If ever a book raged against borders, this one does. Harsha Walia's Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism takes popular, liberal depictions of migration to task, and in doing so brings the accelerating crises of our time into sharp relief: namely, globalized capitalism, racist nationalism, exclusionary borders, and a warming planet. Together, these intersecting crises have created a cycle of displacement, detainment, deportation, and death, all the while masquerading as the status quo. Such outcomes, Walia argues, are far from inevitable. The book culminates with a call not to open, but to dismantle borders entirely, and to "transform the underlying social, political, and economic conditions giving rise to what we know as the 'migration crisis'" (p. 213). A must-read for scholars and comrades in the struggle for the freedom to move or to remain, this is a book by which future critical work on borders and migration will be measured.Chapter One explores the creation of the US-Mexico border as a violent technology of white supremacy. Looking to recent history, Walia shows the border's modus operandi to be twofold: the unilateral protection and elevation of Whiteness, and the simultaneous entrapment of Black and Indigenous labour. She exposes the anti-Black roots of border policing, whose first patrol members came from the ranks of the notoriously racist Texas Rangers and the Klu Klux Klan (KKK), and the lengths to which the

Utilizing James C. Scott’s germinal concept of everyday resistance, we examine the subtle, daily acts of resistance carried out by Mexican and Jamaican migrant farmworkers in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia. We argue that despite finding themselves in situations of formidable constraint, migrant farmworkers utilize a variety of “weapons of the weak” that undermine the strict regulation of their employment by employers and state authorities. We also argue that everyday forms of resistance are important political acts and as such, they warrant inclusion in scholarly examinations. Indeed, by reading these methods neither as “real” resistance nor as political, we risk reproducing the same systems of power that de-legitimize the actions, agency, and political consciousness of subaltern and oppressed peoples. After a brief discussion on the concept of everyday resistance, we provide an overview of Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), establishing the conditions that drive migrant workers to resist and drawing connections between the regulatory framework of the SAWP, the informality of the agricultural sector, and migrant labor. Finally, we examine specific instances of resistance that we documented over 3 recent years through ethnographic fieldwork and as community organizers with a grassroots migrant justice organization. We assert the importance of situating migrants’ everyday acts of resistance at the center of conceptualizations of the broader movement for migrant justice in Canada and worldwide.

No abstract

Despite perfunctory characterisation of Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) as a ‘triple win’, scholars and activists have long admonished its lack of government oversight, disrespect for migrant rights and indentureship of foreign workers. This article contends that the SAWP is predicated upon naturalised, deeply engrained and degrading beliefs that devalue Black lives and labour. Based on twenty months’ ethnographic fieldwork in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia, Canada, it reveals the extent to which anti-Black racism permeates, organises and frustrates workers’ lives on farms and in local communities. It situates such experiences, which workers characterise as ‘prison life’, in the context of anti-Black immigration policy and the workings of racial capitalism. This ethnography of Caribbean migrants not only adds perspective to scholarship hitherto focused on the experiences of Latino workers, but it also reinforces critical work on anti-Black racism in contemporary Canada.

No abstract