00:00:00.000For the Wild podcast is brought to you in part by the Calliopeia Foundation and listeners like you.
00:00:06.460Calliopeia supports projects interweaving spirituality, culture, and ecology.
00:00:11.640We are grateful for their support and the support of grassroots contributions from listeners.
00:00:16.760To learn more about the Calliopeia Foundation, visit calliopeia.org.
00:00:21.360To make a donation to For the Wild, visit forthewild.world slash donate or support us through Patreon.
00:00:30.000hey for the wild community it's ayana here december has arrived and we are reminded that
00:00:37.600winter is the season of giving if you've been especially moved by what for the wild has offered
00:00:42.700this past year we're inviting you to pledge your support by becoming a monthly member on patreon
00:00:48.080or by making a one-time donation through our website as we grow into our goal of raising
00:00:53.920$5,000 a month, we're asking you to pledge your support, not just on behalf of yourself,
00:01:00.000but on behalf of other listeners who learn and grow from the visionaries we interview.
00:01:04.380We know the holiday season can be overwhelming, and we're asking you to help sustain this platform
00:01:09.300and make an investment in media that seeks to dismantle narratives that further consumerism,
00:01:14.780extraction, and exploitation. Join us at patreon.com slash for the wild,
00:01:21.040or make a donation at forthewild.world slash donate. And if you're already supporting us
00:01:27.500in one way or another, we thank you so much and wish you a beautiful season wherever you are.
00:01:38.520Hello and welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. Today I'm speaking with
00:01:44.840long-time advocate for migrant justice, indigenous rights, anti-capitalist movements,
00:01:51.060and economic justice, Harsha Walia. That's the irony of the capitalist dream,
00:01:57.280right, is to die or to work yourself to death. Harsha's advocacy work has resulted in significant
00:02:05.980transformation in government policies at the municipal, provincial, federal, and international
00:02:12.080levels on issues relating to immigration detention, women's equality, indigenous land rights,
00:02:19.020policing practices, and social assistance regulations. She is the award-winning author
00:02:24.820of Undoing Border Imperialism and is currently the executive director of British Columbia's
00:02:30.640Civil Liberties Association and remains active in social movements like No One is Illegal
00:02:36.920and the Women's Memorial March Committee. Well, Harsha, thank you so much for taking the time to
00:02:43.500speak with me today. Thank you so much for having me. I'd like to begin by asking you about your
00:02:49.640relationship to borders and migration. What narratives cultivated your desire to understand
00:02:55.560and dismantle imagined, militarized, and colonial borders alike? Yeah, I think for me, my relationship
00:03:03.680to borders are probably for most people doing this work is deeply personal and also very much
00:03:12.020connected to communities and movements and struggle. So my family on the maternal side
00:03:19.240comes from the Punjab and during the partition of India and Pakistan, which is one of the world's
00:03:25.360deadliest and bloodiest displacements as a result of colonial empire and the British Raj
00:03:31.940and the resulting partition during which the lowest ends of the estimates are that six million
00:03:37.480people were killed or died during that process and millions more were displaced in the Punjab
00:03:42.860region. So for my family's history has very much been impacted just a few generations ago by the
00:03:49.600violent imposition of colonial borders in the Punjab, separating the region. And then also,
00:03:55.760of course, artificially creating the countries of India and Pakistan. And, you know, really the
00:04:01.780legacy then of creating India as an imperial power in the region and the ongoing occupation of0.50
00:04:08.660Kashmir amongst other regions. And so I've been aware of the impacts of borders as a system of
00:04:15.340power, as something that goes beyond the demarcation of an arbitrary line on territory,
00:04:22.100but really symbolizing a politics of imperialism and power in deeply embedded forms of racism.
00:04:30.260So for me, it's personal in that sense.
00:04:32.700And also when I moved to Turtle Island, I lived without status for a brief period of
00:04:37.340time, was living with precarious status rather, and was under removal order for a period of
00:04:41.720time and was briefly incarcerated in an immigration detention center.
00:04:45.940So I was very much aware of the ways in which immigration and again, the arbitrariness and
00:04:51.520The random privilege, really, of where you're born and what passport you carry has so much to do with the ways in which one can navigate space and life.
00:05:00.220And so, you know, those really emerged alongside just witnessing, especially in the post 9-11 climate, a heightened politics of fear that has propelled the militarization of borders and a politics of and a violence of deportation and detention.
00:05:18.200Now, the act of migration has always existed, but in terms of human migration and climate change, we're poised to experience one of the greatest occurrences of global migration the world has ever known.
00:05:31.300In fact, the projected necessity for migration has been somewhat underestimated and underreported thus far.
00:05:38.300With this in mind, it feels like there has never been a greater time to remind ourselves that, as you frame it, the state is illegal, people are not.
00:05:48.200So why must we ensure we rid climate and environmental movements of the concept of
00:05:53.520illegal personhood? Yeah, I think, you know, this is a really important question for people
00:05:59.340concerned with the well-being of the land and the climate and the earth and all human and non-human
00:06:05.620life. In the past few years, all new displacements and migrations as a result of climate disasters
00:06:11.880outpaced actually other forms of displacement. So, you know, kind of political violence. These
00:06:18.080are, of course, deeply intertwined, but in as much as we can kind of separate them out, we know that
00:06:23.420climate induced disasters are the fastest growing form and outpace other forms of displacement.
00:06:30.360And again, you know, here climate disasters are not natural disasters, right? We know that they're
00:06:34.320very much informed by the politics of imperialism and racism and power, you know, low lying islands
00:06:42.460in the Pacific or, you know, coastal countries like Bangladesh or islands like Tuvalu, the
00:06:48.000Marshall Islands, et cetera, are far more vulnerable to climate change and climate
00:06:54.460displacement, not only because of their geography or their topography, but specifically because of
00:07:01.020legacies of imperialism and, you know, over extraction and industrial forms of development,
00:07:07.980You know, in Bangladesh, for example, really the epicenter of sweatshops and the garment industry, toxic polluting industry.
00:07:16.960So, you know, this is important to contend with because that this is the human impact of climate change.0.90
00:07:25.020Right. When we talk about climate change and we talk about the kind of downstream effects of it on communities,
00:07:32.440When places are no longer livable, people are forced to migrate.
00:08:30.280Where we see the climate and climate crisis as becoming the kind of new mantra for green nationalism, for eco-fascism, for that kind of, you know, lifeboat Darwinian politics of need to protect our borders because of the climate crisis.
00:08:50.140And of course, we know that a number of mass shooters and killers and murderers from the
00:08:56.760right in recent years have actually used the dogma of green nationalism to justify their
00:09:02.280white supremacist hate and to justify their anti-migrant xenophobia.
00:09:07.260You know, Marine Le Pen, for example, in France, who's a right-wing leader, has increasingly
00:09:11.620justified the closure of borders in Europe under the guise of the ecological crisis,
00:09:17.240saying that there's the carrying capacity of the earth and for France and for Europe must be
00:09:24.100limited. So I think it's particularly important for environmentalists and land defenders and
00:09:30.440advocates and the environmental movement to think deeply about actively fighting against this trend
00:09:37.260of eco-fascism and to take on the responsibility of solidarity, active solidarity with people who
00:09:43.780are displaced and migrants who are displaced and refugees who are displaced as a result of climate
00:09:48.580disasters. Yeah. And what is your response when you hear the argument of carrying capacity?
00:09:56.560The kind of idea around carrying capacity that really bothers me is that it's connected to
00:10:03.700the kind of Darwinian logic of population growth and this idea that, you know, the earth has only
00:10:10.460so much human carrying capacity. Those conversations always leave out the devastation
00:10:17.240caused by corporations, right? We know that the largest causes of climate crisis and climate
00:10:24.300change and global warming is not actually population growth. It's actually the activities
00:10:30.460of corporations and the military, right? The military is the single largest institutional
00:10:36.040consumer of hydrocarbons. We know that the largest greenhouse gas emitters on this planet
00:10:42.560are corporations. And so I think it distorts the kinds of radical transformation that we need
00:10:49.720from looking at capitalism. It moves us away from looking at forces of power. It moves us away from
00:10:57.940looking at extractivism as a fundamentally capitalist venture towards looking at human
00:11:04.380activity at that individual scale. And so I think it leads us to, on the one hand, false solutions.
00:11:10.700And on the other hand, in its worst form, the logic of carrying capacity becomes, again,0.79
00:11:16.660a way to justify eco-fascism, eugenics, sterilization, population control in countries
00:11:23.720around the world. And so I think it's a deeply troubling narrative. And again, at its best,
00:11:28.600it's a distraction. I think back to the drought in California and there was so much rhetoric around
00:11:36.960take shorter showers, don't flush the toilet as much, you know, things like that, which of course
00:11:42.000I think we should all be aware of the water usage we personally are taking. But then there's no
00:11:48.400mention of how much freshwater safe fracking is taking or oil production. And so, you know,
00:11:56.300on a personal level, even the water being used in a household is such a much smaller percentage of
00:12:02.600what extractive industry or corporations, commercial industries are using, but yet that is not what's
00:12:08.000talked about. And I think we need to start speaking about that narrative more generally in the
00:12:15.440collective movement. So thank you so much for speaking to that. Now, in an interview you gave
00:12:20.960recently, I heard you speak about the dangers of the climate crisis in terms of compelling the
00:12:25.840state to intervene. Certainly in the so-called United States, many popular climate movements
00:12:31.260are doing just that, asking the government to make an intervention without thinking about the
00:12:35.980ramifications of this ask in terms of further militarization or the haphazard development of
00:12:41.800short-sighted clean energy projects. So I'm hoping you might be willing to elaborate your thoughts
00:12:47.160on this, as well as what alternatives we can develop or how we can ensure that in movements
00:12:52.700for climate justice, we're developing tactics and tools that don't solidify or necessitate
00:12:58.460the state's presence in the long term?
00:13:11.880So it's quite a common occurrence where particularly in the face of the onslaught of capital and
00:13:19.940capitalism, where the state is kind of seen as the necessary intervener, right? So the state is
00:13:26.780seen as the kind of person or the institution, not person, the institution that needs to step in
00:13:33.300and protect against capitalist onslaught. And, you know, that sense, the state is seen up either
00:13:38.640as neutral or as a positive force. And I think, of course, the danger with that is that it fails
00:13:44.860to recognize state violence as deeply connected to the violence of capital, right? So the
00:13:50.860corporations, contrary to popular perception, don't just act without regulation, right? The
00:13:57.180state makes an active decision, regulate, for example. And I think, you know, the particular
00:14:03.260dangers of involving the state in environmental projects, particularly on Indigenous lands,
00:14:11.420is one that Indigenous people have been pointing out for centuries and decades, right, which is that
00:14:16.660conservation projects, for example, where the state intervenes and works with environmental
00:14:21.680movements to conserve land and brings it into the realm of, you know, in Canada, it's called crown
00:14:28.940land. In other places, it's, you know, public lands. The danger of that, of course, is that it
00:14:34.880completely distorts and erases Indigenous presence, and more importantly, Indigenous
00:14:43.020rights and title to that land. And so then, you know, the state kind of takes ownership and
00:14:49.300jurisdiction and stewardship of those lands at the expense of Indigenous ownership. And also,
00:14:56.920oftentimes, it also actively destroys Indigenous food systems and Indigenous food sovereignty,
00:15:03.540Because then, for example, lands that Indigenous people may have been using for fishing or berry picking or harvesting or seal hunting, those then become off limits to everybody, including Indigenous people.
00:15:18.680And so I think, you know, that is something that we have to be deeply aware of. And again, this also often points to the racism of dominant environmental movements, where their conservation projects are inherently often at odds with Indigenous sovereignty, because it doesn't take into account Indigenous people's relationships to land where there is actually, you know, hunting or gathering, or, you know, tree felling taking place, but in controlled ways.
00:15:46.820and, you know, based on Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous science.
00:15:51.940And so when the state gets involved in that, further limits Indigenous people's ability
00:15:57.840to engage in their practices and technologies.
00:16:00.800So, you know, that's one example of where we have to be cautious of state intervention.
00:16:06.040Another example, again, is this, you know, growing trend to, you know, expanding from,0.97
00:16:12.140It's basically a conservation project at a macro scale, which is at the level of the entire state and the border, which is where, again, where particularly migrants and humans are seen as the cause of ecological destruction.
00:16:30.700And so then there's calls for the state to protect ecological diversity and to protect ecosystems by limiting the number of migrants into the state.
00:16:44.000And so that often results in, you know, for example, calls by environmental organizations to decrease immigration.
00:16:51.020And there's some high profile examples of that, like the Sierra Club in the United States in the 70s, 80s and 90s.
00:16:57.000And, you know, they've, of course, since reversed that position, but we see that logic still flowing through a number of environmental movements.
00:17:05.780And so in that sense, we see the merging, the very dangerous merging of the call for environmental justice through the lens of border controls.
00:17:16.600And that's, of course, also deeply problematic because then that's the weaponization of environmental justice, essentially in the service of border militarization and criminalization of migration.
00:17:30.500Hmm. Well, similar to the previous question, I'd like to talk about what migration looks like with state intervention or hardened borders. ProPublica and the New York Times have modeled how climate refugees might move through present day borders.
00:17:45.720And in a piece titled, Where Will Everyone Go?, Abraham Lutzgarten writes, quote,
00:17:52.420Northern nations can relieve pressures on the fastest warming countries by allowing more migrants to move north across their borders,
00:17:59.940or they can seal themselves off, trapping hundreds of millions of people in places that are increasingly unlivable.0.55
00:18:06.660The best outcome requires not only goodwill and the careful management of turbulent political forces.
00:18:11.780without preparation and planning the sweeping scale of change could prove wildly destabilizing
00:18:17.280the united nations and others warn that in the worst case the governments of the nations most
00:18:22.640affected by climate change could topple as whole regions devolve into war end quote so on the one
00:18:30.560hand we see support for a calculated response from our government but i think most likely unless
00:18:37.380there is a massive change of heart under any administration, we will see the tightening of
00:18:42.420borders. Broadly speaking, and in context to the reality that our border policy will be responsible
00:18:47.900for unlivable conditions, how does the elimination of borders actually curtail violence?
00:18:54.160Yeah. I mean, I think the starting point for me is that borders are violence, right? That the
00:19:00.120kind of, the kinds of violences that we see at borders are symptoms of the border itself being
00:19:07.820violent. So when we think about families being caged, when we think of people being, you know,
00:19:13.340dehydrated in the Sonoran Desert, when we see people dying in the Mediterranean, in Europe,
00:19:19.700you know, those kinds of deaths that we witness, these, you know, tragic deaths are entirely
00:19:26.340preventable were it not for the border. And so one of the kinds of key principles that I advocate
00:19:34.240for is the freedom to stay, the freedom to move and the freedom to return. And when I say I advocate
00:19:39.960this, this isn't just me personally, it's of course comes from social movements and many others,
00:19:44.080but I strongly believe in this, right? Which is that people have the freedom to stay, which means
00:19:48.980people should not be forcibly displaced, that we are actively fighting against the systems that
00:19:54.900create displacement, whether that is a mine site, whether that is occupation, military occupation,
00:20:03.580whether that's sweatshops, whatever kinds of forces are forcing people to move those systems
00:20:09.380of state violence and imperialism and capitalism that is forcing millions and millions of people
00:20:15.680to be on the move. People have the right not to be forcibly removed and displaced and to be able
00:20:21.420to stay in their homes and their homelands. And people also have the right to migrate, right? So
00:20:28.940that people have the right to move if they are facing violence or persecution and to not face
00:20:34.360this violent system of borders. And one of the kind of logics that we see states continuously
00:20:42.760reinforce this logic of people are crossing illegally, this logic of illegal, people are
00:20:51.740crossing illegally, so we need to crack down on the border. Well, the entire premise of illegal
00:20:56.880migration is based on the border, right? If we didn't have laws deeply restricting the ability
00:21:06.320for people to move legally, then we wouldn't have illegal migration. Illegal migration only exists
00:21:13.540because of border controls. And yet we have this kind of circular logic where then illegal migration
00:21:20.440or the narrative or rhetoric of illegal migration forces further crackdowns on the border, right?
00:21:27.100So it's the circular logic where border controls create irregular migration. That becomes a dog
00:21:33.460whistle for states to further crack down on border controls, and then irregular migration
00:21:40.440becomes more deadly. And so ultimately, the core of this is a complete 180. The way that we deal
00:21:49.100with the violence and the political upheaval surrounding borders is not by further cracking
00:21:54.740down or further militarizing or further regulating or further controlling. It is the elimination of
00:22:01.160borders, because that is the root of violence around migration. There is nothing inherently
00:22:06.180violent about migrating, right? People with privilege, with, you know, passports from the
00:22:10.780United States or Australia, who are white or white passing, travel around the world with much ease0.55
00:22:17.540and much mobility. So there is nothing inherently violent about the process of moving. It's the
00:23:23.140I want to bring up the correlation between borders and a militarized society and what
00:23:47.080that means for human rights and civil liberties. Here in the States, some are outraged and shocked
00:23:53.140by the militarization of places in so-called Oregon, New Mexico, and Illinois as federal
00:23:59.300agents are being deployed by the Trump administration. But these tactics are
00:24:04.200unsurprising to anyone who has been following the slow and steady growth of Customs and Border
00:24:10.020Patrol and the Department of Homeland Security in the aftermath of 9-11. So I'm wondering if you
00:24:15.480could speak to how the mentality of bordering will come home to roost domestically sooner or
00:24:21.320later? Yeah, that's a great question. And I think those are really symbiotic processes. So the kind
00:24:30.560of bordering that we see at the kind of physical location of the border and that we're now seeing
00:24:37.360in Portland, these aren't kind of separate processes. They're completely connected because
00:24:44.920the crackdown in Portland really shouldn't be of surprise to people for two reasons. One is,
00:24:50.900of course, we see that kind of counterinsurgency at the border. And really, you know, the US
00:24:57.560military engages in counterinsurgency and has engaged in counterinsurgency since its very
00:25:01.820founding. You know, the Indian wars, processes of enslavement, these are foundational genocides0.99
00:25:08.140that use counterinsurgency, the U.S. has perfected domestic policing practices as a result of its0.71
00:25:16.160imperial incursions and excursions around the world in Hawaii, in the Philippines, in the
00:25:22.580Contra Wars, in Central and South America. You know, these are the kinds of parallel processes
00:25:29.660to domestic policing. And of course, the other parallel process of around what we're seeing in
00:25:35.560Portland and counterinsurgency practices and policies is, you know, what has transpired at
00:25:41.980the border for decades, right? So the kidnapping and the snatching and separation of families,
00:25:49.940this is also something that we've seen routinely used in Black neighborhoods, you know,
00:25:55.720counterinsurgency is a tactic of squashing dissent, you know, really was heightened during
00:26:04.620the Reagan and Nixon eras. COINTELPRO, all of that is not new. And so I think there's a homology
00:26:13.540to domestic warfare and to imperial warfare that the United States has perfected over centuries
00:26:24.920and that we just see continue to escalate, which is why it's not surprising that what's happening
00:26:30.920in Portland very much involves BORTAC, right? The U.S. Border Patrol Tactical Unit, which patrols
00:26:39.340not only at the border, but also trains border agents in Iraq and has been training border
00:26:47.300agents in Iraq. And so, again, there's this clear through line between what we see the U.S.
00:26:56.860engaging in, in terms of counterinsurgency on the streets right now, and the kinds of
00:27:01.880counterinsurgency it has engaged with in terms of Indigenous and Black genocide within its border,
00:27:09.200the violence of the border, and the violence of imperialism.
00:27:13.860Well, I can't help but think about why globally opinions on migration have become so vitriolic.
00:27:21.720I was reading that in Mexico, the current president, Andres Manuel López Obrador, advocated for open borders coupled with foreign aid, signaling that perhaps Mexico could help Central American countries weather the storm.
00:27:37.480However, the public response to this in Mexico has been incredibly aggressive, with growing marches against immigrants.
00:27:44.080And I'm just curious to hear from you, why is that, despite their relatively recent emergence, borders and practicing of borders have such a firm stake in our imagination?
00:27:56.180You know, really, the fundamental reasons that borders have such a strong hold on our imagination is that they are ultimately a carceral institution.
00:28:05.300So in the same way that police and prisons have such a stronghold in our imagination as punitive structures, as deeply racist, misogynist, transphobic, classist, oppressive, specifically anti-Black, anti-Indigenous structures, all of that is the same reason that borders have such a stronghold in our imagination.
00:28:28.280And, you know, I recently learned that the word mobility derives from mob, right?
00:28:36.600And so mob, as we know, is a commonly used framework for policing, both at the border
00:28:46.880So like particularly poor young groups of especially young men are targeted as mobs.
00:28:54.080And so prisons and borders share the same logic of fundamentally curtailing mobility by criminalizing mobs, right?
00:29:05.440And so, you know, that's really what the explosion of the prison industrial complex was, was to curtail Black freedom.
00:29:11.360And, you know, that's the same logic of the borders, to curtail the movement, the free movement of people across borders.
00:29:18.380And so the curtailment of movement as a foundational aspect of emancipation and self-determination is what carceral systems intend to control.
00:29:30.800And so, you know, borders really are the epitome of that, right?0.50
00:29:33.960We want to control the movement of certain undesirable people.
00:29:38.500And what is so critical about the hypocrisy of borders is, of course, that people are moving at rates that are unprecedented.
00:29:48.560And so when we talk about the crisis of migration, right, like the refugee crisis or the migrant crisis or the border crisis, as liberals or the mainstream media would have it, we're never talking about the mass, mass movement of people on airplanes, you know, in business class, flitting around the world every weekend or every day.
00:30:11.120right? The kinds of ways in which people are moving as tourists or the business class or the
00:30:17.080middle class is unprecedented. And of course, the kinds in that, you know, that's not just
00:30:22.740movement, right? That's a kind of movement that represents capital. People are moving when, you
00:30:28.480know, creating massive amounts of pollution by using, you know, you know, traveling business
00:30:32.860class and airplanes. They're not, you know, on foot. They're not on perilous journeys. And,
00:30:38.240you know, the coronavirus is a prime example of this, right? The initial spread of COVID was not
00:30:44.180as a result of migrants, even though around the world, migrants have been blamed for the
00:30:48.760coronavirus, right? Like Trump calls it the quote unquote Chinese virus. Trump has justified his
00:30:53.100border wall by saying migrants bring COVID. Same in Europe. In India, it's called the corona jihad.
00:30:58.540But we know, we know that the rapid spread of the coronavirus was because of the movement of the0.90
00:31:06.820the luxury movement of the business classes and middle classes. And so, you know, the ways in
00:31:14.500which the border has become, as you say, you know, such an entrenched part of our imagination
00:31:21.240is precisely because it is intended to control not everyone's movement, but the movement of people
00:31:29.740that continue to be those who are dispossessed and displaced, right? So poor racialized people0.98
00:31:36.400moving particularly from the global South to the global North. And that is the same logic again of0.96
00:31:43.600the prison industrial complex, right? So the prison industrial complex, when we talk about
00:31:48.060mass incarceration, not everybody is incarcerated at the same rate because it is not intended to
00:31:53.420capture everybody. Of course, many others are captured through it, but it is intended specifically
00:31:58.720to target Black people in the context of, say, the United States and in Canada, Black and
00:32:05.560indigenous people, also the same in the United States, black and indigenous people. And so that
00:32:09.960is very much why borders have such a strong hold is because they're a legacy. They're a legacy
00:32:15.220of white supremacy. They're a living structure to white supremacy. They're a living structure0.98
00:32:23.080to imperialism. They're a living structure to casteism and misogyny and more. And so that is why
00:32:30.140They have such a strong hold in our imagination because, you know, imperialism as a structure and as a psychology is about being able to extract, being able to colonize without having the victims of those systems ever be able to come and live with us.
00:32:50.040Right. So the, you know, the countries of the north have no problem violating the borders of other countries.
00:32:57.580Right. Like the U.S. military sees no borders when it decides to drop drones in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
00:33:05.980The Canadian mining companies, you know, Canada is the epicenter of the world's mining industry.
00:33:12.000Seventy five percent of all of the world's mining companies are headquartered in Canada.
00:33:15.740Canadian mining companies see no borders when they decide to go and extract and pollute in Honduras or Tanzania, right?
00:33:26.740So borders are, in that sense, when we think about borders being entrenched in our imagination, again, it's a very hypocritical way in which we think about borders because we're not thinking about the ways in which the military or mining companies or any industry violate borders.
00:33:45.120We don't talk about that as a violation or, you know, as a crisis of borders or sovereignty,
00:34:01.940And, you know, one last thing I'll say about that reveals this deeply racialized hypocrisy0.82
00:34:07.920is that in the United States, the single largest nationality of people who overstay their visas,0.76
00:34:16.340right? So the single largest nationality of people who overstay their visas, essentially making them
00:34:21.460undocumented or illegal, contrary to popular perception are not, you know, Mexicans or,
00:34:28.580you know, some other South or Central American country. It's Canadians. Canadians are the single
00:34:35.100largest nationality of people who overstay their visas in the United States. But you never hear
00:34:40.700that talked about as the kind of like crisis of illegals, right? Like, it's just a bureaucratic
00:34:46.280kind of thing. Like, oh, you know, someone was supposed to leave the country. That makes no
00:34:49.960sense. Why do we have these? You know, in that case, it's like, why do we have these stupid laws?
00:34:53.460Right? Like that, you know, why does it, you know, if a Canadian decided they wanted to stay0.99
00:34:58.440two extra days to vacation in the United States, what's the big deal? So in that instance, it's
00:35:03.840seen as a kind of burden, an unfair administrative burden on Canadians. So these are all the ways in
00:35:12.720which the border is animated in our imagination precisely in hypocritical ways because that is
00:35:19.560the intended function of it. Yeah. Well, talking about the destruction, eradication of subsistence
00:35:28.020cultures in the name of corporate profit, I want to recognize that it's impossible to understand
00:35:32.740migration from Central America without placing these conversations in context of food sovereignty,
00:35:38.800security, and big ag. In Border Imperialism, you write, quote, under NAFTA, the Mexican government
00:35:45.340was forced to eliminate subsidies to corn while corn produced in the United States remained
00:35:50.220subsidized, thus making U.S. corn cheaper to buy inside Mexico than Mexican corn. As a result,
00:35:57.620over 15 million farmers who lost their farms migrated to the United States to work in low-wage
00:36:03.900sectors, end quote. I'm also thinking about growing food insecurity across Mexico and Central America
00:36:11.700where crop yields are declining due to drought and how the United Nation believes that around
00:36:17.48065% of farmable lands have already been degraded around the world. So can you share with us how
00:36:23.900many recent migrations began with corporate eradication of subsistence farming and will now
00:36:29.900continue due to the desecration of farmable lands by these very same corporations? Yeah. I mean,
00:36:37.560you know, it's, it's just huge because one thing that happened, you know, you mentioned NAFTA and
00:36:43.860NAFTA is just one example of literally hundreds of trade agreements, you know, where corporate
00:36:51.060profit really is the kind of reigning rule of the day, right? So that is the essence of all trade
00:36:58.000agreements, which is to plunder, particularly countries in the global south, their economies
00:37:03.620to open up those lands for extraction, and to allow major agribusinesses to kind of take control
00:37:11.640of the economy, particularly when it comes to food, right? So the concentration of corporate
00:37:17.140power when it comes to food sovereignty, Monsanto being the most obvious example, Cargill being the
00:37:23.080other. And, you know, so this is the reality of trade agreements, which is the destruction of
00:37:30.640food sovereignty, particularly, you know, localized food sovereignty for indigenous communities,
00:37:36.020for peasant communities, for farming communities. And also this became heightened after the 2008
00:37:41.760food crisis. So after the 2008 food crisis, we saw major land grabs around the world.
00:37:49.060The African continent was the largest single continent, actually, that was subjected to
00:37:56.020land grabs, 60% of which were by agribusinesses. And so we're seeing, you know, this is kind of
00:38:02.340a form of greenwashing, right, where major land grabs are justified under the logic of food
00:38:09.520production. They're also increasingly justified under the guise of biofuel production. So a lot
00:38:15.440of European land grabbing, it has this kind of insidious green logic to it around biofuel
00:38:22.360production as an alternative to fossil fuel production. And, you know, so we have these
00:38:26.660massive, like millions of hectares of land being grabbed around the world. And again,
00:38:33.520really focused on the African continent, which completely destroys local food economies,
00:38:40.900destroys local food infrastructure and food sovereignty, with a disproportionate impact,
00:38:46.140of course, on women, right? Because subsistence, food economies, and the kind of informal food0.57
00:38:51.760economy, you know, informal is not even the right word, because it just suggests somehow less
00:38:55.900advanced than or, you know, kind of feeds into that kind of, quote, unquote, primitive narrative.
00:38:59.900These are advanced informal economies. These are the kinds of economies that women are overly represented in, right? Women who are subsistence farmers. And, you know, in Mozambique, the massive movement, the No to Pro Savannah campaign in Mozambique was led by women and women farmers in that country because of the massive land grabbing happening there under the guise of rice production.0.99
00:39:27.120And so agribusinesses are absolutely complicit in the destruction of food sovereignty and then the displacement, right? One of the impacts of the destruction of food sovereignty is that as farmers around the world are faced with agribusinesses taking over their lands, massive industrial farming taking over small farms, people are displaced.
00:39:52.320People can no longer live on their lands.
00:40:16.580You know, one of the most insidious kind of forms of this, I mean, there's many, you know, you mentioned NAFTA and, you know, one of the results of NAFTA, of course, is, you know, as corn has become cheaper to buy in Mexico, that means that Mexican farmers are, and particularly indigenous communities who grow corn for whom corn is sacred, right?
00:40:37.540Hundreds of varieties of corn are now being replaced with GMO produced yellow corn, you know, purple corn, all the varieties of corn.
00:40:46.140And then people are forced to migrate. Right.
00:40:48.280And so that's what's so insidious about this is now suddenly migration is all about, you know, illegals and border crossers and migrant crisis without looking at the complicity and the responsibility of U.S.
00:41:02.340corporations and the U.S. state and the U.S. NAFTA free trade agreement, including the recent
00:41:08.4602.0, in creating that crisis. And this pattern is mirrored around the world. You know, Italy,
00:41:15.740for example, is one of the largest producers, one of the largest agri-producers of processed
00:41:21.400tomatoes. And, you know, Italy has been dumping these processed tomatoes into countries in Europe
00:41:30.280and also, you know, in Southern Europe, as well as, you know, just across the Mediterranean
00:41:34.900into countries in Africa, including Ghana.
00:41:38.340And so Ghana's local food sovereignty and tomato, you know, the ability to grow tomatoes
00:41:44.260in Ghana has been completely destroyed by food dumping, by agribusinesses of tomato.
00:41:51.300And now we have farmers from Ghana who have become migrant workers who have to pick the0.67
00:41:58.120very same tomatoes in Italy that destroyed their local food production, right? So this kind of1.00
00:42:05.420cycle by which, you know, we don't ask how people become migrant workers, right? It just takes on
00:42:10.880a category in and of itself, right? Like what the kind of violence of, you know, Mexican migrant1.00
00:42:18.540workers having to pick and process berries and corn in farms and fields in the United States
00:42:25.580when their own food and farms have been destroyed, right?
00:42:29.820So there's a cycle to this violence that connects us
00:42:33.580and also that implicates agribusinesses.
00:42:50.200Oh, the world is no longer what it was.
00:42:55.580Sky is burning, trees are turning to dust
00:43:01.460But the moon is rising, can't you see her face is shining?
00:43:09.200She is smiling to see you dancing in her light
00:43:20.020Well, following this train of thought, it's predicted that because of a lack of farmable
00:43:43.840lands and the inability to survive off the land, that we're going to see an increase
00:43:48.660in urbanization and urban migration. And I'm curious to hear your thoughts on urban migration
00:43:53.760and the role of the urban area amidst a changing climate as it relates to migration.
00:43:59.440Yeah. I mean, one of the things around migration is that we tend to think of migration as cross
00:44:05.780border migration, right? So when someone crosses a national border, but one of the largest impacts
00:44:12.580of capitalism over the past few centuries, and particularly in the last century, has been
00:44:18.740rural to urban migration, right? So as we see the destruction of land-based economies, as we see
00:44:26.340the destruction of land-based subsistence life, particularly for Indigenous and peasant
00:44:34.740communities, you know, this kind of rural to urban migration and the kind of bloating of
00:44:41.000the urban centers and then suburbia from that is a huge symptom really of capitalism, right? And we
00:44:49.280can, you know, some of the densest countries in the world now, like, you know, Dhaka in Bangladesh
00:44:55.840is one of the densest urban cities in the entire world. And, you know, it's estimated that literally
00:45:03.500thousands of people come to Dhaka every day from rural Bangladesh, right? And there's many reasons
00:45:09.900for that, for why people are forced into this kind of rural to urban migration in Bangladesh,
00:45:16.280for example. But one of the most, you know, not to kind of overly simplify, but one of the most
00:45:22.860general reasons for that is the decades, the three decades long imposition of structural
00:45:30.540adjustment on Bangladesh. So structural adjustment is, you know, the World Bank and IMF International
00:45:36.520Monetary Fund programs of austerity, and basically just, you know, capitalist restructuring of entire
00:45:43.520economies in the global south, right? So during the 80s and 90s, this was known as the dictatorship
00:45:48.380of debt, where when countries in the global south, you know, kind of claimed their formal
00:45:53.180independence from colonial states, but were deeply impoverished. And we're in this dictatorship,
00:45:58.540of, you know, we're in debt in terms of being able to build their infrastructures, that debt
00:46:04.100was weaponized. And the condition of these loans by the World Bank and the IMF, over 200 countries
00:46:11.600have had World Bank and IMF forced on them. And Bangladesh was one of the first countries to have
00:46:16.920the massive kind of package of structural adjustment. And this meant, you know, several
00:46:21.160things. You had to nationalize your industry. So things that used to be nationalized were then held
00:46:27.480by private industries. So in Bangladesh, subsistence level shrimp farming and coastal
00:46:33.660communities that used to fish and engage in rice cultivation and, you know, kind of coastal
00:46:41.060agricultural economies were bought out by large private business interests. You also have the
00:46:48.580gutting of social infrastructure, right? So things like healthcare, education, childcare, all of
00:46:54.460these kind of basic social services started to become gutted. They were privatized or completely
00:46:59.720gutted. So just this massive project of austerity was imposed and special economic zones were forced
00:47:07.200into countries, particularly, you know, this was pioneered in Bangladesh where special economic
00:47:12.680zones became areas that were tax-free havens. So companies could go in and set up shop without
00:47:19.720paying taxes. They were free of any environmental regulation and unionization was prohibited.
00:47:26.400So it's not, you know, so when we know Bangladesh now as the kind of, you know, garment, the garment
00:47:32.360industry is so well known in Bangladesh, right? So the mass industrial disaster that happened in0.92
00:47:38.620Rana Plaza, right, a few years ago, where, you know, thousands of people were killed and crushed.0.89
00:47:43.440Sweatshops didn't just emerge magically in Bangladesh. It was because of this planned, deliberate process of structural adjustment, of special economic zones that made Bangladesh as one of the epicenters for the sweatshop garment industry.
00:48:00.580And so now you have this parallel process where sweatshops are in these special economic zones, often outside of large urban areas, and you simultaneously have the destruction of rural economies, rural, again, you know, again, largely impacting indigenous and peasant and coastal communities.
00:48:22.320And so the only option that many rural communities have now is to migrate thousands by the day, thousands. It's estimated thousands of people move to Dhaka every single day, forced into, you know, living in massive slums.
00:48:38.060um daca you know daca has really got some of it's got the world's largest um garment industry it's
00:48:45.780got some of the world's largest uh slum communities um and it's also one of the countries that's you
00:48:52.080know going to be most impacted and is already impacted by the climate disaster just all of0.98
00:48:56.980these are converging um but not coincidentally right they're all connected to each other0.72
00:49:01.460and so thousands of people now migrate uh from rural communities to work in these toxic sweatshops
00:49:07.780every single day. And, you know, then we end up with these kinds of disasters that I was just
00:49:12.220mentioning, like the Rana Plaza industrial disaster, where thousands of people were killed
00:49:16.700when that entire plaza collapsed, collapsed into a rubble of stone. And people, I know that was
00:49:23.580predicted, right? There was already, there was cracks in the wall, that building had failed
00:49:28.620safety inspections, but people were forced to work. Women were forced to work in those sweatshops.1.00
00:49:34.840And so, you know, that's just one small example of the ways in which rural to urban migration is happening as a direct result of capitalist forces that are restructuring economies, you know, national and local economies to such a degree that people have no option but to move to urban areas and are then forced to work in those same capitalist industries that forced them off their land in the first place, right?
00:50:02.560That's the irony of the capitalist dream, right?
00:50:06.600Is to die or to work yourself to death.
00:50:11.520In an interview from Room Magazine titled On the Principles of DIY Activism, you're quoted as saying,
00:50:19.300Neoliberalism is entrenched around the world.
00:50:22.060But at the same time, there are parts of the world where neoliberalism hasn't yet taken a hold.
00:50:27.300We see this in communities that continue to live on the land, that continue to live traditionally.
00:50:32.720India has a growing economy, but at the same time, 40% of India continues to live in forests
00:50:38.580and in farming and peasant communities.
00:50:57.700As we come to a close, I'd like to ask you about the importance of places that haven't been poisoned by neoliberalism.
00:51:04.740So many of us remain thirsty for something that isn't this, but we also believe that certain isms, capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, are irreversible.
00:51:15.380Can you speak to the truth that as we stretch our minds to think about a world without borders, surveillance, land degradation, or forced severances, that we actually open ourselves to the worlds that are already existing and have demonstrated an unwavering commitment to care and abundance for all?
00:51:35.480Yeah, I mean, that's such a such a great question, you know, because I think one of the things we struggle with the most is the sense of, you know, yes, I know things are bad, but there's no other alternative, right?
00:51:50.160that sense of despair and apathy, which is real, right? It's really hard to stretch
00:51:57.300our imaginations. And that's why I think it's such a good and necessary political exercise
00:52:05.180to be engaged in political imagination work. And, you know, the one thing that's so important to,
00:52:14.660that I'll say first about the kind of structure particularly of capitalism is the entire structure
00:52:21.320of capitalism as an economic structure we know but as a kind of political project it needs us
00:52:28.420to believe in its inevitability right that was part of neoliberalism was this acronym called
00:52:33.460TINA there is no alternative in the 80s and 90s when capitalism you know capitalism of course is
00:52:39.520older, but neoliberalism as its current form was taking root. Tina was necessary for politicians
00:52:46.960and the elite to sell to us that there is no other alternative. And so it's not a coincidence that we
00:52:53.240feel this despair and apathy or this sense of overwhelm about fighting the system because it
00:53:00.480wants us to believe that. And I think in order to kind of fight that and to look to spaces,
00:53:04.760it is also important to remember that these systems are human-made. Anything that humans
00:53:09.040have made, we can destroy. There are many other systems that we have destroyed. I mean, they still
00:53:14.120exist, but, you know, feudalism, for example, is not the reigning political structure in the world
00:53:19.280today. Capitalism is arguably feudalistic and nepotistic and all of that. But, you know, we have,
00:53:24.340we have fought political power and every day people are fighting different forms of political
00:53:29.520power. And so it is important to realize that nothing is inevitable. The future is a process
00:53:34.020that we all make. I don't want to be overly, you know, I don't want to be overly romantic about it
00:53:58.620that we can turn to, like Wet'suwet'en that you mentioned
00:54:03.120and many others, particularly indigenous communities, right?
00:54:06.860So indigenous communities are 5% of the world's population and steward 80% of the world's biodiversity and continue to practice indigenous jurisdiction, continue to practice indigenous laws.
00:54:21.400You know, and again, I think it's really important that we not fall into those kinds of racist tropes of indigenous life as some kind of, you know, quote unquote, primitive pre-colonial.
00:54:32.640These are people and cultures and communities and nations that are practicing and evolving their laws and their practices and jurisdictions and technologies all the time and are not frozen in time in these kinds of racist anthropological kind of textbook ways.
00:54:49.100And so there are so many examples of, you know, indigenous communities in Brazil, in BC, where I live, really all around the world of indigenous communities fighting extraction that are that are offering different worldviews of ways that we can live because those those ways of life are still alive and well and being practiced.
00:55:13.780the Wet'suwet'en Nation, just to return to that example, you know, have successfully fought back
00:55:20.860so many different pipelines. And in that process are not only fighting the capitalism of the
00:55:27.780pipeline and fossil fuel industry, including liquefied natural gas, are not only fighting
00:55:33.140the colonial Canadian state and the full armed violence of the state. So they have faced a
00:55:39.100number of militarized raids by the Canadian state but also are doing it as they are affirming their
00:55:47.820laws and their practices right so there's a healing lodge on the territory there's a cultural center
00:55:53.080on the territory you know there's just there's daily practices of hunting and trapping and
00:55:58.880permaculture and harvesting on the territory cultural resurgence on the territory so you know0.97
00:56:05.240they're living a Wet'suwet'en way, right? It's not just about fighting capitalism and colonialism.
00:56:10.960It's about doing that as an assertion of Wet'suwet'en law and jurisdiction. And so these
00:56:18.920examples, I think, are so important because they remind us that there are other ways of living and
00:56:25.620being, that there are other laws that we can follow, that there is Indigenous jurisdiction
00:56:31.360that continues to be alive on all lands in North America,
00:56:36.060that that is not a figment of the past,