Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism

"Harsha Walia wants us to think big. It is a book that asks us to see borders not as an object, in and of itself, but rather as part of a much larger project of colonialism , the expansion of the state, and of racial capitalism. Essentially, she argues that you cannot think about indigenous rights, minority rights, and immigrant rights in a vacuum. All of these are interconnected and part of an ordering regime of racial state capitalism. Walia argues we should not focus on individual countries, but rather should think about this as a global system of capitalism that excludes people based on racial grounds and produces racially uneven results. Borders are a system of dividing up the majority of the people in the world and separating them from each other so that they can be managed. Then wealth can be extracted from their labor. The privileges of the wealthy few are protected by fragmenting and containing the majority of people in the world. Absolutely. She would say that you cannot separate those things. She would be critical of people—of scholars, journalists, activists—who focus on only one aspect of that. If you are just thinking about wealth inequality, you are going to miss the racial aspects of it. If you are just looking at racism, you are going to miss the connections to capitalism that have created those divisions in the first place. She aims high. She argues that what really needs to happen is a challenge to all of those things at the same time. She is arguing for an internationalist left that challenges capitalism, but also the state system of borders, simultaneously, and tries to imagine a new world that is outside of the bounds of racial state capitalism. I think that her criticism of how the world works in terms of borders, the state, and capitalism being intertwined with each other, and shaped by racial exclusion, is right. She diagnoses the problem. I have trouble seeing what the solution to it is, though. She proposes what is essentially a whole new world: an internationalist, socialist system that is not based on a capitalist state and the racialized limits to movement that we have today. It is a vision for what a future world could look like."