to those imagined borders, which remained fairly fuzzy to their day-to-day in those liminal zones.
Though the European powers sought to sustain their settler colonization efforts, they still
restricted who the settlers would be, and they had different approaches. Spanish settlers
couldn’t be Jews or Moors or related to heretics. Any ship that facilitated the illegal carriage of
passengers to the Indies would have its officers sentenced to death. Meanwhile, the British shipped
off their dissenters, criminals, and pains in the bumcee to settler colonize places like Australia.
So-called liberals like John Locke began to question the ruler’s right to restrict
individual movement, though of course Locke himself was cool with chattel slavery, so
I take whatever he says with a grain of salt. Still, with Locke’s lil musings plus Adam Smith’s
new school economics, the notion of free trade and free market gained some ground. Concerns of
overpopulation, underemployment, and social unrest in Europe led governments to start facilitating
emigration, opening up their colonies to a more general free for all settler colonialism, which
would in turn lead to domestic depopulation.
Eventually, there would be another shift. In the
19th century, migrants from now underdeveloped regions began to stream towards the more developed
areas in droves. North Africans went to France, Italians and Irish headed to New York, and all
the while, racism and xenophobia festered and proliferated as nationalists whipped up fear
against the so-called threats to the nation. European countries began to lock down and
restrict the entry of immigrants, with greater measures implemented in the age of revolutions,
as political refugees flooded from all over.
These border restrictions were empowered by the
rise and spread of new technologies in that era. The telegraph, the railroad...they all enabled
central governments to assert their presence across their whole territory unlike ever before.
And then, of course, came the First World War, which saw the death of some sixteen million
people. The segregationist Woodrow Wilson, who was US President at the time of the war,
proposed Fourteen Points to the international community in order to prevent such horrors. Those
Fourteen Points, which I’m not gonna read cuz you can look it up, became central to the Paris Peace
Conference in 1919. One of the core principles of the Fourteen Points was that some of the globe’s
borders be redrawn along clearly recognizable lines of nationality. This of course, is just
for Europe, it’s not like any of those world leaders actually cared about the territories they
carved up in Africa, irrespective of the actual linguistic or cultural groupings on the continent,
solidifying a century of tensions and conflict.
In the post-war period, the collapse of
four European empires, Ottoman, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German, would leave millions
of refugees in a world where immigration controls continued to tighten and passports gained greater
prominence. Alas, once the nation state was cemented in place, fascism and Nazism would arise
to guard its supposed “purity.” The world would once again be plunged into War, which would again
leave millions of uprooted and displaced people that states like Switzerland and the
US would largely refuse to assist.
After the Second World War, nation building
continued to displace and slaughter millions of ethnic and religious minorities. The consequences
of environmental degradation are left in the hands of colonized countries, weakened by wars
and poverty and imperialist intervention. And the tens of millions of refugees from these
lands are dismissed and deported by the Global North, despite the rising tidal wave of need.
Immigration controls only tighten further, especially with the founding of the EU in 1993
and the implementation of ICE in the US in 2003.
Oh yes, how could I forget about
what happened two years before 2003. I wasn’t really conscious back then so
forgive me. Never forget and all that. In our post-911 reality, US border patrol has
escalated to employ 20,000 agents and Israel runs the largest open-air prison in the world. It’s
common these days to see militarized borders, with heavily guarded barbed
wire and electrified fences. These imaginary lines on a map have become, in
some places, violent fixtures of the landscape, where thousands of people lose their lives every
year for simply trying to cross. We’ve entered what political science professor Matthew Longo has
dubbed an “era of bordering without precedent,” as several other countries follow America’s
lead. Suddenly customs and immigration have turned from bureaucratic to militant.
Thanks to today’s technology, governments know more about the people they
govern than at any point prior in human history. Cross-border surveillance keeps neighbours in the
know, managing and monitoring their populace like lab rats, as data becomes more valuable than black
gold itself. China has become well known for its advancements in surveillance technology, but it is
not alone. These governments have chosen to wall and surveil. This is our world now, a
surveillance capitalist dystopia, and borders have an important role to play.
The Role of Borders
“The border is not just a wall. It’s not just a
line on a map. It’s not any particular physical location. It’s a power structure, a system
of control. The border is everywhere that people live in fear of deportation, everywhere
migrants are denied the rights accorded citizens, everywhere human beings are segregated
into included and excluded. The border does not divide one world from another. There
is only one world, and the border is tearing it apart.” —No Wall They Can Build by CrimethInc.
In this global caste system, we are separated. Whether by gated communities or for-profit
prisons, these borders exist to control the masses and privilege the monied few. Internet
firewalls, checkpoints, and hidden databases all section off human beings into citizens,
maintaining boundaries through ceaseless violence, from deportation to vigilante attacks
to street harassment to torture. Migrants are often the first targets of
economic downturn, repression, surveillance, and scapegoating, and one of the greatest weapons that
borders wield is fear. Fear of immigration raids, fear of expressing dissent, fear of fighting for
better pay when you work undocumented in a country wholly dependent on your hyperexploitation, all
to blackmail a captive population. And of course, a manufactured fear of those on the lowest rung
in society, that the media deems a threat.
Categories like refugee, asylum seeker,
economic migrant, and illegal alien are used to further divide and control,
separating those economically useful from those deemed criminal. But those “scary
outsiders” we’re told borders protect us from are just people, like you and me. What we should
be asking is “why are they outside?” Our economy is global. It has been for a while now. Resources
are extracted from some parts of the world, processed in other parts of the world, products
manufactured elsewhere and then sold worldwide, for profits to be hoarded by a select
few countries and select few people. Wealthy countries plunder the poor and
then brutalize those who follow where the opportunities have been taken.
But your destiny and your liberty should not be restricted by the passport you
wield and the wealth you do or don’t control. Look at this map. As a citizen of Trinidad and
Tobago, I have the privilege of travelling to much of the Caribbean due to CARICOM, the Schengen Area
due to a 2015 agreement with the EU, most of Latin America, and parts of Africa without a visa. In
all, 150 countries and territories visa-free. The US, Canada, Australia, and Japan are not included.
Some Caribbean islands have more freedom than us, like Bajans with 161, while others have
less. Haitians with 49, Dominicans with 68, and Cubans with 64, have among the worst passports
for visa-free travel. Americans with 187, Germans with 191, and Japanese with 193 enjoy
the greatest freedom of visa-free movement. While Israelis can boast visa-free
travel to 161 countries and territories, Palestinians are restricted to only 38 countries
and territories, yet those in the West Bank are restricted by violent checkpoints and those who
live in Gaza can’t even leave the Strip at all.
A billionaire like Elon Musk could fly
anywhere he wants in his private jet while a political prisoner like Ojore Lutalo
can be kept in solitary for years on end. Those who hold the privilege of certain
citizenships can be bribed into maintaining it with pithy freedoms like legal participation
in the labour market, social recognition, and a little welfare, as a treat. These papers we
hold only hold power because others are without them. Because of artificial scarcity.
The same passport privileges apply to areas of life other than work and travel too.
Your chances of getting a vaccine are dependent on which side of the vaccine apartheid you
were born in. The pandemic is “over” for some, despite the staggering majority of the
world still without even the first dose.
The violence of borders targets us all,
but Indigenous and colonized peoples suffer the brunt of it. Where we can live and
where we can move has been determined by colonial and neocolonial divides. Traditional seafaring
channels are now militarized and guarded by vast navies and pollutant cargo ships, disconnecting
and unravelling the once deep ties between island communities. Indigenous people are shuffled around
like pawns and shoved into borders within borders, like reservations or redlined communities,
disrupting and disconnecting us from our land-based cosmologies and ways of life.
Just as a prison transforms those within it, the border serves to turn us into prisoners or
prison guards. To quote CrimethInc yet again: “As long as there is a border between
you and those less fortunate than you, you can be sure there will also be borders above
you, keeping you from things that you need. Some people are deported, others are evicted,
but the fundamental mechanisms are the same. And who will help you tear down the borders
above you, if not the people separated from you by the borders below?”
The Fight Against Borders
If you choose to take up this fight, understand
that despite all their violents efforts, you must not overestimate the strength of states
and you must not underestimate the strength of resistance. The underground railroads
of anti-Nazi and anti-slavery resistance shows that everyday people can help
everyday people, no matter the obstacles.
How can we get started?
If you live near a border, a sanctuary city, or a migrant community, there are probably already
groups putting in this work, and you can join that infrastructure of resistance. Connect with people
who are affected by borders in ways you aren’t. Maybe you have a neighbour or a coworker who’s
undocumented and could use a helping hand. Get involved in these networks.
Make contacts, share information, pool resources, assist at meeting points
or drop ins, lend your vehicle, and/or make your home or another space available as a safe
house for migrants on the move. Connections, formal and informal, public and clandestine, are
what makes these networks possible. Every day, millions of people and millions of connections
help people move, live, and evade state violence.
Migrants are often among the most revolutionary
groups in history. The Levellers and Diggers, largely composed of workers thrown off their
lands by enclosure in 17th century England, were at the forefront of their early revolutionary
movements. In the 19th and 20th century anarchism in Europe and the US was most popular among
migrant communities. During World War 2, exiles from Spain and Eastern Europe fomented
anti-Nazi resistance in France. The precarity, loss, and uncertainty of migrant life tends to
invigorate people to take up new ways of thinking, organizing, and acting to survive.
I say this to say, follow their lead. Learn from them and share with them. Pick up some
DIY skills, learn the streets, produce propaganda, maintain communications. I can’t speak to
everyone’s situation, cuz different people’s legal status, language, education level, gender, race,
class, commitments, and ability will affect their contribution to this broad, open, and diverse
movement. But however you do decide to contribute, leave the stunt activism home. This fight is
not about so-called “public opinion”, which is often just a dog whistle for some abstract
projection of white folks’ privileged bubble or mainstream media’s constructed prop of a
homogenized mass called public in order to suppress dissent. Pay attention to the media,
but recognize that they are not our focus. The audience of our actions is not “public opinion,”
it’s those we want fighting with us: the people who we most need to work with, the people who
already know the violence of borders firsthand.
The No Borders Manifesto offers three
principles for No Borders activities:
Number One: Direct action, in the truest
sense. Whatever you do, no matter how small, should have direct material outcomes for those
affected. If you stop one person being deported, help one migration prisoner manage to escape,
get one person a safe roof over their head, stop one eviction, win one asylum case, help one
person trapped in the system to find strength to get through the days, win one workplace struggle,
cause some real damage to a company’s profits, that is a material gain. Symbolic
actions often serve to discourage us, while successful action reverberates in our
communities, encouraging others to do the same.
Number Two: Ensure your direct action
tactics are aimed toward a particular goal: building the infrastructure of resistance.
Develop and strengthen your networks, make new alliances, and acquire
useful skills and resources.
Number Three: Ensure your direct action
tactics are founded in a particular strategy. Think carefully about the strengths and weaknesses
of yourself, your group, and your community. Understand, but don’t underestimate, what you can
achieve and where you need to improve. Never be afraid to question common practice and dogma.
Never look down on those less able to take on risks as you, especially if you enjoy a level of
privilege. Lastly, never forget that the fight against borders will not be easy. The only defense
against the risks and repression of this regime is a strong community and a culture of solidarity.
Conclusion
We are all connected. The problems in one country can’t be solved without addressing problems in
another. There is no “border policy” that is just and fair. Those in power are not going
to fix the mess they created and rely on. The only solution is international
resistance against capitalism, colonialism, and the state. Global systemic change, led by
networks and communities united in struggle.
There is nothing necessary or inevitable
about borders. Only the violence of their more ardent believers keep them in place, and
without them, borders would cease to exist. Together, we can make borders unenforceable.
Together, we can create a world in which everyone is free to travel, free to create,
free to exist on their own terms.
Peace.
Outro
Thank you for watching. Thanks once again to the
Famalay, Ongrad, Coby Tamayo, John Vechey, Ori Shimony, Len P, SomeGuy, Seth, J. Dorrance, Eepa,
y@, Beyond Binary Podcast, Mamish Disgusting, Eshi The Mad, Hoie, Geoff Massey, kimonoko, Alki,
Forrest Alvarez, PoodleHawk, Håkon Kleppe Normann, Spencer Harmon, Matt, Jason Baker, Jordan,
Redenbush, Tom S, bean, Scott Trinh, Tyler Brant, Brandon Barney, Moomooshin, Christopher Hunter,
Sian Charles-Davis, and Suavacado Jones. You can join these beautiful humans and support me too
on Patreon.com/saintdrew. Please like, comment, subscribe, and share with your fellow peoples.
Feed the algorithm. Check out my previous videos for other fascinating topics. You can follow
me on Twitter @_saintdrew. Thanks again, peace!
