A world without borders

 

The World Socialist Movement and its constituent political parties have long raised the call for a world without borders and even if its voice has not resonated with all of our fellow workers some informed writers and commentators have come to a similar conclusion as we have.

This interview with Harsha Walia, author of several books, including Undoing Border Imperialism and Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, makes a valuable contribution to the promotion of one people, one planet. It is worth quoting parts of it. 

"...Capitalism requires labor to be constantly segmented and differentiated — whether across race, gender, ability, caste, citizenship, etc. — and the border acts as a spatial fix for capitalism. Borders are not intended to exclude all people or to deport all people, but to create conditions of deportability, which in turn increases social and labor precarity. Workers’ labor power is captured by the border and this cheapened labor is exploited by the employer. The lack of full immigration status and the tying of visa status to an employer are key to creating pools of cheapened, indentured laborers. Workers are then kept compliant through threats of termination and deportation. According to one study, 52 percent of companies in the U.S. threaten to call immigration authorities on workers during union drives..."

"...What is the function of borders today? Borders maintain asymmetric relations of wealth accrued from colonial impoverishment, of mobility for some and mass immobility and containment for most — essentially, a divided working class and system of global apartheid determining who can live where and under what conditions. Border policies cannot be tweaked or reformed, they must be dismantled if we believe in justice at a planetary scale..."

"...A world without borders is not the same as a world with open borders. In an open-borders world, the world stays configured the way it currently is with massive inequality, mass displacement and continued hierarchical differentiation, except borders are opened up. If people are still being forced from their lands, and some parts of the world are still being plundered and treated as sacrifice zones for the centers of power, there is no justice in that. A no-borders politics is more expansive than the site of the border itself. A no-borders politics is about dismantling all bordering, all ordering and all exploitative regimes.

To say that we need to live in a world that doesn’t have borders is not only to struggle for the rights of refugees and migrants, but to fight for freedom for all against displacement and immobility. It is to fight for liberation so that everyone has a home and where we are all able to live freely in our neighborhoods, our lands and our homes, in relation and kinship with one another..."

 "...While the rich from wealthy states routinely enjoy borderless mobility around the world — whether as investors, bankers, expats or hipster colonist tourists — the world’s majority of racialized, poor people are subjected to criminalization, illegalization, immobility and premature death..."

The interview also includes many disturbing statistics to drive the message home.

There are at least 50,013 recorded deaths of migrants around the world since 2014.

 As of 2022, there are at least 89.3 million people worldwide who are forcibly displaced. 

This is escalating with climate disasters; today an estimated one person every two seconds is being displaced due to a climate catastrophe. 

As of 2016, new displacements caused by climate disasters are outnumbering new displacements as a result of persecution by a ratio of three to one. 

By 2050, an estimated 143 million people will be displaced in just three regions: Africa, South Asia and Latin America. 

Harsha Walia explains, "Given the violent deathscape for literally millions of people around the world, what alternative is there other than to fight for a world without borders? We must refuse to live in a world where the majority of the world’s people are destined to live without adequate food, shelter or access to life-saving vaccines because of where they were born..."

We Need a World Without Borders on Our Increasingly Warming Planet (truthout.org)

It is a conclusion that we in the WSM and SPGB can fully share. 

Harsha's next step is to understand that alongside a world without borders there must also be a world without money.