My next extended series will be an analysis of Border and Rule by Harsha Walia. This time I’m aiming to alternate discussions of the sections with other essays as I go along. Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism was published in 2021 and becomes more relevant by the day as we see the harsh and often illegal actions ICE, CBP, and the Trump administration are taking to arrest and deport immigrants, legal residents, visa holders, and U.S. citizens. Below you’ll see a mini review of Sapiens, a small portion of the flood of news stories around the atrocities ICE is committing, and an overview of Border and Rule.
Mini Review
I’m most of the way through Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari and I’ve gotten to the point where my opinion of the book drops a little bit each section. It has been interesting to listen to his books in reverse order and notice that he repeats some of the same talking points in each of his first three books. I was pleasantly surprised near the end of his discussion of different past societies that he said something along the lines of “history has shown us that human beings are constrained by their nature, but the limitations imposed by that nature are incredibly broad.” Human societies have been organized in vastly different ways throughout history and there are still many more options for us to test.
Unfortunately, he then gets into first a defense of imperialism as tied to scientific progress, and then an explanation of how capitalism is the best economic system the world has seen (see my last essay on this). In his “other people don’t look at both sides like I do” statements, he commits the same error he warns others not to: using hindsight bias to claim that of course things must be this way. His argument is somewhat shallow; relying on a statement of facts about the rise of capitalism concurrent with the rise of rational inquiry and implying that the good caused by rational scientific inquiry could not have existed without imperialism or capitalism.
I do not disagree with most of the facts that Harari lays out (though his characterization of Adam Smith’s ideas and the context in which he was writing is sorely lacking), but the presentation is highly misleading. Statements like “there is enough evidence to claim that empires are purely evil and enough evidence to claim that they have done massive good in the world” give a veneer of impartial observation to what is otherwise a defense of empire against those he believes have gone too far in their critiques. By framing every argument as a choice between two extremes of his choosing, Harari is conveniently always in the “reasonable middle” while his choice of extremes necessarily limits the possible solutions he proposes. He often falls into the “far center” as described by Andrea Long Chu in this recent article.
Overall I was pleasantly surprised with the first section of the book and there is a lot to learn from the overview of ancient human societies and history. However, this should not be the last book someone reads on the subject, as they would leave with a convincing, but partial understanding of capitalism and imperialism and the development of the modern world.
Reading Recommendations
According to ProPublica - “The for-profit prison company GEO Group has surged in value under President Donald Trump. Investors are betting big on immigration detention. Its stock price doubled after Election Day.
But despite its soaring fortunes, the $4 billion company continues to resist having to pay detainees more than $1 a day for cleaning facilities where the government has forced them to live.”
Immigrants contribute much more to NY economy than they receive, but are stymied by intentionally disruptive bureaucracy. This article contains many good points, but I don’t think this type of economic reasoning is the path we want to go down. Are the only people worth maintaining in the U.S those who contribute to the GDP?
The NYT is reporting on the absolutely cruel treatment of migrants by the Trump administration. They are not hearing their cases and immediately deporting them to Panama when they can't be sent home for fear of death. In Border and Rule, the author dedicates an entire section to the outsourcing of immigration enforcement to third countries and the human rights abuses the U.S. and Europe knowingly promote by doing so.
Also from NYT, a man was sent to Guantanamo just for attempting to claim asylum in the U.S., even though the administration claimed they were sending all "criminals.”
A green card holder was detained at the airport in New Hampshire when returning home to his family. “Senior described Schmidt being “violently interrogated” at Logan Airport for hours, and being stripped naked, put in a cold shower by two officials, and being put back onto a chair.
An ICE contractor monitors social media to track protester activity and link accounts across different social media sites. Our tax dollars are being spent to surveil us and identify people resisting that surveillance and excessive policing.
Reporting from USAToday notes the awful conditions of ICE detention. Immigration is intimately linked to the prison system in the U.S., with ICE contracting jails and prisons across the U.S. to detain people who have been accused of no crime. “The government's own investigators have repeatedly found serious problems in immigration detention centers around the country. The problems have persisted through Democrat and Republican administrations and range from fatal medical neglect to improper use of force... ICE reported holding 46,269 people in custody in mid-March, well above the agency's detention capacity of 41,500 beds. Immigration detention is "non-punitive," according to ICE policy, in recognition that most immigration violations are civil, not criminal. Mich González, an immigration attorney representing the family of the Ukrainian man who died Feb. 20 in Krome custody, visits the facility regularly to meet with clients. The guards there "are overwhelmed," he said.... In February, the administration tried to scale up detention capacity with a 30,000-bed site at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, but the plan has faced legal, financial and logistical challenges. The U.S. Army also plans to build detention space for another 30,000 immigrants on mainland military bases.”
Finally, The Guardian reports that a Canadian woman with a valid work visa was detained for two weeks in awful conditions (which have been the standard conditions of ICE detention for the past decade or more). "It felt like we had all been kidnapped, thrown into some sort of sick psychological experiment meant to strip us of every ounce of strength and dignity... The reality became clear: Ice detention isn’t just a bureaucratic nightmare. It’s a business. These facilities are privately owned and run for profit. Companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group receive government funding based on the number of people they detain, which is why they lobby for stricter immigration policies. It’s a lucrative business: CoreCivic made over $560m from Ice contracts in a single year. In 2024, GEO Group made more than $763m from Ice contracts. The more detainees, the more money they make. It stands to reason that these companies have no incentive to release people quickly. What I had experienced was finally starting to make sense."
Border and Rule
This post will serve as my introduction to Border and Rule and some general thoughts. The book is a great jumping off point for many of the blog post ideas I’ve been thinking about, so in each subsequent post I’ll dive deeper into the sections of the book and pull out examples and evidence to support the conclusions presented here.
The first thing I will say is that this book is not for everyone. I have been working closely with immigrants and learning a lot about migration and colonization in recent years and even I felt that some paragraphs turned into a word-salad of anti-capitalist buzzwords. In that sense, I think it would be intimidating and confusing as an introduction to these issues, while also immediately turning off anyone who has an uncritical view of the U.S. or Europe and their role in the world order. All that aside, I found the book to be packed with details of immigration systems around the world and, with almost 70 pages of references at the end, I will be returning to it regularly for further sources and information.
The book is structured in four parts:
“Part 1: Displacement Crisis, Not Border Crisis”
The section title here focuses on the true framing that we should consider when thinking of the “crisis” of migration. It is a crisis of people being displaced from their homelands, often by big agriculture and mining companies for the benefit of former colonial powers like the U.S. and Europe. This section may have been one of my favorites as it details how the same countries that claim they can’t handle the influx of immigrants created and profit from the war, violence, and underdevelopment that people across the world are fleeing from. We rely on false narratives of scarcity and not enough resources to support “our own people” while extracting massive amounts of resources from others. The chapter challenges us to recognize our history of colonization, destabilization, and abuse which led directly to the lifestyles we enjoy every day.
“Part 2: ‘Illegals’ and ‘Undesirables’: The Criminalization of Migration”
This section examines the U.S., Australia, and Europe and the ways that each “externalize” their borders, cutting deals with third countries to outsource border enforcement and prevent immigrants from coming near their countries. These agreements also conveniently shift responsibility for human rights abuses to these third countries, allowing Western nations to claim their hands are clean and fueling autocratic rule to maintain such harsh enforcement. This section is particularly relevant to the political context in the U.S., and many of the actions Australia has taken and continues to take appear to be serving as a blueprint for the new administration.
“Part 3: Capitalist Globalization and Insourcing of Migrant Labor”
Part three looks at the U.S., Gulf States, and Canada and identifies the underlying capitalist structures which maintain the free flow of money across borders while restricting labor in just the ways that most benefit companies (and citizens). The restriction of labor not only allows large agriculture monopolies to maintain a precarious workforce and access cheap labor when they need it while sending those people back to their countries when they don’t, it also creates a racial underclass of people with fewer rights and protections that can be used to break worker solidarity (as we’ll see in the next section). This “insourcing” of labor pits exploited citizen workers against the even more exploited class of immigrant workers, providing companies with all of the benefits of outsourcing their work to another country without having to make investments in those countries.
”Part 4: Making Race, Mobilizing Racist Nationalism”
Finally, part four describes the rising far-right nationalist movements across the world and one of the key features they all share: anti-immigrant sentiment. This section encourages us to recognize that “our enemy arrives in a limousine and not on a boat (p 203).” It also details the ways that restricted citizenship and closed borders create racial hierarchies while also being enforced by those racial hierarchies in a vicious cycle. In the closing, Walia challenges us to recognize the ways in which right-wing, liberal, and even left-wing rhetoric reinforces border control by promoting their own definitions of national provision of welfare (which necessarily presupposes a border and the exclusion of certain groups) instead of breaking free from the mental and physical boundaries imposed by borders. After detailing all of the harms that are created by and fuel borders and states, Walia challenges us to work toward the international solidarity necessary to dismantle these institutions which protect the free flow of wealth while trapping and often killing workers.
P.S. - If you like what you read, please share with anyone you think might be interested. If you really like it, I now have a Ko-Fi page set up where you can send me a tip and tell me what post sparked your interest.
Purchase the Book
If you’d like, you can purchase some of the books mentioned in this post from bookshop.org. This is a way to support local bookstores (or me if you use the link below), and avoid the Amazon monopoly.
Here is the link to my store page, with all of my recommendations.
You can also use the store locator and select a local book shop for the profit of your purchase to go to. According to the website:
When you select your local bookstore on the map above and visit their Bookshop.org page, we place a cookie in your browser that identifies you as that store's customer, and the store will get the full profit from all your Bookshop.org purchases (30% of the book's list price).
Exactly what you're saying is the reason we need more experiments now than ever. I think a lot of people have bought into the capitalist myths that it is the natural way of human organization and don't even know about the many ways of organizing societies that lasted hundreds of years longer than capitalism.
But you are right, it is so pervasive and backed by police and military force which makes it hard to create new possibilities.
"Human societies have been organized in vastly different ways throughout history and there are still many more options for us to test."
Hi, Sean. A problem arises when we try to rack our brains to find alternatives to "test". My own explorations land at some society that embraces the true spirit of communism - a political theory that, as Marx expounded it, has in fact never been applied as a governmental system. I think it founders at the problem of scale. But at small scale, it offers one of your "options", as the commune.
It's when you ponder the posit that capitalism (which is frequently confused and commingled with commerce, which is something different) is founded in the idea of theft that one comes to a realisation of what imperial expansion was, and still is, all about. When something cannot be stolen, such as when labour through slavery is outlawed, it is then procured at the lowest possible price, which partly explains the inordinate size of certain prison populations.
It is capitalism that our ordinary working lives feed into. It is because of capitalism that some work for the same wages now as they did 40 years ago. Capitalism is exploitation pure and simple and you're entirely for it if you're the exploiter; and totally for it if you're the exploited, because there is no alternative. No option. To test.