“Borderlands, the ultimate Achilles’ heel of colonialism and imperialism.“
-Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Over the last five months, we have witnessed our government’s complicity in the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. It is as though the Canadian state has taken off its liberal mask, revealing its true face: the face of a Western imperialist power.
Right from the start, Canada has always been a Western imperialist state that is built on ongoing colonization and genocide against Indigenous peoples. The history of Canada’s foreign policy demonstrates that it has consistently supported the agendas of the dominant Western imperial power.
Canada has a long history of endorsing the colonization of Palestine. In 1917, around 400 Canadians fought under British General Edmund Allenby’s Jewish Legion to help seize modern-day Palestine and realize the Balfour Declaration. Canada later played a key role in imposing the 1947 UN partition plan, which eventually led to Israel’s violent displacement of 750,000 Palestinians from their homelands in an event known as the Nakba. Today, we see our ruling class lend their full support to the US empire-backed Israel genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
As the working class, we have a responsibility to stop our ruling class’s imperialist agendas. The only way we can accomplish that is by building a stronger anti-imperialist working class—a united, multiracial, multi-national working class with internationalist perspectives. To get there, we must include migrant workers in all our working-class movements. We must eliminate all the divisions between us and the migrant workers; the divisions imposed by our immigration system, our borders. We must fight for permanent resident status for all migrant workers.
Borders as a tool of Western imperialism
The border is not a line on a map that divides two geographical locations or a physical wall in the middle of the desert. Borders are, as Harsha Walia defines it, an ordering regime that displaces, excludes, and exploits migrants and refugees.
Borders were created through violent conquest and subjugation of Indigenous peoples for the purpose of capital accumulation. They remain essential in the creation and maintenance of Western imperial global domination.
Borders protect the imperial centers from potential “disturbances” caused by the free movement of the populations displaced by the capital accumulation process. The borders in the US, Canada, Israel, and other Western imperialist states serve the same function: to exclude and deny entry to the people whom they have violently displaced.
Borders establish and reinforce a racialized hierarchy within the international working class by criminalizing migrants and refugees as the “undesirables” and ”trespassers.” The privileges granted to workers in the imperial centre instill a sense of superiority, making them prone to surrendering their class interests in favour of their ruling class’ imperialist agendas.
Borders facilitate capitalists wealth accumulation by increasing labour exploitation through what Harsha Walia calls the “commodified inclusion of migrants.” Borders produce cheap migrant labour by deliberately deflating their labour rights upon entry. In addition, the lack of rights and protections for migrant workers depresses the wages and working conditions for all workers, thus increasing the rate of labour exploitation. The higher the rate of labour exploitation, the higher the rate of profit for the capitalists.
The expansion and militarization of borders serve as a means for capitalists to continue to profit in the face of stagnation. Border expansion and militarization channel public wealth produced by the working class into the pockets of the global capitalist class. Military and surveillance companies such as Elbit Systems are making a killing out of border controls.
Anti-imperialist working class
We know that the ruling class is weak in the face of mass movement organizing. The global movement for Palestinian liberation has forced the hands of our elected leaders, who can no longer hide their role in facilitating genocide to further imperialist interests. The movement for Palestine is made up of a diverse range of workers—Jewish, Black, Indigenous, Tamil, and Filipino comrades among them—guided by the principles of international solidarity. We have shown that to challenge our ruling class’s imperialist agendas, we must build an anti-imperialist working class; a united, multiracial, multi-national working class guided by internationalist perspectives.
Migrant workers are internationalists simply because of their connections to their homelands. Most migrants came from places devastated by Western imperialism’s greed. Migrants bring not only food, music, and culture, but also their unique experiences of capitalist oppression and rich traditions of resistance organizing. Migrant workers are uniquely positioned to be members, experts, and leaders in any anti-imperialist movement in so-called colonial “Canada.” But to get there, we must eliminate all the divisions imposed between us by the border system.
We can fight together against the system that exploits our labour and destroys our planet, against the system that continues to colonize Indigenous peoples and incarcerates Black and brown bodies, and against the system that has forced the displacement of working-class people all over the world. This is why we must fight for permanent resident status for all migrants.
Our ruling class knows that a united, multi-racial, multi-national working class is a threat to their imperialist agendas, and increasingly repressive border control is how they protect themselves from that threat. The fascists also understand that, which is why we have heard Zionists call for the deportation of Palestine solidarity activists. Permanent resident status for all migrants will take that weapon away from them, away from imperialism, and put the power where it belongs: in the hands of workers.
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