Borders as Capitalist Machinery
Interview With Heba Gowayed
October 6, 2026
Spectre’s Zachary Levenson talked to sociologist Heba Gowayed about the political economy of migration, the border as a site of capitalist accumulation, and the ways contemporary immigration regimes extract profit from human mobility while eroding democratic freedoms. Drawing on her award-winning book Refuge (2022) and her next book The Cost of Borders, Gowayed argues that borders are not simply instruments of state sovereignty or national security, but central institutions of contemporary capitalism, generating wealth through detention, surveillance, deportation, and exclusion.1Heba Gowayed, Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential (Princeton University Press, 2022), https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691235127. Their conversation ranges from colonialism and welfare states to abolition, social movements, and the future of migrant justice.
Heba Gowayed is a writer and associate professor of sociology at CUNY Hunter College and Graduate Center, and a current Carnegie Fellow (2025–2027). Her research and writing centers the lives of people who migrate across borders and the unequal and often violent institutions they face.
My research for Refuge actually began on this question of political economy. I was doing research in Cairo on poverty alleviation policy. It was on a program that was carried out by the World Bank globally, but it wasn’t being done by the World Bank in Egypt. It was this idea of cash incentives for people to send their children to school.
And, as you can imagine—this is actually in my very first published paper—people want to send their kids to school.2Heba Gowayed, “The Unnecessary Nudge: Education and Poverty Policy in a Cairo Slum,” Sociological Forum 33, no. 2 (2018): 482–504, https://doi.org/10.1111/socf.12421. What’s missing, actually, is cash, so they don’t need the incentive at all. So, I call it “the unnecessary nudge” in that first paper.
But I’m doing this research, and I’m there, and I don’t actually have the intention of coming back to the United States. And then, of course, a coup d’état happens. I am sort of edged out of the project. It is a government project, and I am observing it. I lost access to it because of prerevolution work that I’d done, policy work, and so I found myself back in the United States without a project. My background was not primarily in immigration research, but simultaneously, you know, this is the summer of 2015 and I’m hearing about Syrians who had been displaced because of the war that began there. That was an outcropping of the same revolution that I had been following in Egypt, which called for bread, freedom, and social justice: aish, hurriya, ‘adāla ijtimā’iyya. Syrians were being resettled to New Haven, where my husband was doing his PhD at the time, and which is where I came home to. And so, I went to a local NGO and talked to those doing the resettling, and they basically looked at me and were like, “you speak Arabic?” And I was like, “yes, fluently.” They’re like, “great, we need you, you’re on board.” So, I began to interpret for this resettlement agency. What I quickly realized is that this was essentially a story of social welfare, the devastation of the US social welfare system, and its inability to receive people who arrived to this country in any way that was dignified, or treat people who are experiencing poverty in any dignified way.
And so, the Syrians confronted the same social service system as low-income people in the United States. And this social service system was constructed through racism, with the imaginary of Black and brown recipients, over the past century. It is a system that is threadbare and does not provide for basic needs in terms of shelter, food, or cash assistance. Other people who experience poverty, their poverty was circumstantial, right? Despite the fact that we have disproven the “culture of poverty” thesis, we still very much adopt it in the way that we imagine the poor.3The culture of poverty thesis argues that poverty persists because people in poor communities develop and transmit cultural values and behaviors that make escaping poverty difficult. This line of argument was originally advanced by the anthropologist Oscar Lewis in La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty. Oscar Lewis, La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York (Random House, 1966). Culture of poverty explanations risk treating poverty as a problem of individual or community behavior rather than examining structural causes like labor markets, inequality, housing policy, and political decisions. Lewis himself argued that the “culture of poverty” was an adaptation to conditions of deprivation, not simply a cause of poverty. But the behavioralist aspect of his argument has been taken out of context and adopted by both conservative and liberal social scientists and pundits as a strategy of blaming the poor for their own poverty, letting capitalism off the hook. These were very, very middle-class and upwardly mobile people. You have to be in order to flee war, actually. And they came here, and through the same social service system, found themselves in the trenches of the lower rungs of the US labor market and US social services. They basically resettled into poverty, which is what I argue in the book.4Gowayed, Refuge.
That insight is what prompted me to do more research, to expand the scope and think about, okay, well, if this is a story of welfare policy, then what does it look like under different welfare regimes? And so, I went to look at Canada, and I looked at Germany. And, you know, I found that more expansive systems afford people different possibilities. Even if, in the case of Canada for instance, that expansive system doesn’t actually admit many immigrants and has this point system and is, let’s say, capital-oriented in how it selects who can be admitted. They rely on United States fascism—through something called the safe third country agreement—in order to prevent any “unwanteds” from arriving.
But then you go to Germany, and it’s a much more expansive social welfare system. But it’s also an extraordinarily racist system that only sees people with certain qualifications as being eligible for participation in the labor market. So that really did reveal that it’s not just about providing people with housing, food, and cash to live, or even educational assistance, which they do offer in Germany. But it’s equally about recognizing humans as human beings—that is, its about providing beyond the bare necessities and recognizing that human beings need to participate in society in some capacity. And in Germany, the bar for participation is to earn that German credential, which is a very narrow sense of what qualifies somebody to enter a labor market or an educational system. And so, that was sort of the barrier there.
Yeah, I mean, I think that it’s more than xenophobia. I think in the German case particularly, it is a quintessential racism in the sense that they believe that, as Germans with Germanic blood, they are superior to others of different races. And this is a belief that motivated the Holocaust; it’s a belief that motivates their definition of themselves as not a country of immigrants. Right up through 2000, in order to become a German citizen, you had to actually have Germanic blood. So if you did not live in Germany but had “Germanic blood,” you did qualify for citizenship. But if you lived in Germany for decades and had any other kind of ethnicity or racial background, you did not qualify. And so, you know, that’s why, I also challenge this idea of xenophobia or Islamophobia—this idea that they are reducible to phobias, which, I think, diminishes the structural realities of these systems; it’s not that any individual within these systems is phobic, and maybe they are. Maybe that, you know, or interpersonally hateful. But irrespective of those “phobias,” the system itself is constructed in such a way that it is defined by denying rights to others.
This is not just in citizenship, but also in the way that the educational system or the labor market sees qualification, and so it is a racism in the sense that it is systemic, and it is, part and parcel of how the system is structured—that is, as a German system for Germans, and everybody else is at a deficit. And even the attempts at fixing this are based on that. They did pass a recognition law in 2012 that allows them to recognize non-German credentials. But the credentials recognized were overwhelmingly of people from Western Europe, and everybody else was not recognized at the same rate. And the explanation given by the German office at the time—I used the quote in Refuge—says something to the effect of, “well, with places that are culturally distant, the recognition is harder.” And so they are fully aware they are defining the metric of worth on the basis of German race and identity and valuation.
Absolutely, and I think, that kind of insight is what motivates the second project that I’m working on now, which is that in those interviews in Germany, I start every interview with basically some version of “tell me about your childhood” and then the second question is “how’d you get here?” As in “How’d you get to where we’re having the conversation right now?” And typically in the United States or Canada, where people have been resettled, which means they’ve been preselected, vetted, and invited to travel, the response to that question is like a twenty to thirty minute response, right? It’s long. They tell me about interviews they’ve had and so forth.
In the case of the German interviews, where people arrive through asylum, as in they showed up and applied for status, they had these very long journeys across many borders—you know, ten, twelve borders, from Syria all the way to their destination, which was Germany in this case. But I also did interviews in Italy that were similar.
And in those interviews that question, in a couple of cases, took a day to answer. You know, we just didn’t get to other questions. I had to come back the next day to continue the interview. And that’s because people would tell me about how they left Syria, which already cost a lot of money. They had to be smuggled out, boat rides that they took, fees that they paid to smugglers. I heard on multiple occasions that people could not eat tuna anymore because they had to eat so much of it that the smell of it now just turns their stomachs. They told me about life vests that they had to purchase, tents that they had on their backs, how they had to navigate services, how they charged their phones. All of these were a part of the answer to that question, and it struck me that often people couldn’t remember exactly which country’s borders they had crossed, but they could remember all of the dollar amounts that they had to pay smugglers; they could remember every time they were brutalized; they could remember every time they were held.
And it got me questioning, what are we actually talking about when we’re talking about migration of this sort, when people are seeing the migratory experience itself as a cost of admission? Like, they’re seeing it as dollar signs, as these fees, as that amount, and they know prior to leaving that you need x amount in order to get from place A to place B. And they realized, too, that they might die. But that’s a cost too. That there is this fee to pay, and it won’t necessarily save your life, but it is the cost to get from place A to place B, and when you pay more, you can purchase a little bit more safety…maybe.
The less resources you have to spend, the more risk that you’re exposed to. And so, from these conversations, I began to think about how our illustrations of the migratory experience are really missing this story of these costs. And it sort of sees countries as sending and receiving countries. It sees the question of political economy as the question of labor markets or the question of the legal framework that allows people to either integrate or not. But it misses entirely what the burdens are and what the actual migratory process looks like.
I also began to question, Zach, like, what does it mean if people are seeing the price of admission as these dollar signs? What does it mean for the countries that are defined by borders that are themselves a price for admission? And then when you look at it on that side, you begin to see that it is an industry. You know, Todd Miller, for instance, writes about the border-industrial complex.5See Todd Miller, Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security (City Lights, 2014); Todd Miller, Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the US Border around the World (Verso, 2019); Gabriel Schivone, “The Border-Security-Industrial Complex: A Conversation with Todd Miller,” Los Angeles Review of Books, October 3, 2018, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-border-security-industrial-complex-a-conversation-with-todd-miller/. What we’re seeing is a for-profit industry of surveillance tech, detention facilities, for-profit prisons, and contractors—like the ones who built the wall and raised it another ten feet during the first Trump administration. You know, there are NGOs that are positioned there, companies that run shelters, people who do the ankle monitors, and people who run the drones. And there are multiple governments involved with this: Israel is involved; and obviously the United States is very heavily involved in the production of this. But there are also companies like Leonardo and Thales and all these different international companies.
I began to notice that G4S Security, for instance, was at the door of these Greek detention centers that I began to visit in pursuit of this project. G4S Security, which brutalized people in Ferguson and mans the apartheid wall in the West Bank. And so, when we’re talking about these things, it’s just money on all sides. It’s capital, and it’s at the expense of the taxpayer, at the expense of the immigrant. And that’s making a tremendous amount of profit for the very, very few: the worst people any of us have heard of.
This is happening at the expense of the many, and that expenditure is what’s fueling this smuggling industry, which didn’t exist prior to the enforcement of the borders. And the current form of border enforcement happens initially in the United States under Reagan, at least in its current form. This has expanded into the atrocity that we see today.
Well, I think they’re mutually reinforcing. When you think about how we got here, you have to start with colonialism. You have to start with the colonial era, and this imaginary in which the countries that become the Global North have a right to the resources, the labor, and the lives of people in the Global South. You have to understand that Haiti was robbed. The only reparations ever paid for enslavement are paid by the enslaved to the French! Somebody termed it “the greatest heist in history.”6Marlene L. Daut, “When France Extorted Haiti: The Greatest Heist in History,” Conversation, June 30, 2020, https://theconversation.com/when-france-extorted-haiti-the-greatest-heist-in-history-137949. You recognize that Britain’s theft in India is so astronomical that it is now seventeen times the current British GDP through extremely problematic tax policies.7Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present (Monthly Review Press, 2021). See also Jason Hickel, “How Britain Stole $45 Trillion from India,” Al Jazeera, December 19, 2018, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2018/12/19/how-britain-stole-45-trillion-from-india.
Now, if you start there, and you get to the United Nations—this idea that now we’ve actually got state sovereignty, now we are going to respect the little guy, now everybody gets their borders, and everybody gets their land, and everybody can protect it—but there is no repair for that earlier period, you know? At the time, prior to the ratification of the UN Convention, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in Color and Democracy that this is white people profiting.8W. E. B. Du Bois, The World and Africa/Color and Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2007). This is white people imagining how to continue to profit and kill, and they’re basically planning the world’s demise again. They’re basically rewriting what’s happened with these two wars. They think they’re ending these wars, but if you don’t deal with colonialism, and you don’t deal with this extractive tendency, and you continue to treat all these people in the world primarily as sources for profit, you are condemning yourself to another catastrophe.
And, you know, immediately after the UN Convention is signed, the United States—within weeks—drops bombs on Hiroshima. And to no condemnation! When Langston Hughes and Du Bois openly condemn it, they’re called “un-American.” And it just keeps going, right? Patrice Lumumba is killed over his attempt to nationalize the Union Menière, and he’s killed with the help, of course, of US and UN leadership.
And so slowly—slowly but surely—these borders emerge under the name of state sovereignty as a way to protect these countries—as a way to say, everybody is sovereign and everybody has a right to control their borders. A nation is made by borders, and that was actually a statement in one of Trump’s very first executive orders about defending the nation where he says, “A nation without borders is not a nation.”9Exec. Order No. 14,165, 90 Fed. Reg. 8467, (Jan. 20, 2025), available at https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/01/30/2025-02015/securing-our-borders.
Sovereignty becomes very salient when we talk about migration, but if you see the world from this perspective, you begin to see, as Tendayi Achiume and others have written, that basically this is a way for these states to hoard wealth.10Tendayi Achiume, “Migration as Decolonization,” Stanford Law Review 71, no. 6 (2019): 1509–74; Harsha Walia, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (Haymarket, 2021). Sovereignty becomes salient not when the United States is blockading Cuba and not when we’re killing the leaders of other countries, but only when we talk about borders and migration. And so, you have multiple stories that are layered on top of each other. You have the story of labor exploitation that’s absolutely happening within each country. You have the stories of allowing, for example, the Bracero Agreement—all these different machinations allowing migration in order to exploit cheap labor from other places.
But you also have a story of wealth being hoarded at the expense of people from whom it was extracted. And today you have a story of the violation of borders actually generating profit. So, you know, there’s a very interesting aspect to this, which is that for the first time in ninety years, the United States has net negative migration. The reasons for this are many. There is a securitization of the border, but that’s looked pretty similar for the last several decades. There are different measures being taken, the cancellation of humanitarian parole, and TPS and so on, but really what we’re looking at is this: people are looking at this country and saying, “this isn’t somewhere I want to go. I could end up detained, I could end up in prison!”
What’s happened is that as they’ve closed the border, as now the number has dwindled by 90 percent. They’re illegalizing huge swathes of people within the country. And that’s because this is a profit maker. So, if you don’t have people coming in that you can detain, you need to create some fuel for this capitalist machine that is domestically available. So, when you cancel temporary protected status (TPS), you’re creating 1.3 million people who are now available to be put in your prisons, who are now available to be put in your deportation flights.
And so, what we’re going to see is the expansion of this process of illegalization. And we’ll see the expansion of surveillance towards nonimmigrants as well because you need to sate the appetite of this machine—this for-profit machine that you have built, and that is generating kickbacks for all of these politicians. So, by a recent report, for every dollar the Geo Group and Core Civic, gave to campaigns, they got $11,000 back. That’s 1, 100, 000 percent return on investment.11“Quarterly Investor Risk Briefs for Private Prison Companies Geo Group and CoreCivic,” Robert and Ethyl Kennedy Human Rights Center, May 13, 2026, https://kennedyhumanrights.org/report/quarterly-investor-risk-briefs-for-private-prison-companies-geo-group-and-corecivic/. We’re not talking about just a little money here. It seems far-fetched to frame it as such an instrumental story, but it actually is! The numbers bear it out. The facts bear it out. This is what it is.
I think it’s actually a really important point. I think we’ve been sold the narrative of securitization. I don’t think it’s just that we must invest in our collective security. And this is not just in immigration. It’s in policing, it’s in the expansion of our prison system, and it’s in the expansion of the criminal legal enterprise as a whole. And, of course, it’s also in the expansion of immigration enforcement: this idea that people who arrive at the border—people who are generally Black and brown—are, regardless of their origins, inherently dangerous.
And the way to secure our communities, we’re told, is by expanding this enforcement apparatus that is designed to protect “us.” And you can imagine who is a part of that “us,” right? “Us” tends to be upper middle class and wealthy, and “them”—the people from whom we need this security—tend to be poor. And race is obviously very salient throughout this process, given the history of the United States and how class and race mesh. But you will talk to a lot of people, including a lot of Black and brown people in low-income communities, who also believe that this securitization is necessary. And I believe that this is a lie that we have all been sold and that, actually, this securitization logic precludes us from actual safety.
By “actual safety,” I mean being able to live your life unmolested, to have a roof over your head, to feed your kids, and to feel that your kids are safe as they come and go. But the securitization logic is itself a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I tell you that the issue of borders is primarily an issue of your security, and I shift this idea of immigration from a social issue—people who need refuge, people who need a place to be, people who cannot live in their own countries—to a security logic, where I tell you, “actually, the issue is that these people are coming here and I need to protect you from them,” then I basically have a green light to spend. Because if securitization is working, you need more. And if it’s not working, you also need more.
And so, despite the fact that for two decades—from the formation of ICE all the way to 2024—the amount spent on the border increased every year and the number of people arriving also continued to increase. So we know that this actually doesn’t work to deter anybody from travel. We know it doesn’t keep anybody safer. There isn’t, for instance, any spike in the number of crimes that immigrants have committed. Actually, immigrants are systematically less violent than the native-born. They are net contributors to the economy, but none of that matters, because what they’re actually interested in doing is building up this for-profit system.
But I think, Zach, that also something else that I want to caveat here is that I don’t actually believe in this populist narrative, that there is this strong populist narrative, because what we’re actually seeing now is most Americans wanting to abolish ICE. And we’re seeing that actually being demonstrated empirically in these recent victories of socialist candidates throughout the country. Their wins are actually determined by people who have never voted before, a lot of voices who have never participated in electoral politics.
I think, actually, the results of our elections are rooted in limits to voter participation, which, again, are by design, even before the latest clownery of the Supreme Court. We actually don’t have a good sense of what Americans think, and all indications of what Americans think don’t actually tell this incredibly facile story of some populist demand to deny immigrants arrival here.
I think that we’re at an interesting moment, you know, in US politics. Establishment Democrats are deeply, deeply concerned about the rise of this socialist cadre, which is actually not just a New York story. It’s a Philly story. It’s a DC story. It’s a Michigan story. It’s a Colorado story. Regardless of what happens in the Michigan election, for instance, we know that there is an appetite for this kind of politics. We know there’s an appetite for it in Maine. Across the country, we’re seeing this kind of politics, which was once seen as radical, unrealistic, and impossible, gather steam.
We’re also seeing, increasingly, Americans reporting higher sympathy with Palestinians and with Palestine, which is also a huge shift. I mean, Nancy Pelosi voting against funding for Israel is wild. And so I personally believe in the power of social movements and social pressure, and I think that what we’re seeing right now is a testament to the fact that it all starts from the street. For instance, in this case, obviously with the student encampments, but even before that, students have been protesting for Palestine from even before the State of Israel was formed! So, this is a longue durée process. Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine were not formed on October 7. This is organizing that seemed to be going nowhere for a really long time, that was there when the opportunity emerged, and they took it. It’ll always be wild to me that people encamping on a quad within their campus could precipitate such change. But it is true that that is what we’re seeing.
And so, I do believe in this possibility to shift incentives through protests, through electoral action, and through organizing. And I also believe that when we think about abolition—when we think about something like border abolition or prison abolition—we tend to think about it as erasing things. But actually—and Mariame Kaba and Ruth Wilson Gilmore and a lot of people talk about this—it’s actually about what you create.
And so, I do think that when we’re talking about defunding ICE, I think that’s a huge part of it. Defunding—and ideally, abolishing—but through the pathway of clawing back all this money. Abolishing for-profit prisons.
You know somebody had to imagine these institutions of incredible cruelty and violence, and I do think that the first step is imagining their alternative. But I also think a simultaneous step is recognizing, for instance, temporary protected status (TPS) should have never been temporary for these people. Asylum is a status that used to exist—a pathway that used to exist—that’s now being destroyed through these bureaucratic machinations, but also through the lack of protection of asylum as a legal category. We need Congress, we need our legislating institutions to protect these very basic immigration pathways.
And so, those are things that I think can happen immediately. And then in terms of the longer journey, when you talk about healthcare for all, or when you talk about expanding housing, or when you talk about—and this kind of brings us back to my first book—divesting from these securitization logics in our cities across all levels, whether that be policing, or prisons, or the immigration system. What you’re ultimately talking about is imagining a radically different world that’s centered on care rather than control. That’s a line that Phil McHarris came up with.13Philip V. McHarris, Beyond Policing:Building Abolitionist Futures (Legacy, 2024). He talks about this idea of centering our world on care rather than control. And so, I think we have to stop thinking about these policies as immigration-specific or not immigration-specific. Because at the end of the day, if you center humans, which is what these policies envision, the social welfare system that exists is going to be the social welfare system that meets everybody.
But if that system is threadbare, and if it denies people who are born here any form of social support, then it’s going to deny people coming here as well. It’s going to injure people coming here as well. And so, I think that, we are being done a service by recognizing that these are mutually dependent goals. What’s interesting is that recently Trump kind of said this out loud.14Trump made these remarks on April 2, 2026. “CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip,” CNN, April 2, 2026, https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/cnap/date/2026-04-02/segment/01. He said, you know, we don’t have money for daycare because we’re bombing Iran.And he said it explicitly, and I think that was just a gem, because the man always says the quiet part out loud. But that’s precisely the story that I’m telling here.
I think any of us who have attended more than a few protests have the experience of seeing the same people across these spaces. If we’re in a Signal group for the ICE Watch in our community, there’s a high likelihood that those are the same people who are on the Palestine solidarity group in the community. And I think that is because you all recognize the connection between the oppressors. When you recognize that, you know, the Cellebrite technology was made on the backs of Palestinians in the West Bank, and only then was marketed for use at the US border, and then gets used against activists. When you recognize that it’s the same drones that were developed, again, for use on Palestinians, whose tech was developed for use on Palestinians, and then are being used at the border, and then they’re the same ones that are buzzing above the protesters in Ferguson… When you recognize that police departments in our cities are in conversation with ICE, are in conversation with the IDF, you begin to see that “no one is free until everyone is free” is not a slogan, but just a fact.
ICE is only able to surveil people because Palestinians are sequestered. The tools that are being used by ICE on immigrants are very, very quickly being used on nonimmigrants. What’s really interesting about this moment, and specifically about the oppression of immigrants, is that in the United States, immigration is actually a civil process, which means that you do not have the same protections that you do within the criminal legal system if you’re facing immigration prosecution.
And so, you have due process protections in theory, because the Constitution guarantees due process to everybody in the country. But that due process looks very different if you’re not entitled to a lawyer, and you are not in an immigration process. You are not entitled to have your rights read to you. There’s no Miranda process. And because it is a civil process, technically, deportation is not a punishment but a rescinding of benefits. And so, therefore, if you, like this Yemeni man that I recently interviewed, are held for three years in ICE detention for no reason whatsoever, you do not have recourse to say that this is cruel and unusual punishment, because technically it is not punishment.
And so, what is happening today is that legal reality is being used to deny basic Constitutional protections. And by that, I mean, First Amendment rights, freedom from persecution on the basis of your religion or racial identity. What we’re seeing, for instance, now is the Supreme Court, through a shadow docket, okaying racial profiling, which means that anybody, brown or Black—and this happens all the time—can be apprehended by ICE. And there are citizens every day who are apprehended by ICE on this basis and without repercussion, with complete impunity. And so, what we’re seeing is—very, very, very quickly—a system in which people’s rights were not actually, fully protected. And this idea that deportation is not a punishment has been contested in the Supreme Court—and lost many times. They’re using that in order to destroy all of our freedoms within the country.
The argument that I make in my next book, The Cost of Borders, is that there are many costs to borders. There are the costs of people losing their homes, in terms of leaving, trying to find a home here, being denied one. There’s a capital cost in terms of these tremendous expenditures on borders and tremendous expenditure by people to cross borders. There’s the cost of life, which is time spent rotting in detention centers, without access to legal status. Or just living in fear in your home: fear of being stopped by the cops, of having a child get sick, of having to go to the hospital, of separation from loved ones, or from your kids, or from your romantic partners. But the ultimate cost, I argue, is the freedom of everybody in the country; because, by design, if you deny the humanity of anyone—if you think that it is okay to sequester, kill, massacre all these people who are coming to your borders or that it is preferable to kill people rather than to risk their inclusion in your polity—then you are creating a system of violence that is going to ravage you from within very much in Cesaire’s sense.15This is a reference to Martinican poet and revolutionary Aimé Césaire and, in particular, his concept of the “imperial boomerang,” which describes how violent techniques of population control were perfected in colonial territories before being reimported back to the metropole. See Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (Monthly Review Press, 1972). And that’s what I think we’re seeing happen now.
I think it’s built into the system of capitalism. Like, I think this is the result, right? I watched Nawal El Saadawi—the late, great Egyptian feminist philosopher—give an interview and she was very clear: you cannot have democracy under capitalism. And that’s because the profit motive that exists under capitalism means that you’re always going to privilege private interests over the public good. That’s how it’s designed. And so, what we’re seeing is the result. This is colonial. Du Bois and others try to go to Paris to take a petition—“We Charge Genocide”—in front of the Genocide Convention after it’s signed. And Du Bois is denied travel, and then they’re all denied, you know, they don’t even listen to it. And that’s documenting the history of lynching and the denial for African Americans within the United States. This country is founded on a genocide and enslavement, and so when we talk about this, we can’t talk about it as something just pertaining to borders and just happening in the last several decades, or only happening since the establishment of ICE.
When we see people as primarily sources for profit, then basically we’re condemning ourselves to this result. It is a system that eats people. It is a system that kills masses of people. But the victims necessarily have to keep expanding in order to keep the profit seated.And this is what capital looks like. It’s an expansive system. I mean, this is like Marx 101. And eventually, this is where we land. You know, it becomes progressively untenable.
What we’re seeing is—and I write about this in The Cost of Borders—but the idea is that when you talk about abolition, when you talk about border abolition, it seems like the idealism of some leftist professor. It’s like a pipe dream. But, our reality is kids being imprisoned and fed food with maggots in it because it makes somebody richer. If that is not the stuff of a dark, dystopic sci-fi future, I don’t know what is. And so, we have to recognize that our reality has gotten so much worse than anyone could ever have imagined for it, and that we have to create and write a different kind of future if we’re going to get out of this period. I think the future has to divest from this entire capitalist system and redistribute the resources, redistribute the wealth to make it a more equitable system. And only with that will we get out of this.