Borders are prisons and prisons are borders

On March 29, 2024, New York City Mayor Eric Adams was interviewed on the popular Black morning radio show “The Breakfast Club.” Adams, head of one of the richest cities in the world, used hyperbolic language to describe the “migrant crisis,” hoping to instill fear in poor and working-class Black listeners. Adams also spoke proudly of his decision weeks earlier to allow the governor to station 750 National Guard soldiers in the subways, explaining that Black and Brown people feel safer when more police are around. This is despite a 15 percent drop in the crime rate from February 2023 to February 2024.

You can hear Adams connecting the migrant crisis to policing, almost doing the work for us, illustrating that the border regime is a prison. As Angela Davis and Gina Dent explain, “We continue to find that the prison is itself a border.”

As he scapegoated migrants, Adams argued that housing migrants would bankrupt the country, and that he had to cut pre-kindergarten school funding to pay for the migrant crisis. Listening to the interview without knowing who he is, one would be forgiven for thinking that Adams does not have the power and resources of a New York City mayor.

While Adams did not call for laws allowing everyone to have the right to work with labor protections, he did call for “securing” the borders of the United States. Adams described migrants as being useless to him and to the city if they can’t work. “We need workers! I need lifeguards, food service workers…backstretch workers.” On May 15, Adams was recorded explaining that when he talks to asylum seekers at encampments, folks from West Africa, Central America, and Mexico tell him they are “excellent swimmers,” so they can become lifeguards for New York City. Beyond evoking vile racism, Adams only sees immigrants as workers he can exploit.

On November 12, Adams shared at a press conference that he is willing to work with President-elect Trump on the broken immigration system by stating, “Fix immigration so that no city will have to go through what I went through.” Adams blamed President Biden for not doing enough on immigration and has continued to call for “securing our border.” The Democrats’ willingness to work with a man who they say is threatening democracy proves that our two-party system is working together to criminalize immigrants and refugees.

The far-right like Texas Governor Greg Abbott and President-elect Donald Trump are using human beings as political pawns to force the Democrats to move right on immigration policy, making the border regime truly bipartisan. The xenophobia and scapegoating of migrants is a tool to pit working-class people against one another, convincing people that it’s migrants who are cutting their wages at work, not their boss. As exploited and oppressed people are facing neoliberal austerity measures, it’s easy to play into U.S. nationalism, believing that migrants are taking “our” resources. But Black people must remain steadfast and continue to take up the fight to eliminate all borders in order to one day live in a world free of anti-Black racism and all forms of oppression.

All over the country, we’ve seen the misleadership class, including Black ruling-class politicians, consent to upholding and taking part in displacement and immobility. Lori Lightfoot, the previous mayor of Chicago, similarly invoked scarcity, saying there were not enough shelters to house migrants. We are currently watching the Black mayor of Atlanta, Andre Dickens, gladly support the building of Cop City in a historically Black neighborhood on stolen Muskogee lands, where U.S. police and Israeli occupation forces will be trained on how to kill with impunity.

And let’s not forget that then-mayor Marilyn Mosby of Baltimore was the one who called for more police presence at the intersection where Freddie Gray was arrested a few weeks before his murder in April 2015. And in 2013, President Obama, who received the nickname, “deporter in chief,” hired Tom Homan, a cop who has called for family separation (The Trump administration’s new border czar), as his ICE executive associate director of enforcement and removal operations.

Much like Adams, Vice President Kamala Harris illustrated her willingness to move right on immigration policy. While on the campaign trail and on her website, she bragged about a bipartisan border bill that would have increased border surveillance and hired 1500 more security agents. This is not only an illustration of a Black South Asian woman upholding xenophobia and anti-Black racism; it also explains one possible reason that she lost the presidential election.

Black politicians are not only connecting the dots between the border regime and the prison industrial complex—they are following a long tradition of upholding systems that are rooted in anti-Black racism and anti-indigeneity, with a goal to kick out or immobilize the next group of people that the Global North villainizes. Knowing this history can help us create strategies of resistance that won’t be sidelined by the kinds of divide-and-rule politics Adams used on “The Breakfast Club.”

Not only are Black people often migrants and refugees experiencing some of the worst xenophobia and Islamophobia, but Black people have historically been oppressed by U.S. migrant policies, being forced to stay in the United States during enslavement. As Harsha Walia notes in her book Border and Rule, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act allowed slave owners to kidnap Black people they claimed had escaped to free states. After the annexation of Texas, slave owners formed militias to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border to prevent Black people from escaping to Mexico.

Today, vigilantes still patrol the border, in tandem with the police, committing acts of violence that the empire upholds, as Justin Akers Chacón and Mike Davis explain in their book No One Is Illegal. These vigilante groups privatize violence, reproducing a racist divide-and-conquer ideology. Throughout U.S. history, these groups have “protected” the United States from Black people, Asian and Latinx immigrants, Indigenous people, communists, and workers on strike.

The vigilante embodies the white, settler identity protecting their property, deemed their right by an empire that created the Second Amendment to grant settlers permission to protect newly stolen land from Indigenous people. Voluntary fighting crews, or vigilantes, called “militias” in the Second Amendment,” took Indigenous prisoners, destroyed villages, and slaughtered women, men, children, and elders, as Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz argues in her book Loaded.

Harsha Walia argues that borders and immigration policies are generally only viewed as a migrant justice issue, distinct and separate from anti-imperialism, Black liberation, and Indigenous decolonization. However, the way working-class people experience borders all over the world is tied to the theft of land and surplus value. Settler-colonialism’s life source is criminality and illegality, which is why we must be anti-capitalist abolitionists, developing a critical analysis of how imperialists’ tactics work to divide us.

Biden, Harris and Trump speak of an influx of migrants and refugees, attempting to frighten us. But how and why should Black people in the United States be frightened, when the entire system is rooted in a fear of an influx of Black people in cities and towns across the country? Housing and schooling laws like redlining and the 1973 San Antonio v. Rodriguez Supreme Court decision prove that borders just don’t exist between nation-states, but as Walia says, borders are elastic and move within cities and states wherever the state deems appropriate. Pre–Civil War “free states” like California, Indiana, Oregon, and Illinois feared an influx of Black people and codified prohibitions on interstate Black migration in their constitutions.

Black people are migrants, refugees, and criminalized people. The ways in which people are criminalized today echo Black criminalization both before and after the Civil War, as evidenced in detention centers, public schools, and social work offices, Silky Shah notes in her book Unbuild Walls.

As more money goes to the border, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and United States Border Patrol (BP), Black people suffer. Our abolitionist call should be to close any type of prison and take away every badge of every cop. If we don’t work to undo capitalism, the prison industrial complex will continue to expand. We are already seeing ICE and BP make connections with local police departments. The federal ICE Agreements and Cooperation in Communities to Enhance Public Safety and Security (ACCESS) program allows local police forces to arrest undocumented people, with Black migrants especially likely to be profiled by the police. This continued growth can only be met with an internationalist insurgent mass action from below, as we saw, for example, in the widespread direct actions at airports to protest Trump’s anti-Muslim travel bans.

While on the campaign trail, Harris continued to agree more with Trump than those on the Left and called for closed borders and increased policing and surveillance. Her loss and her unwillingness to talk about racism indicate that we must remain steadfast in building infrastructures of dissent outside of the democratic party. Her identity as a woman of color guaranteed absolutely nothing for Black and South Asian immigrants and asylum seekers. The Left must develop a plan to combat liberals taking energy away from our movements and turning us against each other. That plan must include immigrants and refugees leading movements. It must include a multiracial, multilingual Left willing to protect each other from racist cops, border patrol agents and ICE.

Black liberals will continue to run for office, asking their communities to support them. And when they get elected, regardless of their promises, they will enforce ruling-class ideology because liberal politicians must uphold the status quo to protect capital. They are running to uphold a capitalist system that needs racism and exploitation of workers to function. The most progressive politicians cannot grant us liberation.

We must call for an end to borders and nation-states, and Black people and immigrants in and out of the United States must work to build solidarity during this crisis of displacement and immobility to resist the ways ruling-class ideology is taken up by Black politicians and celebrities. Imprisoning Black people is a North Star for imperialism, which is why, as abolitionists working to create a world without prisons and police, we must call for a struggle to abolish detention centers, ICE and BP, nation-states, and imperialist borders. Human beings have the right to move and to stay. Most importantly, they have the right to self-determination.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Harry Herz; modified by Tempest.