The Freedom to Move

In Conversation with… Harsha Walia

Harsha Walia is the award-winning author of “Undoing Border Imperialism” and, most recently, “Border and Rule.” Trained in the law, she is a community organiser and campaigner in migrant justice, feminist, anti-capitalist, abolitionist, and anti-imperialist movements, including “No One Is Illegal” and “Women’s Memorial March Committee”.

Perhaps I can start by asking you to explain what you mean by border imperialism?

For me border imperialism is the idea that we can’t think of borders simply as a domesticated immigration policy issue, that we have to locate the existence and production of borders in a global context and especially in the context of imperialism. The fact that there are mass inequities in this world that are underwritten by colonialism, settler colonialism, enslavement, war, impoverishment, racial capitalism, all of that; and that creates mass asymmetries when it comes to life, life on this planet. And border imperialism is a way to maintain power. And for me citizenship is one of the pillars of global inequity. A lot of the time we talk about it as a very domestic issue, like immigration policies and quotas, how many people are we going to let in, these very policies that question at a national level without implicating these mass forces of inequities that forces people to migrate and constrict their mobility. So for me border imperialism is looking at all those forces in a global context and locating them squarely in the historic and contemporary realities of imperialism.


In your book you write ‘undoing border imperialism would mean a freer society for everyone.’ Could you speak a bit to that?

I think borders really are at the nexus of a lot of social issues. If you think about, for example, global poverty, again global poverty is not a function of individuals or the kind of liberal narrative of meritocracy, it’s a function of mass deliberate impoverishment.

Or if we look at issues related to climate justice, if we look at issues related to gender violence, if we look at issues around living wages and labour rights, all of these are connected to the fact that we live in a world that is fortified, and one of the main ways that gender violence is upheld, one of the main reasons racial justice is upheld, one of the main ways in which labour inequities are upheld, all of these are related to the border. 

The fact that there are sweatshops in the so-called Global South is not something inherently to do with the Global South, as a place of space, it’s the production of impoverishment in the Global South and then the refusal to allow people in the Global South to live in the Global North. 

Right, the kind of access that the Global North prides itself on not only invisibilises how wealth in the Global North is dependent on legacies of imperialism, so enslavement expropriation, theft of land resource (all of that has built the wealth of the North), but also the North maintains that wealth by disallowing people from the South to migrate, so in that sense, undoing borders really unravels the immobilisation that is required to maintain global inequity.


You’ve spoken about the freedom to stay, the freedom to move and the freedom to return. And in relation to that, you also make compelling links between different groups, for example Indigenous communities and migrant rights. Can you explain this?

Yes to me they are related because the freedom to move and the freedom to stay are intertwined in the sense that one of the things that forces people to move, whether that is trade agreements, whether that’s environmental catastrophe, whether that’s a mining company, an oil company on the land, whatever it is, whether it’s war or work, those forces that are compelling you to move are also the ones that are denying you the right to stay.  

So to me that is the connection, that people have as much a right to move, as they have a right to stay, a right to live in their land. Indigenous people have the right to remain on their land, Indigenous communities resisting climate change have a right to remain on their land and not have to become climate refugees, Palestinian people have the right to stay or to return on their land and to resist Israeli apartheid and occupation. So those are intertwined and that the right to migration must be under conditions of freedom. And also, nobody should have to be forced to move, which is the corollary to the right to stay. 


You also say that migration today is the ‘human face of climate disaster’ and you related that to ecofascism, green nationalism and also to the weaponisation of environmental justice that serves the militarisation and criminalisation of migration. Can you explain what you mean by that?

One of the ways in which ecofascism plays out is specifically the call to militarise borders and again to create a white sanctuary. That is a kind of apocalyptic view that climate change is real and climate change is coming and in order to survive we need to close the borders, we need to shut down the borders to the floods, the climate floods but also the metaphoric floods, by which they mean people. 

I think there’s a long troubling trend of white nationalism in the environmental justice movement that is anti migrant and anti Indigenous. A lot of conservation movements talk about saving face and place as if those were barren lands and Indigenous people don’t live there which is a form of settler colonialism. Also there are forms of white nationalism that are deeply anti migrant with population control discourses; idea of scare space, those are all very troubling narratives and not only are they racist, but they really absolve and scapegoat migrants, instead of laying responsibility on extraction, capitalism and  destruction of the planet.  


You also say that borders are violence and you draw some parallels with prisons and other systems that prevent people from moving. Could you talk a little bit about that? 

Yes, to me they’re violent because that’s their function. Borders are not just lines on a map, they are a form of governance that very much rely on enforcement, whether that’s detention or deportation. I mean, all around the world, in Australia, we have mass externalisation of borders so it’s not just about the borders of Australia, you have Papua New Guinea, Mauru, Christmas islands.  

In Europe, we have mass externalisation of borders into northern and western Africa, into the Sahara. The fact that Europe has the deadliest border is not because of the Mediterranean, it’s because of border policies, border policies that create dangerous migration. There is nothing inherently dangerous about migration. And I think we’ve started to normalise that narrative, we start to normalise this idea that migrants happen to die on their journeys whether that’s at the US-Mexico border or the Sonoran desert, the Mediterranean and Libya. But that is not true, there is nothing inherently dangerous about moving.

There is the State that creates conditions of precarity and fatality, and so in that sense borders are violence. The act of migration is not dangerous, it’s border policies that make migration dangerous and fatal. Why are borders violence, they are a form of enforcement to restrict mobility, particularly against those who are racialised and poor.


How can we change the mainstream narrative around this topic, which is mostly dehumanising, vitriolic and alarmist? 

I take the view that it doesn’t help to have liberal humanitarian responses to such immense state violence. Of course there is a very important role for storytelling, for ensuring that every person’s story is allowed the dignity that it deserves. But as a political orientation, I really strongly urge against narratives like multiculturalism or refugees welcome, with these kind of humanitarian gestures. I don’t think that they actually undo state violence, they actually reinforce them by continuing to centre Western [societies], by which I mean American, Canadian, European, Australian, etc. as the arbiters of people’s humanity.

So I very much believe in narratives of resistance, I very much believe that we have to turn the gaze away from migrants and refugees, to squarely adopt a no borders analysis and to understand that migrants and refugees are actually state created terms, these are not natural ways in which people identify. To be a migrant or refugee simply means that you don’t have citizenship in a particular state, that is by its very definition a state defined term, not a linguistic category, not a cultural category. So we have to move against the gaze that really fixates on migrants and refugees and turn the gaze squarely towards state violence,  and focus our energies on dismantling that violence. 


Can you imagine a world without borders and how do we build a common vision for that?  

It’s hard to say, I can imagine a world without borders in the sense of it’s not our present day reality. We have to remember that borders are new, they are man-made, they’re not natural, they’re not historic. These are all very very new structures, and nation-states and capitalism try to tell us that there is no alternative, but there is, in fact, these man-made systems are newer. 

I don’t want to romanticise and suggest it’s easy, also I know that it’s not the reality of the world today, and statelessness, the experience of statelessness is seen as somehow normal, that you don’t belong to a state, what an absurd concept, but nonetheless it is one. 

I think dismantling borders, and I don’t mean that in a symbolic way, I don’t mean open a border, that’s why I say specifically that open borders or no borders are different politics.  And to me no borders means that you have to undo the racial, social organisation of a world,  which tells us that somehow black and brown people do not deserve to be in the same space as white people. 

That is still the racial social organisation of this world, and citizenship maintains that. You have to undo racial capitalism that continues to deny people again both the right to move and the right to stay.


In the chapter on decolonisation you say ‘without romanticising the past we have much to learn from ancestors in the evolution of knowledge.’ Could you talk about that?

Along the lines of what I said now, so much of what we understand today we have to understand as a short snippet in the context of human history. Even 100 years ago everything was so different. I think that we have to look in different places and contexts, there are many parts of the world where people do still live on the land, it’s not some strange idealistic back to the land cult,  it’s these people’s actual way of life, and of course especially Indigenous people but also peasant communities, farming communities, land based, they still very much live in relationship with the Earth and understand that intimately, not just as kind of an environmental project, but the interdependence. So there’s other ways of being free that other communities experience and continue to live and of course it’s no coincidence that the Zapatistas first rose in 1994 to challenge NAFTA, that will continue to remain such a powerful moment in history, that very precise juxtaposition. 


You write a lot about movement building, in particular you say ‘there is no liberation in isolation’ but also that one of the hardest aspects of movement building is building alliances. So, I wonder if there is a recipe perhaps?

There is no recipe, it’s so context-specific because so much of that is based on relationships, based on specific dynamics of community. There is no recipe but I think there is a general compass which is that you can’t do this alone and you have to realise that learning how to do work with other people is hard because so much of our interdependence now is underwritten by violence.

When I’m dependent on someone else it’s an extractive relationship or a consumer relationship, and by that I don’t mean intimate friends and family, but I mean the broader world, so we have to figure out how to have relationships and be interdependent human beings, because we can’t pretend it’s an easy task, that’s not what we’ve learned, it’s not what we believe, that’s not what we’ve inherited.

So I think we have to be honest about the difficulties of the scale of that, for many of us, and I don’t mean everybody, but particularly those that are in largely westernised capitalistic urban centres. That work is needed and that’s why it’s also a hard task.


What advice would you give to people who might not be working in these spaces, but who have a strong desire to do something. 

I think what has really been detrimental in the past 20 or 30 years is the idea that the work of social change is that of experts. That the work is done in the hands of charities or nonprofits, or academics, or policymakers or professional lobbyists. I know there’s a load of critiques, legitimate ones, for example the non-profit industrial complex, but for me the one that is most profound is the ways in which we can’t mobilise people, that we don’t think they are capable of enacting change. We see that as governments downplaying this work by characterising social issues as special interest groups, rather than this is something that impacts everyday people.

So what I offer is not a concrete action, rather a philosophical orientation, if you will, which is just the necessity and the belief that the only way we will win this, is that if everyone is involved, whatever act someone could do, that is important, and it’s so important to not get paralysed by the narratives of not being an expert, whatever that means.


How can we become better ancestors to future generations?

Trying to leave the world in a better place than we inherited it? I know that’s impossible, increasingly, and very dismal. And the other is really just believing and doing in ways that don’t make us feel shame or regret for not having done anything or not having done more when it comes to just the trajectory of the planet - what a massive planetary crisis! And I know it’s very easy on top of a pandemic, and that’s on top of day-to-day life to somehow wish it away but it’s not going away, it’s just getting closer and closer. So I think just sitting with the gravity of the situation and finding whatever ways and, again this goes back to that earlier thing, it doesn’t mean you have to give up your whole lives and suddenly start a new job in a non-profit. That narrative ‘if I can do anything I will do nothing’... I think a good ancestor means being able to be honest with ourselves about what we can do and actually doing it, not allowing those excuses to pile up.  


In your book you mention a Zapatista quote: ‘walking we ask questions’ what do you understand by this saying?

For me it’s the idea that we can’t wait for all the answers in order to act. That we can’t just theorise that it’s necessary to understand the world around us, but instead of changing it, because we might focus our energy on something that is not useful. So it is necessary to understand the world, as part of the process of changing it, but not fixate on that.

A lot of this, in some ways, might be neutral aim, again the balance between what we inherit and our struggles, but also the political conditions are constantly evolving. But only by the praxis of being and doing, and being involved in struggle will we be able to ask relevant questions and hopefully find answers. I take that Zapatista saying to mean, you have to be walking. 


If you had to be in perpetual movement what form would this take?

A turtle.