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Title: Borders = Global Apartheid
Author: CrimethInc.
Date: July 6, 2018
Language: en
Topics: borders
Source: Retrieved on 17th June 2021 from https://crimethinc.com/2018/07/06/borders-global-apartheid-a-new-poster

CrimethInc.

Borders = Global Apartheid

National boundaries are one of the chief structural factors that enforce

de facto white supremacy. While Donald Trump’s remarks have made it

clear that he sees immigration policy as a way to systematically

privilege whiteness on a global scale, the regulation of immigration has

always served that function, ever since this land was wrested from its

original inhabitants. National boundaries are one of the ways that the

state purports to protect citizens from the Other—when nothing is more

dangerous than to concentrate so much force and legitimacy in a single

militarized institution.

The constructs of race and national citizenship are two of the most

fundamental tools used to divide those who are exploited under

capitalism. We do not believe it is ever truly in the interests of any

group to identify with those above them in the hierarchy rather than

organizing alongside those who are less privileged than them. If we

permit our rulers to determine whose lives are valuable and whose lives

are not, they will ultimately target citizens with the same repressive

apparatus they use against those who lack documents.

Our hearts go out to all the people who are suffering in detention

centers at this moment—to all the families who have been separated by

ICE agents or immigration protocols—to everyone who is treated as

expendable and inferior.

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Borders don’t surround populations; they run through them. They don’t

protect communities; they cut them apart. There are 11 million

undocumented people in the United States, many of whom have lived here

for decades. Without their labor, the economy would grind to a halt. Of

those who cross the border without papers, half are deportees attempting

to return to their families in the US.

The point of deportations is not to empty the US of undocumented people.

It is to terrorize them with the threat of deportation in order to

maintain a caste system. As long as part of the population lives in

constant danger, employers can exploit a vast pool of disposable labor.

This drives down wages for workers with US citizenship, too. But it’s

not undocumented immigrants who are “stealing their jobs”—it’s the

border itself.

The border enables the ruling class to force down wages, suppress

dissent, and channel resentment towards those who have the least power

in society rather than those who have the most. The solution isn’t just

to abolish the border—it is to put an end to the social order it

protects.