Undoing Border Imperialism

4.5 Walia synthesises swirling frameworks of social justice, shares practical aspects of activism, and calls on us to overgrow the logics of capitalism and colonialism.

Border imperialism is structured by, first, the free flow of Western capital and plunder which creates mass displacements, while simultaneously securing Western borders against the very people who capitalism and empire have dispossessed and impoverished; second, criminalizing migrants through their construction as deviants and illegals, which also ensures profits for companies that receive contracts for border militarization and migrant detention; third, the entrenchment of a racialized hierarchy of citizenship by arbitrating who legitimately constitutes the nation-state; and fourth, the legal denial of permanent residency to a growing number of migrants to ensure a precarious, exploitable, and expendable pool of labor.