Undoing Border Imperialism. Harsha Walia
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“tough on illegals” narrative, which justifies increased border patrols, armed border guards, migrant detention, immigration enforcement raids in homes and workplaces, and vigilante programs like the Minutemen in the United States or deportation tip lines in Canada, is not new or unique. Such narratives and material practices are linked to that which predates them, including the “tough on crime” narrative deployed in the 1980s, and the more recent “tough on terror” rhetoric. These discourses have justified the oversurveillance and overincarceration of Indigenous people, black people, sex workers, homeless people, Muslims, and migrants of color.
Largely unnoticed, the imprisonment of women has skyrocketed over the past two decades. As the world’s largest jailer, the United States, with only 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, has increased its incarceration rate of women by 832 percent over three decades.(61) The incarceration rate of black women in the United States has increased by 828 percent over a five-year period, and black women now constitute one-half of the US female prison population.(62) In Western Australia, the number of incarcerated women doubled between the years 1995 and 2001, with Indigenous women comprising 54 percent of the female prisoner population although consituting only 2 percent of the state’s population.(63) In Canada, the representation of Indigenous women in prison has increased by nearly 90 percent over the past decade and has been declared “nothing short of a crisis.”(64)
Though informed by different logics, the incarceration of all these “undesirables” is interrelated. Migrant detention centers, prisons, secret torture facilities, juvenile detention centers, and interrogation facilities are all part of the growing prison-industrial complex. As former political prisoner and prison abolitionist Angela Davis points out,
Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages. . . . Taking into account the structural similarities of business-government linkages in the realms of military production and public punishment, the expanding penal system can now be characterized as a “prison industrial complex.”(65)
Foucault further explains the expansion of prisons as the self-perpetuation of power: the constant creation of prisoners in order for the state to keep exercising coercive and disciplinary power. He describes this as the carceral network, an inescapable and increasingly internalized network of “discourses and architectures, coercive regulations and scientific propositions, real social effects and invincible utopias, programs for correcting delinquents and mechanisms that reinforce delinquency.”(66)
The construction of illegals within border imperialism is part of a broader logic that constructs deviants in order to maintain state power, capitalist profiteering, and social hierarchies. Within mainstream narratives, criminals are never imagined as politicians, bankers, corporate criminals, or war criminals, but as a racialized class of people living in poverty. The word criminal becomes synonymous with dehumanizing stereotypes of ghettos, welfare recipients, drug users, sex workers, and young gang members. Similarly, the term illegals is imagined as referring to poor migrants of color, even though many white tourists often illegally overstay their visas. As Davis writes, “Regardless of who has or has not committed crimes, punishment, in brief, can be seen more as a consequence of racialized surveillance.”(67) In North America, we can look to the countless police killings of Indigenous and black men, such as Dudley George and Oscar Grant, since the enduring violences of genocide and slavery, and also the more recent illegal detentions of over eight hundred Muslim men and boys in Guantanamo Bay to understand that these bodies are disciplined by being cast as suspicious even before any so-called criminal act has been committed.
Therefore, the social control and criminalization that delineates the carceral network and disappears undesirables is the frequently invisible yet entrenched racist colonial belief that incarceration is a legitimate response to communities that are constructed and characterized innately as being illegals, deviants, criminals, terrorists, or threats.
Racialized Hierarchies
The third constituent structuring within border imperialism is the racialized hierarchy of national and imperial identity, which anchors and shapes the understanding of citizenship and belonging within the nation-state as well as within the grid of global empire.
Racialization comprises the social, political, economic, and historical processes that utilize essentialist and monolithic racial markings to construct diverse communities of color. Whiteness, as a dominant and dominating structuring that is more than a fixed identity, is able to escape these markings of identity while determining the markings of its racial others. The enduring centrality of whiteness rests in white supremacy, which Challenging White Supremacy Workshop facilitators define as a “historically based, institutionally perpetuated system of exploitation and oppression of continents, nations, and peoples of color by white peoples and nations . . . for the purpose of maintaining and defending a system of wealth, power, and privilege.”(68) Language such as “racial equality” and “multicultural diversity” are described by anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli as the optics of liberal democracies parading “social difference without social consequence,” thus becoming effective color-blind cloaks for the maintenance of a racial hierarchy that situates whiteness as pervasive and hegemonic within state building, global empire, and border imperialism.(69)
Racial profiling has received much attention in post-9/11 discourse, but must be understood within the broader phenomenas of global white supremacy and racialization that underwrite border imperialism. Racialization enables the conditions for racial stereotypes to be inscribed onto racialized individuals as an inherent marking of their racial community. Yasmin Jiwani of Researchers and Academics of Colour for Equity writes,
The racialization of these Others is maintained and communicated through a focus on the inferiorization, deviantization and naturalization of difference. While overt and explicit forms of racism are no longer condoned by the liberal state, colour-blind racism permeates institutional rhetoric and through the mediation of inferential referencing, cordial tonality and culturalized modality, focuses on difference as the site of the abject and contemptible.(70)
For example, Islamophobia in the post-9/11 era is predicated on the ability to designate and vilify the “dual” citizen (such as Arab Canadian or Muslim American) as a potential terrorist threat, rendering every Muslim, Arab, and/or South Asian as an eternal other and outsider to the nation-state. The 2011 massacre in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik and 2012 shooting by Wade Michael Page in the Oak Creek gurudwara in Wisconsin were considered the acts of “lone” white men, rather than an indictment of whiteness, white supremacy, or right-wing libertarian culture. As commentator Juan Cole derisively blogs, “White terrorists are random events, like tornadoes. Other terrorists are long-running conspiracies. White terrorists are never called ‘white.’ But other terrorists are given ethnic affiliations.”(71)
Theorist Sherene Razack argues that race thinking not only depicts racialized people as deserving a different type of humanity but also constructs them as a different type of humanity.(72) This casting out within the nation-state is not new or unique; it is evident in the experiences of segregation, internment of Japanese Canadians and Japanese Americans, the War on Drugs, and reserve system. These lived experiences of otherness are shaped by imaginings about who is entitled to protection from the nation-state because they represent the national identity, and who faces violence by the nation-state because their bodies are deemed not to belong. The material structures of the Western state have killed, tortured, occupied, raped, incarcerated, sterilized, interned, robbed land from, pillaged, introduced drugs and alcohol into, stolen children from, sanctioned vigilante violence on, denied public services to, and facilitated capital’s hyperexploitation of racialized communities.
Dangerously, racism is increasingly legitimized through the rhetoric of rights, freedoms, and protections for women. From the earlier “yellow peril” myth that warned of migrant Asian men ensnaring white women with opium to the more contemporary justifications of the occupation of Afghanistan as a mission to liberate Muslim women, such putatively feminist causes have been perennially seductive, and many feminists are implicated in shaping these counters of racialized empire. Postcolonial theorist