Border and Rule

Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism

By: Harsha Walia, Robin D. G. Kelley - foreword, Nick Estes - afterword

Narrated by: Cindy Kay

Harsha Walia disrupts easy explanations for the migrant and refugee crises, instead showing them to be the inevitable outcomes of the conquest, capitalist globalization, and climate change that are generating mass dispossession worldwide. Border and Rule explores a number of seemingly disparate global geographies with shared logics of border rule that displace, immobilize, criminalize, exploit, and expel migrants and refugees. With her keen ability to connect the dots, Walia demonstrates how borders divide the international working class and consolidate imperial, capitalist, and racist nationalist rule.

Illuminating the brutal mechanics of state formation, Walia exposes US border policy as a product of violent territorial expansion, settler-colonialism, enslavement, and gendered racial ideology. Further, she compellingly details how "Fortress Europe" and "White Australia" are using immigration diplomacy and externalized borders to maintain a colonial present, how temporary labor migration in the Arab Gulf states and Canada is central to citizenship regulation and labor control, and how racial violence is escalating deadly nationalism in the US, Israel, India, the Philippines, Brazil, and across Europe, while producing a disaster of statelessness for millions elsewhere.

©2021 Harsha Walia (P)2021 Tantor

One of best books of the year

This book is really fantastic and progressively gets better as you read it. The author does a really good job of connecting the border to its role in the political economy of capitalism and imperialism. The books global perspective taught me a lot about border regimes that are much further away from me , in ways that allowed me to draw valuable lessons for the border struggle in my country.

Invaluable and visionary

As a U.S. immigration lawyer for almost 40 years, I’m frequently asked what would be my solution to the “immigration problem”? This.

Amazing

READ THIS. Most important book about immigration I’ve ever read. Highly recommend checking this out.

Excellent, challenging, timely yet timeless.

Brilliant book that was surprisingly manageable conceptually, given the density of the topics explored. Narrator has several curious mispronunciations that suggest a less than full familiarity with the subject matter, but while noticeable, this wasn’t distracting.

absolute must-read

one of the most in-depth books on the world as it is today and how it got here