Praise for THE BORDER CROSSED US
The Border Crossed Us is a meticulously researched manifesto on the USMexico border. Justin Akers Chacn masterfully exposes how capital mobility necessarily criminalizes the movement of labor, and, with radical and urgent clarity, he calls on all of us to strengthen the movement to open the border. HARSHA WALIA, author of Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
At last, here is a book showing just how critical the demand for the freedom of workers mobility is to the anticapitalist movement. Justin Akers Chacn makes the urgent case for a new internationalism, one that openly rejects the divisive, racist, and anti-worker politics upholding national borders. With a clear-eyed examination of how labor repression is the core of the migra-state, Chacns call for cross-borderand anti-borderorganizing is shown to be a necessary part of working-class politics everywhere. NANDITA SHARMA, author of Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants
This brilliant and timely book lays bare the violent extortion and extraction of working-class migrant labor by untangling the hydra of the North American model of capitalist accumulation. Justin Akers Chacns incisive temporal and geographic analysis of US capitalist imperialism sets the stage for the urgent and immediate mobilization within labor, migrant, and union organizing across borders. As a scholar-activist, Justin Akers Chacn empowers us to sharpen our critique of the border paradox of open borders for capital and closed borders for people, to finally dismantle and abolish the migra-state, from free trade agreements to detention centers. Our communities depend on it. LESLIE QUINTANILLA, cofounder of the Center for Interdisciplinary Environmental Justice and assistant professor of women and gender studies at San Francisco State University
The Border Crossed Us provides a salutary antidote to the stale debate about whether immigration harms the working class. The book offers a convincing and comprehensive account of how the half-closed border between the United States and Mexico gives more power to employers and makes workers on both sides more exploitable. As US capital has inundated Mexico over the past century, increasing its hold on the Mexican economy in the era of free trade, the border has kept Mexican people impoverished and limited their rights and alternatives both at home and in the United States. This book cuts through the distorted nature of our current debates on immigration and makes the most coherent case Ive seen for how opening the border will help all workers, on both sides, by giving them the right to organize and fight for a decent life. The border only serves to prevent workers from fighting effectively against capital that has long been transnational. AVIVA CHOMSKY, author of Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal
This book captures the current political moment perfectly. It takes a look at the past and how we arrived at this point, and the crises that have harmed workers on both sides of the border. It also sheds light on the emerging worker movements that have arisen to overcome the ongoing efforts by capitalist industries to prevent or break grassroots and independent worker organizing. The question of open borders is one that we as workers have to ask ourselves. The borders are already open to finance, products, capital, wealth, but remain closed for the people who create the wealth through our labor. Yet, it is more than just a labor issue. It is a human right to migrate, and to stay home as well. Our union congratulates Justin for writing a book that is asking the questions we have always had to contend with, while also discussing and proposing a better world for all workers. EDGAR FRANKS, political director Familias Unidas por la Justicia
If you want to understand why international borders are open for the corporate class, while slammed shut for migrant workers, this excellent, incisive, thoroughly researched, and thought-provoking book is for you. In The Border Crossed Us, Justin Akers Chacn addresses precisely what most discussions on open borders lack: how their enforcement is entrenched in capitalism and the free market system. He makes clear that there is no security or protection with militarized divisions, that borders need to be broken down for the sake of humanitys collective well-being, and that it is a working-class, cross-border solidarity movement that can lead us to justice. TODD MILLER, author of Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the US Border Around the World
In The Border Crossed Us, Justin Akers Chacn asks and answers the hard questions about how the corporate capitalist class has been using border militarization and violent immigration enforcement to squeeze every last bit of profit out of workers, casting aside their dignity and humanity along the way. Chacn does the necessary work of staring hard into the everyday reality of people trampled by the border machine. This is an essential addition to border studies, as convincing of the need to open borders as it is compelling. JOHN WASHINGTON, author of The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the US-Mexican Border and Beyond
THE BORDER
CROSSED US
The Case for Opening
the USMexico Border
Justin Akers Chacn
2021 Justin Akers Chacn
Published in 2021 by
Haymarket Books
P.O. Box 180165
Chicago, IL 60618
773-583-7884
www.haymarketbooks.org
ISBN: 978-1-64259-481-2
Distributed to the trade in the US through Consortium Book Sales and Distribution (www.cbsd.com) and internationally through Ingram Publisher Services International (www.ingramcontent.com).
This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund.
Special discounts are available for bulk purchases by organizations and institutions. Please call 773-583-7884 or email for more information.
Cover design by Rachel Cohen. Photograph of art on the USMexico border wall Christopher Morris/Corbis via Getty Images
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.
INTRODUCTION
The Bordering of Capitalism
North American capitalism has been transformed into two overlapping yet starkly contradictory realities for capitalists and workers. Nowhere is this more apparent than through observation of what has taken place between the United States and Mexico over the last four decades. Through the aegis of the state, its two major political parties, and in alliance with the capitalist class of Mexico, the US state has transformed the region into a singular borderless economy dedicated to facilitating the movement of capital.
Integration in this form has been accomplished through what is characterized as a free-trade agreement (FTA). For the purpose of this book, I define an FTA as a state-crafted legal mechanism that supersedes, and eventually eliminates, the concept of national borders for the free movement of money. Throughout this text, the movement of money will be referenced both as capital: accumulated wealth invested in ownership of the means of production, and as profit: wealth accumulated from existing investments through the exploitation of workers and the extraction of their surplus labor value.
