\u201cSo, what do you think our chances of immigrating to Canada are?\u201d he asked me as he attempted to bring his unruly son onto his lap. Looking at my cousin I could see the toll of years of hardship in his eyes. We had the same name, we were the same age, even the same height, but our realities could not be more different. I was set to begin at law school in the United States in just a few weeks whereas my cousin was recently unemployed and thinking about his wife and two sons. I was going back to a life of certainty of school, good job prospects and stability. My cousin was walking into the abyss of the unknown as the economic situation in Iran was quickly deteriorated due to the United States\u2019 reimposition of comprehensive sanctions following the Trump Administration\u2019s unilateral withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Sealed off from the world, the sense of desperation and panic was palpable as nearly everyone I spoke to who had had the means was drawing up plans to leave Iran.<\/p>\n
I felt guilty. That summer, every laugh, every conversation, every moment I shared with my friends and family in Iran was haunted by this melancholic realization that my presence was a reminder of what they lacked. True, I spoke their language, shared in their laughs and tears, but my presence was a constant reminder of the precariousness of their situation. My status as a dual national and my US passport protected me from the harshness of their reality: rapid inflation, high unemployment and bleak prospects for immigration. My being there was simply a reminder of a world beyond their grasp. But why me? Why was I one of the lucky ones? But for a stroke of luck, I could be sitting in my cousin\u2019s shoes and he in mine.<\/p>\n
The readings for the Open Borders seminar of Abolition 13\/13 shed light upon the moral quandary of borders and offer alternatives to existing border and immigration regimes. In The Ethics of Immigration<\/em>, Joseph Carens compares the stratification created based on modern citizenship to feudalism: \u201cTo be born a citizen of a rich state in Europe or North America is like being born into the nobility. To be born a citizen of a poor country in Asia or Africa is like being born into the peasantry in the Middle Ages.\u201d[1]<\/a> In his work, Carens forwards a moralistic critique of\u00a0 borders beyond theory arguing that some formerly deeply imbedded practices\u2013such as slavery, racial segregation and institutionalized sexism\u2013are seen as reprehensible by modern moral standards. Drawing upon \u201cfamiliar, widely shared democratic principles.\u201d Carens seeks to use democracy\u2019s most basic tenets\u2014equality and liberty\u2014to both levy a moralistic critique of modern migration and border practices in order to advocate for open borders. Tapping into these principles to argue that all humans are of equal moral worth and equally deserving of opportunity, Carens advocates for treating \u201cfreedom of movement across state borders as a human right.\u201d[2]<\/a><\/p>\n In her book, On Borders<\/em>, Paulina Ochoa Espejo similarly advocates for the reimagining of borders looking to commonly held principles and legal theories. Ochoa Espejo critiques the identity-based approach to delineating borders and instead advocates for borders to be conceptualized in terms of place and place-based obligations\u2014such as political or social duties. Likening her conception of borders to the Watershed Model, Ochoa Espejo challenges both conceptions of national sovereignty and the individual right to own private property. Rather, Ochoa Espejo argues that like watersheds and drainage basins, territory should be seen as \u201cemerging from local and socio-natural relations, obligations and institutions\u201d[3]<\/a> Per this model, Ochoa Espejo advocates for a \u201cground up\u201d approach to conceiving borders as \u201cinstitutions could be used to draw borders between localities.\u201d[4]<\/a> Thus, Ochoa Espejo advocates for a pragmatic approach to borders, taking into consideration political, social and cultural considerations tied to the territory or land when crafting a place-specific border regime.<\/p>\n Harsha Walia takes the critique of borders one step further, analyzing the border as the amalgamation of imperialist, racist, capitalist, corporatist, and nativist policies serving as a \u201ckey method of imperial state formation, hierarchical social ordering, labor control, and xenophobic nationalism.\u201d[5]<\/a> In her book, Border and Rule<\/em>, Walia counters the imaginary \u2018border crises\u2019 narrative drummed up by nativists in Europe, the United States and around the world, instead arguing that \u201csuch representations depict migrants and refugees as the cause of an imagined<\/em> crisis at the border, when, in fact, mass migration is the outcome<\/em> of the actual<\/em> crises of capitalism, conquest, and climate change.\u201d[6]<\/a> In her analysis of the function of borders, Walia connects the movement to abolish borders to the wider abolitionist movements to abolish prison and the police arguing that \u201cpolice, prisons, and borders operate through a shared logic of immobilization, containing oppressed communities under racial capitalism.\u201d[7]<\/a> According to Walia, the use of the law is instrumental in carrying out such immobilization efforts as \u201cillegal immigration is a product of migration law\u201d and the state\u2019s attempt to criminalize and regulate such activity.[8]<\/a> Legal status, Walia argues, is at the core of the exploitation of undocumented migrants and their use as \u201cstate-sanctioned pool of unfree, indentured laborers.\u201d[9]<\/a> To solve for such endemic issues surrounding the existence of borders, Walia advocates for a \u201cleftist politics of no borders\u201d in which capitalist social relations are abandoned.[10]<\/a><\/p>\n In contrast, Seyla Benhabib contends that the issue is not the borders themselves but how the extent to which they are militarized and policed. In her article, \u201cThe End of the 1951 Refugee Convention? Dilemmas of Sovereignty, Territoriality, and Human Rights,\u201d Benhabib advocates for a cosmopolitan pluralism in which would do away with the \u201cmilitarily armed and violently guarded border regimes.\u201d[11]<\/a>\u00a0 While Benhabib contends that \u201cdemocracies require jurisdictional boundaries\u201d because we must know in \u201cwhose name the law is being enacted and how we can request accountability from those who enact it.\u201d[12]<\/a> Rather than the abolishment of borders, Benhabib advocates for \u201creconceptualizing sovereignty as a regime of global interdependence\u201d with the primacy of international law over democratic, independent and self-determining sovereigns.<\/p>\n Reading such critiques of borders, I couldn\u2019t help but reflect on how my life was shaped by immigration policies. I am the son of small business owning immigrants and I am a product of what some would call \u201cillegal immigration.\u201d To become a citizen, my mother along with many people in her generation, committed marriage fraud\u2013marrying a U.S. citizen on paper to get a green card. After his student visa expired, my father was arrested in order to be deported as an undocumented immigrant. Luckily, after nearly two weeks in holding he was granted an extension by a judge\u2014which he overstayed by about two decades. Immigration law is arbitrary and cruel. My childhood was characterized by a steady flow of family moving from Iran\u2014despite highly discriminatory U.S. immigration practices in order to escape the ravages of U.S.-imposed sanctions. However, with the rise of nativist policies and the imposition of Trump\u2019s notorious Muslim Ban, for many of my friends and family, Iran, the country of their birth, has become an open air prison in which the people of a nation are collectively punished by a U.S.-led sanctions regime.<\/p>\n Coming to understand such alternatives to existing border regimes, I could not help but think about my own experience with immigration. Reading Walia\u2019s writing, I was especially struck by the way she was able to reverse the logic of nativist conservative rhetoric surrounding the imaginary \u2018migration crisis\u2019 and point out such an obvious fact: immigrants are the product, not the cause, of the crises of capitalism, imperialism and climate change. I started working with my father at the age of fifteen at my family\u2019s gas station. Many of our customers were undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Central America who were escaping the violence of the War on Drugs. Many of these undocumented workers, some not much older than me, worked for cash in construction crews, boat crews and other manual labor jobs. Working as a cashier, I saw kids not much older than me maimed on the job or even deported in ICE raids that profiled and targeted Hispanic migrants. As a young teenager, I realized how something as arbitrary as birthplace and legal status could render human life expendable and disposable.<\/p>\n Now, as a law student, I am joining a field that is the core instrumentality of the violent and racist border regimes\u2014especially in the United States. Borders are international legal fictions that are enforced via state violence. To reimagine borders and to overcome such injustices, we must first confront the laws that constitute such border regimes. Whereas Carens and Ochoa Espejo\u2019s moralistic critique of contemporary border regimes are highly effective at appealing to universal principles, Walia\u2019s critique was extremely effective in highlighting the top-down effects and ramifications of contemporary border regimes. As generations of law students are educated and inculcated into a legal system that is blind to the implications of such border regimes, this system of immobilization and exploitation is perpetuated. By demonstrating the injustice and inhumanity of these imaginary frontiers through education and effective pedagogy, the law can be retooled to abolish existing border regimes.<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Joseph Carens, \u201cThe Case for Open Borders,\u201d in The Ethics of Immigration<\/em> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), at 226.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Ibid, 239.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> Paulina Ochoa Espejo, On Borders: Territoriality, Legitimacy, and the Rights of Place<\/em> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), at 19.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Id, 18.<\/p>\n [5]<\/a> Walia, Border and Rule<\/em>, at 14.<\/p>\n [6]<\/a> Ibid, 14.<\/p>\n [7]<\/a> Ibid, 15.<\/p>\n [8]<\/a> Ibid, 15.<\/p>\n [9]<\/a> Ibid, 16.<\/p>\n [10]<\/a> Ibid, 111.<\/p>\n [11]<\/a> Benhabib, \u201cThe End of the 1951 Refugee Convention? Dilemmas of Sovereignty, Territoriality, and Human Rights,\u201d Jus Cogens\u00a0 (2020).<\/p>\n [12]<\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By S. Shabzadeh \u201cSo, what do you think our chances of immigrating to Canada are?\u201d he asked me as he attempted to bring his unruly son onto his lap. Looking at my cousin I could see the toll of years… Continue Reading Notes<\/h1>\n