Borders with Andrew

I really despised. Things I despised from like fairly early each that being the education system, advertising and porters. I believe freedom of movement is fundamental. I don't know if that's controversial or anything, but these days it feels like it has reached a point of like really great restriction, more so, I think than at most points of human history. So I want to talk about the history of borders,

the role of borders, and the fight against borders. Not to give you some context, I guess you didn't talk about my accent and from the Caribbean, particularly from Turno,

Tobago and being from an island nation twin island nation. Actually, um I have been made away of the constant through history that has been into Ireland migration, whether you're talking about the Polynesian migrations across the specific whether you're talking about even within the Malay Archipe Loco or the Philippine Archipelago, or even when you're talking about of course the Caribbean, there's always been, you know, this movement of people going

from Ireland to Ireland. You know, like Tronada is very close to northeastern Venezuela, only eleven kilometers off the coast of northeastern Venezuela. Our Northern Range literally called Northern Range is an extension of Venezuela's maritime and these mountains, but the connections to end there. Human settlements in turn IAD dates back at least seven thousand years. In fact, one of the oldest human settlements discovered in the Eastern Caribbean,

the Banuari Trae site, is found in southeastern Turndad. One of the leading theories of human dispersal across the world places the migration of the Caribbean as beginning in TURNAD and going up the Antillian chain. A lot of the indigenous groups that settled in turn Ad and in the other islands north of turn Ad for the most part, migrated up the or No Coal River in what is

now Venezuela. So exchange and migration between the continent and the island has continued undisturbed freely for thousands of years before the arrival of the Spanish, and today, in our free coote and code post colonial code and code world, what was once the norm is now criminalized. Now you have to go through this proper process in order to migrate. You have to ask permission from governments who draw these invisible lines or in some cases violently physical lines in

the sand and demanded deference. And yet still migration continues because migration is a constant of human existence, legal and illegal. Recent Venecuela crisis and subsequent migration is just another uptake

of the stay. Refugees desperate to escape the present um of American imperialism and Venezuelan govern mismanagement and all the component is ues that have caused Venezuelan crisis have been flee into Colombia, to Brazil, to the Dutch Caribean Islands, to the other Latin American countries, and of course to turn that well, this's my creation is extorted by opportunists, facility, by the organized crime of human traffickers, because when you

try to restrict that kind of demand, when you illegalize that kind of movement, the people on the margins, we'll try to take advantage of those who are who need to move around, because that need is still there. And so lines also, of course are not necessarily creating, but they still to exacerbate issues like xenophobia, which is you know,

only amplified by the existence of borders. And they also deal with, due to their paperless status, a lot of gross exploitation because they struggled to find work and secure the basic necessities of life. The Venezuelan refugee crisis is a disaster I've seen unfull before my own eyes when I have witnessed firsthand, and one that is facilitated and exacerbated by the existence of borders. And I've seen similar

issues occurd at the parts of the world too. You know, Borders are enforced between the US and Mexico, between Haiti and the Binican Republic, between Spain and Morocco, between Europe in the Swanna region, between India and Pakistan, between Australia and Indonesia, UM, between Palestine and Israel, and being journalists, I'm sure you guys have experienced perhaps foostand other examples of the violent enforcement of borders. James, you have any experiences, Yeah,

for sure. I actually live just about the same distance you live from Venezuela. I live about the same distance from the US border with Mexico. So I've spent quite a lot of my journalistic career crossing the border and reporting on the border. And like, it's as you said, it's become increasingly violently enforced, and it's just ugly scar on on the landscape now. And it's and I often like to say, the border doesn't protect people, it controls people.

It's yeah, it's a very cruel and vicious and entirely arbitrary distinction between what is Kumi is Land to the north of the border and Kumi is Land to the south of the border in my case, yeah, exactly exactly. The way that borders have cut through um the ame lands of any different indigenous groups has been absolutely disastrous for them. This is taken place and of course the US, UM and most I suppose recognizably in Africa, where these

clunial borders have been causing tremendous harm to this day. Yeah. Yeah, it's a very good point. I remember just talking of like weird border things. I remember in just before the pandemic, I was on the border between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and when you did, it just seems so absurd, like to think that you know, some literally some I'll do in England, or a line on a

map or whatever in Germany. But one of the things that it creates is this weird situation where plastic bags are illegal in Rwanda because they're trying to protect the environment and they're not in Congo. So there's like this illegal arbitrage trader of of plastic bags across this border. And it's just such an odd and constructed, entirely unnecessary and strange sort of legacy of the colonial plunder of Africa. Yeah. I didn't even hear that before. And that sounds quite interesting. Um,

he says, between Rwanda and Democrats Republic of the Congo. Yeah, I think it's the border town there, um right, Yeah, people people will come across with their plastic bags. Be interesting to see how that develops. I know they are attempting to unify Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Salt Sudan, Um, I think Jubooty and and Somalia and a few other places I think into like an East African federation. So be interested to see how those umscan

seas and laws developed. Yeah, the rwandam bordered with Congo is that there's a soldier every fifty ms with a big machine gun, even going right through the middle of the Young Way rainforest, which is very remote by rewinded standards, a busy country with lots of people. But yeah, that's a very militarized border right now, right, Yeah, Yeah, that

reminds you it's a less militorized example. UM. I mean, people point out the disparity between the US Kindada border and the US Mexico border, But I remember reading a story somewhere about how person on the Canadian side UM had like they could very easily cross over onto the US side, but there was like a steep trooper or something just standing there and it's like if you cross over,

have to arrest you. And it's just it's like you're right there, We're literally having a conversation face to face, and yet if I walk over this our cherry designation, I have to be jailed. Yeah, it's biz. There's a very arbitrary The border between Neanmar and Thailand is it's a funny example like that where like it's a river and this is unfortunately resulted in people trying to cross it.

Here we're able to swim dying, which is terrible, right, But one thing that happened, it's like if you're in the river, you're in neither country. And so people will make stilts, like little stands on stilts which come up to the level of the river bank so that they can stand in like no man's land or every man's land maybe everyone's land, and sell alcohol without paying the Thai taxes and things to people who are standing on

the bank in Thailand. And again it just really illustrates how stupid now, but treat this whole thing is so as we're talking about the absurdity of boilers, I suppose it's wanting fair to get into their history because for most of the rule and for most of human existence, really free movement has been the status school traders, migrants, hunter gatherers, nomads. They freely each a boost. This little blue marble, as they call it. Of course, many ethnic

groups maintains it in relationships with particular lands. But even when city states on such rules, it was rare for rulers to delineate precisely where their realm ended and another's began. The first like large scale restrictions really a rose under the Roman emperor Constantine in the fourth century when he forbade serves from leaving their lord's land. Documents, of course, had to be created to request save passage to ask O king, will you please allow me to move from

point A to point B? My lord, your majesty soon whatever? What what do we call the first past sports is what quickly in rules the medieval era essentially bound large parts of yours population in place by sufdom, and movement was viewed by rulers as ruin us to their low and order. They needed static populations to stay in place so that taxation and the raising of troops and whatever

they wanted to extract could easily be extracted. Because you know, if these persidents were able to just move as they pleased, they will probably try to evade taxation that got a little bit too excessive. Um, they would probably trying to evade the oppression of their rulers, and that they did. I mean, throughout feudalism, peasant revolts and uprisings very commonplace, and it's due to those revolts of the masses that sifdom would come into a decline as a wage labor

rules in the fifteenth and sixteen centuries. But that would mean that free movement came back because now people were commodity that a country's government wanted to keep within its borders. Surrulers offered citizenship and tax incentives and want to encourage migration. And yet while they were encouraging migration, they were also

kicking people out. So countries like Spain and France were either executing or expelling ethnic and religious minorities and mass So this period also bring about the rights of nationalism, which would tap into an earlier sense of um I suppose connection and sort of subvert that from connection to community to connection to this abstract notion of nation state,

the imaginary community of the nation jenn. Nationalism in Europe would attempt to unify a vast and diverse range of cultural groups and classes under one state, while defining themselves against outsiders, and of course this ruling class meta narrative exists as a mechanism of manufactured, meaningless loyalty in order to control you. But that's a topic for another time.

This era has also been described as one of the largest periods of involuntary migration in human history, that be in the Transatlantic slave trade, which trafficed and estimated twelve point five million in slave African people between the sixteen and nineteenth century. But there was this one key movement in history of borders that would have lasted effects to today.

At the end of the Thirty Years War, the Peace of Westphalia was signed by a gen nine principalities and touchies and imperial kingdoms which basically agreed in sixty eight that the state's borders were inviolable and an absolute sovereign state could not interfere the domestic affairs of another. Now, of course, this is all just talk right at the end of the day, states have continued to interfere the domestic affairs of others, will continue to violate the words

of other states. There are plenty of board disputes that are alive and well some decades or even centuries old, um on this planet. And then, of course this whole idea of West Philian sovereignty would not really be applied to people outside of Europe. The actual inhabitants of the interesting looking maps that the West Fillian era produced, we're not actually made privy to any of those um this

visions about the drawing up borders. They would also be moving, of course people continuously, so you know, Spain was kicking out um Jewish people and more's and people who relate the heretics as un the inquisition Um. The British was moving their dissenters, criminals and general pains and new bombacy to settle colonize in places like Australia, which is why

Australia is like that. And things progress a bit further, you have the notion of free trade and free market gain in some ground thanks to Adam Smith's new school of economics. At the same time, concerns of population and the mouths, unemployment and social unrest in Europe led governments to start facilities and emigration moving out their colonies the more general free flow settler clonalism, which would lead to domestic depopulation in Europe. And then there was another shift

as tend to be the case in human history. As in the nineteenth century, migrants from now underdeveloped regions began to stream towards the more developed areas and drews. So you had North Africans going to France, Italians and Irish headed to New York and all the while, of course, racism and xenophobia festeran and proliferating as nationalists with top fay against the so called threats to their nation. Of course, Italians and Irish were eventually assimilated into the hegemonic notion

of whiteness. But North Africans in France have not been so lucky. Oh, I suppose lucky could and could because there's a whole conversation about how whiteness destroys cultures and erases the unique identities that these people would have come up with in an efforts to unite them against minorities such as African Americans in the US. Do you see this period of lockdown, of this increased nationalism and these restrictions, These bad restrictions would also try to manipulate access to

certain technologies, um the telegraph, the railroad. Yes, they enabled central governments to assert their presence across their whole territory. But they would also try to compete with other nations UM and keep certain secrets regarding technology. See that particularly UM during the Cold War, but we'll get to that a bit later. During the First World War we have the death of some sixteen million people, the Great War UM, as you should probably call it if you ever happened

to time travel to that period. I don't think people would want to hear that this is just the first two World Wars. But after the World War UM, the Great War UM, this seggregationist Wouldrew Wilson, who was US President at the time, proposed fourteen points to the international community in order to prevent such horrors. And one of those core principles of the fourteen points was it the globe's borders. We were drawn along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.

And like I said before, this is of course just in Europe. It's not like any of these will leaders actually care about the territories they coved up in Africa. And I think there was a point that I wanted to make about technology and how technology has been restricted because when you look at again the real road and telegraph, while they enabled the central governments to suit their presence send assume their control onlike ever before, the potential these

technologies was kind of lost. Yes, the railroad in the telegraph can help a government to sue its control over its territory, but it can just as easily empower people to travel further and faster than they ever had before, two communicate across greater distances and they ever had before, and insteadin the hands of the states. These technologies are of course used for oppress events. Back to the end

of the First World War. In the post war period, which saw the collapse of four European empires Ottoman, Russian, Austro, Hungarian and German, millions of refugees were left in a world where immigration controls are continued to tighten and passports gained great a prominence. Last, once the nation state was meanted in place fashion Zalman Nazism would quickly arise to

god its supposed to purity. The world would once again be plunged into war, the second one, this time which would again leave millions of uprooted and displaced people that states like Switzerland quote unquote neutral and the US would largely refuse to assist. After the Second World War, nation building would continue to displace and slaughter some millions of

ethnic and religious minorities. Millions of refugees have been dismissed from lands that have been colonized and imperialized, and intervened with wars and wrecked with just the destruction of climate change and poverty. And yet immigration controls only tightened further, and they will likely continue to tighten due to the effects of climate migration and climate collapse, especially in our

post ninety leveln reality. US border patrolling particular has escalated to employed twenty thousand agents, and Israel Run is the largest open air prison in the world. These days, militarized borders with heavily guarded barbed wire and electrified fences, which were once common in times of war, have now been a staple of times of peace. These managinary lines and the map have become in some places violent fixtures on the landscape, with thousands of people lose their lives every

year for simply trying to cross. We've entered an era of essentially bordering without precedent, and thanks to today's technology, governments no more now about the people they govern, the people within their territory, but at any point prior in human history. Cross border surveillance keeps neighbors in the new managing and monitoring their populous like lab rates, data has become more valuable then black Cold itself. These governments have chosen to wall, and so they this is our will now.

It's not some future cyberpunk, the stupia, the curveillance capitalist heales keepers here now and borders have an important rule to play. But as our power structure their system of control. As the writers A Crime think Of said, there's only one world on the border is tearing it apart. And I think the idea of borders extends much further than

just the nations borders. When you look at the Internet, fire walls, the checkpoints, the hidden databases, the for profit prisons, indicated communities, all these different boundaries enforced by ceaseless violence, enforced by a deep autation, enforced by visual anti attacks, by street haraspment, by torture, All of these boundaries are holding us back and tearing us apart. Migrants, due to their vulnerable status or often the first target when it

comes to the economic down to and depression. Civilians and scapegoating nations wield fair of this other and they use that to prevent their people from fighting for better. They

turned their eye towards another victim. I doesn't even get into all the different categories that have been constructed my grant expert refugee, asylum seeker, illegal alien, and that one in particular really grinds my cares because it is a believe the pinnacle of dehumanization to look at a person who's dice just man just managed to like just by happen sands fell on the other side of the border, to look at them and to deem them alien, deem

them illegal, to brand them that, and I even acknowledge the humanity when referring to them. And it's become a normalized part of political discourse to speak of illegal aliens. But I don't think we should forget just how violent that kind of languages. It's particularly violent when you count for the fact that while these borders are used to restrict people on the lowest rung of society, capital has

very few restrictions. In fact, that has much less restrictions, and people the rich and their capital can cross borders with ease, go from place to place without munch process. And in fact, we look at Jeff Bass. Also we say that, oh, well, he's the richest man the world for but when you account for the wealth that has not been accounted for, I think it must be put into perspective that Bill Gates are Sackaboo, Jeff Beazles, etcetera. They are the richest people that we know of, not

necessarily the richest. A global economy has also been, of course, moving resources for a while now. Resources have more freedom than people. The unequal and even development has extracted minerals and materials from some parts of the process them in other parts of the world, manufacture them in other parts of the world, and then sold worldwide for the profits to be hoarded by select few countries and select a few people. These wealthy countries under the poor and then

brutalize those who follow. Where the opportunities of Antica. But I don't think that one's opportunities one freedom. One's freedom should be restricted by where they were born or by the wealth that they do to not control. Passports, inequality is essue that should not exist. Passports should not exist. Palestinians can travel visa free to only thirty eight countries and territories. Yet those in the West Bank are restricted by violent by violent checkpoints, and those who live in

gas are call you the stript at all. Meanwhile, other regions enjoy fast These are free travels, such as humans who have access to d countries and territories, or the Japanese who enjoy the most freedom, piece of free of all, with ninety three countries available to them. A billionaire like Elon Musket flying wherever he wants in his private jet.

A political prisoner like a Jory Luta, who can be kept in solitary bears on end traditional seafear and channels and land has been militarized and guarded by these vast navies, by these vast troops, by these these machines, These structures that disconnected, unraveled the deep ties between communities. Borderston us all into prisoners, and I think it's about time we

resisted them. As the underground railroads of anti Nazi and anti slavery resistance has shown everyday people can help everyday people, no matter the obstacles. If you live in a border sanctuary city or a migrant community, they are probably already groups that are put in this work, and you could join that infrastructure resistance if not, you can help to create that infrastructure to connect with people who are affected

by borders in ways that you aren't. I mean, perhaps you have a neighbor or a cool worker who's undocumented and could use help in that. Try to connect cross border formal and informal, public and coland design because these connections, these networks, or how people move live and evade state violence. Obviously, I can't speak for everybody situation because different people's legal status, language ability, education level, gender, raised class, commit muns and ability.

What a fact that can atribution to this anti borders movement. But however you decide to contribute, I hope that you would remember who it is we're trying to help. We're not trying to act as you know, these saints for the media, and I recognized the irony of saying saints in particular considered my allD YouTube name. But the media is not all focus. The audience of our actions is not public opinion. It is those we want fighting with us, people who need our help, people who know the violent

supporters forstand so they get into direct action. Two, you know, directly affect the material outcomes of people influence our borders. You know, whether you're helping my creation prisoner manach to escape, or helping one person get a roof over their head in an asylum case, having a person who is trapped in this system to find the strength to get through a day. These actions refupreating our communities, and they kilp

oup others do the same. You also need, of course, more infrastructure, networks, alliances, skills and resources to be cultivated to strengthen our autonomy from these structures and to develop ability to defend against them. And of course these actions should be rooted in some strategy long term and short term for overcoming this regime months and for all. Just for a final would I would say that there is

nothing necessary or inevitable about borders. Only the violence of their most ardent believers keep them in place, and without them, what as with seems to exist. Borders can only exist if they are enforced, and together we can make borders an enforceable. Together, we can create a will in which everyone is free to travel, free to create, and free

to exist on their own terms. Now's it. If you like what I spoke about in this episode, or if you just like to hear my voice, feel free to check out my YouTube channel and toism and you can support me on peature dot com slash seeing True or follow me on Twitter at and disclore saying true. It could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.

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