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Title: Borders: The Global Caste System Author: CrimethInc. Date: August 7, 2017 Language: en Topics: borders, Immigration Source: Retrieved on 23rd April 2021 from https://crimethinc.com/2017/08/07/new-poster-borders-the-global-caste-system
The border does not divide one world from another. There is only one
world, and the border is tearing it apart.
The border is not just a wall or a line on a map. 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 divides the whole world into gated communities and prisons,
one within the other in concentric circles of privilege and control. At
one end of the continuum, there are billionaires who can fly anywhere in
private jets; at the other end, inmates in solitary confinement. As long
as there is a border between you and those less fortunate than you, you
can be sure there will be a border above you, too, keeping you from the
things you need. And who will tear down that second border with you, if
not the people separated from you by the first?
Speak of freedom all you like—we live in a world of walls.
There used to be few enough that we could keep up with them—Hadrian’s
Wall, the Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall. Now they’re everywhere.
The walls of the old days have gone viral, penetrating every level of
society. Wall Street, named after a stockade built by African slaves to
protect European colonists, exemplifies this transformation: it’s no
longer a question of fencing out the natives, but of a market economy
that imposes divisions throughout the entire world.
These divisions take many forms. There are physical boundaries—the walls
of detention centers, the fences of concrete and barbed wire, the
perimeters that enclose private campuses and gated communities. There
are boundaries controlling the flow of information: security clearances,
classified databases, internet firewalls that cordon off entire
countries. There are social boundaries—the privileges of citizenship,
the barriers of racism, all the ways that money calibrates what each
person can and cannot do.
All of these divisions are predicated on ceaseless violence. For some,
this means imprisonment, deportation, torture, solitary confinement,
vigilante attacks, state-sanctioned murder. For others, it means police
patrols, security checkpoints, traffic stops, background checks, street
harassment, surveillance, bureaucracy, propaganda.
Borders don’t just divide countries: they exist wherever people live in
fear of immigration raids, wherever people have to accept lower wages
because they have no documents. The world isn’t just divided
horizontally into different jurisdictions—it is divided socially into
different zones of privilege, of access. The US-Mexico border is part of
the same structure as the chain-link fence that keeps homeless people
out of an empty parking lot and the price bracket that keeps day
laborers from buying the “organic” option at the grocery store even if
they were the ones who picked the vegetables.
The purpose of the border is not to regulate migration. It is to control
communities on both sides of the wall. The border regime enables the
authorities 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.
We’re told that borders protect us from outsiders. But how did they
become outside in the first place? We are all joined in a single
worldwide economy, in which resources are extracted from one country and
sent to another, in which profits made in one country are hoarded in
another. This isn’t new—it’s been going on since the colonization of the
Americas.
So who is invading whom? The corporations that plunder the south, or the
migrants who go north, following the resources and opportunities that
have been taken away? If anyone has a right to cross these lands, isn’t
it the descendants of the peoples who lived here before European
settlement?
There are 11 million undocumented people living in the United States
today. They are essential to the functioning of the economy; without
their cheap labor, agriculture and construction work would grind to a
halt. Many of them have lived in the US for many years or decades. Of
those who cross from Mexico without papers, fully half of them are
deportees attempting to return to their families in the US.
The border is not intended to keep undocumented people out. The goal is
to make sure that entering the United States without papers is
dangerous, traumatizing, and expensive—but possible. The point of
deportations is not to empty the US of undocumented people. It is to
terrorize those who live in the US with the threat of deportation. This
serves to maintain a caste system by blackmailing a captive population.
So long as a massive part of the US population lives in constant danger
and without any rights, employers have access to a vast pool of
disposable labor that is easy to exploit. 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.
Accusing migrants of stealing jobs from US citizens is blaming the
victim. If everyone were accorded the same rights, if national
boundaries did not artificially create impoverished populations in
countries that are stripped of natural resources and treated as garbage
dumps, migrant labor could not undercut anyone else’s job opportunities.
If not for all the risks and pressures undocumented workers face, they
would be able to obtain the same price for their labor as everyone else.
Time and again, undocumented workers have demonstrated their courage in
struggles for higher wages, despite having to overcome obstacles other
workers do not face. But border enforcement drives down wages across the
board. That’s the point of it.
In deporting people who have lived in the US for decades, the US
government is using Mexico as a concentration camp to conceal
unemployment and other problems. The desperation and the firearms
produced in the US reappear in Mexico in a brutal illegal economy driven
by the appetite of US consumers for narcotics. This is a way of
exporting the violence that is essential to maintaining such tremendous
imbalances of power. And as it has become more difficult and therefore
more expensive to enter the United States without documents, the cartels
have been drawn into the business, creating a feedback loop of brutality
that the US authorities use to justify further the clampdowns.
The cycle repeats and intensifies.
The border sends resources and profits one way, and human beings the
other. This is how the rich amass great concentrations of wealth: not
just by accumulating resources in one place, but also by excluding
people from them.
If a prisoner is a person contained by walls, what does that make us?
Prisons don’t just contain the people inside them. When the border is
everywhere, everyone is transformed into a prisoner or prison guard.
It’s easy to be bribed by the advantages of citizenship: being able to
travel more freely, being allowed to participate legally in the labor
market, being able to access what is left of government assistance,
being acknowledged as a part of society. Yet these privileges come at a
terrible cost, for the documents one person holds only have value
because others are without them. Their value is based on artificial
scarcity.
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?
Borders are just social constructs—they are imaginary frameworks imposed
on the real world. There is nothing necessary or inevitable about them.
Were it not for the violence of the believers, they would cease to
exist.
Crossing the border without documents is a way of resisting. So is
getting to know people who are affected by the border in ways that you
are not, setting out to understand and share their struggles. Together,
we can make the border unenforceable—a step towards creating a world in
which everyone will be free to travel wherever they desire, to use their
creative energy however they see fit, to fulfill their potential on
their own terms.