Introduction
1. Harsha Walia’s book, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (London: Haymarket, 2021) makes these connections skilfully in Part 4.
2. Amelia Gentleman, The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment (London: Guardian/Faber, 2019).
3. On everyday borders, see Nira Yuval-Davis, Georgie Wemyss and Kathryn Cassidy, Bordering (Oxford: Polity, 2019).
4. Catherine Dauvergne, Making People Illegal: What Globalization Means for Migration and Law (Cambridge: CUP, 2008).
5. On how immigration controls impact citizens and define the meanings of citizenship, see the work of Bridget Anderson – in particular, Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control (Oxford: OUP, 2013), and ‘ “Heads I Win. Tails You Lose.” Migration and the Worker Citizen’, Current Legal Problems 68: 1 (2015).
6. Radhika Mongia, Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
7. Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
8. Nadine El-Enany, Bordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020).
9. Stuart Hall, Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands (London: Allen Lane, 2017), p. 65.
10. Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories, 2003).
11. Bridget Anderson, Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright, ‘Editorial: Why No Borders?’, Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees 26: 2 (2009), p. 6.
12. Dan Berger, Mariame Kaba and David Stein, ‘What Abolitionists Do’, Jacobin, 24 August 2017, at jacobinmag.com.
13. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition (London: Haymarket, forthcoming).
14. E. Bloch, The Principle of Hope (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986 [1959]), p. 3.
15. Mariame Kaba, We Do This ’Til We Free Us (London: Haymarket, 2021); bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. xiv–xv.
16. Les Back, ‘Hope’s Work’, Antipode 5 (2021).
17. Kaba, We Do This ’Til We Free Us.
1 Race
1. David Theo Goldberg, Are We All Postracial Yet? (London: Polity, 2015). p. 4.
2. The phrase ‘scavenger ideology’ is borrowed from George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1978).
3. Bridget Anderson, Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control (Oxford: OUP, 2013).
4. David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 1–32.
5. Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
6. Sivamohan Valluvan, The Clamour of Nationalism: Race and Nation in Twenty-First-Century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), p. 54.
7. Etienne Balibar, ‘Racism and Nationalism’, in E. Balibar and I. Wallerstein, eds, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), p. 48.
8. Hagar Kotef, Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), p. 15.
9. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).
10. Nandita Sharma, Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020); Aderanti Adepoju, ‘Illegals and Expulsion in Africa: The Nigerian Experience’, International Migration Review 18: 3 (1984); Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020).
11. Mahmood Mamdani, Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity (The W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
12. Achille Mbembe, ‘The Idea of a Borderless World’, Africa Is a Country, 2019, at africasacountry.com.
2 Gender
1. Bridget Anderson, Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration control (Oxford: OUP, 2013), p. 66.
2. Ibid., p. 67
3. Eithné Luibhéid, Pregnant on Arrival: Making the Illegal Immigrant (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
4. Luke de Noronha, ‘No Tears Left to Cry: Being Deported Is a Distressing Nightmare’, VICE News, 1 December 2016, at vice.com.
5. United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).
6. Council of Europe, The European Convention on Human Rights (Strasbourg: Directorate of Information, 1952).
7. Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework (Bristol: Falling Wall, 1975).
8. Anderson Us and Them?, pp. 166–7.
9. Ibid., pp. 172–6.
10. Juno Mac and Molly Smith, Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights (London: Verso, 2018).
11. Julia O’Connell Davidson, Modern Slavery: The Margins of Freedom (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
12. See Detained Voices for the record of these demands: detained-voices.com.
13. Anderson, Us and Them?, p. 137.
14. Ava Caradonna, ‘We Speak but You Don’t Listen: Migrant Sex Worker Organising at the Border’, X:talk Project (2016), at open-democracy.net.
15. ‘bell hooks – Are You Still a Slave? Liberating the Black Female Body’, YouTube, 7 May 2014, accessed 28 April 2022.
3 Capitalism
1. Harsha Walia describes this broad relationship between dispossession, containment and the importation of temporary and illegalised labour in terms of ‘border imperialism’. Harsha Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2013).
2. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, ‘Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence’, in G. T. Johnson and A. Loubin, eds, Futures of Black Radicalism (New York: Verso, 2017).
3. Lisa O’Carroll, ‘Immigration Raid on Byron Hamburgers Rounds up 35 Workers’, Guardian, 27 July 2016.
4. Alberto Toscano, ‘Dirty deportation tactics at Soas’, Guardian, 17 June 2009.
5. Nicholas De Genova describes this as the ‘condition of deportability’. Nicholas De Genova, ‘Migrant “Illegality” and Deportability in Everyday Life’, Annual Review of Anthropology 31 (2002).
6. See ‘Grunwick 40: Remembering the Grunwick Strike 40 Years On’, at grunwick40.wordpress.com.
7. For a damning critique of Len McCluskey’s interventions, see Ewa Jasiewicz, ‘I Am a Union Organiser. Len McCluskey’s Migrant Clampdown Will Only Benefit Bosses’, Guardian, 15 November 2019.
8. Vernon M. Briggs, Jr., Immigration and American Unionism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).
9. Mike Elk ‘Undocumented Workers Find New Ally as Unions Act to Halt Deportations’, Guardian, 22 March 2018
10. Josh Eidelson, ‘Unions are training hotel workers to face down immigration raids’ Bloomberg Online, 20 September 2017.
11. AFL-CIO, ‘Iced Out: How Immigration Enforcement Has Interfered With Workers Rights’, ecommons.cornell.edu, 2009.
12. Dan Berger, Mariame Kaba and David Stein. ‘What Abolitionists Do’, Jacobin, 24 August 2017, at jacobinmag.com.
13. ‘Interview: Bridget Anderson on Europe’s “Violent Humanitarianism” in the Mediterranean’, Ceasefire, at ceasefiremagazine.co.uk.
14. On migration and existential mobility, see Ghassan Hage, ‘A Not So Multi-Sited Ethnography of a Not So Imagined Community’, Anthropological Theory 5: 4 (2005).
15. Todd Miller, Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the US Border Around the World (London: Verso, 2019); Adrian Little and Nick Vaughan-Williams ‘Stopping Boats, Saving Lives, Securing Subjects: Humanitarian Borders in Europe and Australia’, European Journal of International Relations 23: 3 (2017).
16. Achille Mbembe, ‘The Idea of a Borderless World’, Africa Is a Country, 2019, at africasacountry.com.
17. Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism.
18. William Walters ‘Acts of Demonstration: Mapping the Territory of (Non-)Citizenship’, in E. Isin and G. Neilson, eds, Acts of Citizenship (London: Zed, 2008)
19. The Communist Manifesto, after all, calls for the abolition of private property, of bourgeois individuality, of the family, and of countries and nationality.
4 Policing
1. On Operation Nexus and deportation on the basis of ‘non- convictions’, see Luqmani Thompson & Partners, ‘Operation Nexus: briefing paper’, 2014 luqmanithompson.com; Frances Webber, ‘Deportation on Suspicion’, Institute for Race Relations, 20 June 2013, at irr.org.uk, and Melanie Griffiths, ‘Foreign, Criminal: A Doubly Damned Modern British Folk-Devil’, Citizenship Studies 21 (2017). For more on the stories of Darel and others deported to Jamaica, see Luke de Noronha, Deporting Black Britons: Portraits of Deportation to Jamaica (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020).
2. On the criminalisation of migration, see Katja Aas and Mary Bosworth, eds, The Borders of Punishment: Migration, Citizenship, and Social Exclusion (Oxford: OUP, 2013); Juliet Stumpf, ‘The Crimmigration Crisis: Immigrants, Crime, and Sovereign Power’, American University Law Review 56: 2 (2006).
3. Jenna Loyd, Matt Mitchelson and Andrew Burridge, eds, Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012).
4. Paul Gilroy, ‘The myth of black criminality’, in Socialist Register (London: Merlin Press, 1982), pp. 47–56.
5. This closely mirrors the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 in the US – although without its retroactive force, and with slightly better human-rights provisions.
6. Emma Kaufman, Punish and Expel: Border Control, Nationalism, and the New Purpose of the Prison (Oxford: OUP, 2015); Alpa Parmar, ‘Policing Belonging: Race and Nation in the UK’, in Mary Bosworth, Alpa Parmar and Yolanda Vazquez, eds, Race, Criminal Justice and Migration Control: Enforcing the Boundaries of Belonging (Oxford: OUP, 2018).
7. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, ‘Race, Capitalism, Abolitionism’, in Loyd, Mitchelson and Burridge, Beyond Walls and Cages.
8. ‘Home Secretary: Backing the Bill on illegal immigration’, conservatives.com, 8 December 2021.
9. Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories, 2003).
10. Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018).
11. Gilmore, ‘Race, Capitalism, Abolitionism’.
12. Luke de Noronha, Deporting Black Britons: Portraits of Deportation to Jamaica (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020).
5 Counter-terror
1. Anthony Loyd, ‘Shamima Begum: the interview in full’, The Times, 14 February 2019.
2. Arun Kundnani, The Muslims Are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror (London: Verso, 2014).
3. Nisha Kapoor, Deport, Deprive, Extradite: 21st Century State Extremism (London: Verso, 2018).
4. M. Longo, The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security, and the Citizen after 9/11 (Cambridge: CUP, 2017).
5. Kapoor, Deport, Deprive, Extradite.
6. Most deprivations have occurred when individuals are out of the country, and some men – such as Bilal al-Berjawi and Mohamed Sakr – were deprived of their citizenship before being killed by US drones. In the case of Pham Minh, the courts argued that he was still a Vietnamese citizen even though the Vietnamese state did not recognise him as such, and he was subsequently extradited to the United States. At a similar time, Hilal al-Jedda managed to win his case on appeal against deprivation, arguing that he could not simply reapply for Iraqi citizenship, as the home secretary claimed. However, the al-Jedda case served as proof of the need to revise the law further, resulting in the extension of powers in the Immigration Act 2014 that would later support Shamima Begum’s denationalisation.
7. Aziz and Ors v Secretary of State for the Home Department, EWCA Civ 1884 (8 August 2018).
8. Nisha Kapoor and Kasia Narkowicz, ‘Unmaking Citizens: Passport Removals, Pre-emptive Policing and the Reimagining of Colonial Governmentalities’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 42:16 (2019).
9. Gareth Peirce, ‘Was It Like This for the Irish?’, London Review of Books, 10 April 2008.
10. Kapoor, Deport, Deprive, Extradite.
11. Home Office, CONTEST: The United Kingdom’s Strategy for Countering Terrorism (London: Home Office, 2011).
12. Home Office, Prevent Strategy (London: Home Office, 2011).
13. Section 26 of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015
14. Home Office, Prevent Strategy.
15. Police officers have sought powers to criminalise so-called ‘gang members’ for inciting serious violence without having to prove that their social media posts or music videos are directly linked to any actual acts of violence, and terrorism laws have provided some inspiration to this effort.
16. Anthony Loyd, ‘Shamima Begum: the interview in full’, The Times, 14 February 2019.
17. Bridget Anderson, ‘ “Heads I Win. Tails You Lose.” Migration and the Worker Citizen’, Current Legal Problems 68: 1 (2015).
18. Nandita Sharma, Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).
19. Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020).
6 Databases
1. Amelia Gentleman, The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment (London: Guardian/Faber, 2019).
2. David Goodhart and Richard Norrie, ‘The UK Border Audit: Is the UK Border Now Fit for Purpose? A Post-Windrush Review’, Policy Exchange, 2018, at policyexchange.org.uk.
3. ‘Taking the Initiative Party’, at theinitiativeparty.org.uk.
4. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes for Improving the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
5. Jane Caplan and John Torpey, eds, Documenting Individual Identity (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018).
6. John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge: CUP, 2000).
7. Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Keith Brecken-bridge, Biometric State: The Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present (Cambridge: CUP, 2014); Chandak Sengoopta, Imprint of the Raj: How Fingerprinting Was Born in Colonial India (Basingstoke: Pan MacMillan, 2003).
8. Jon Agar, ‘Modern Horrors: British Identity and Identity Cards’, in Caplan and Torpey, Documenting Individual Identity.
9. George Grylls, ‘Digital “ID Cards” lead the Dominic Cummings data revolution’, The Times, 2 September 2020.
10. Elections Bill, House of Commons Session 2021–22.
11. Statewatch, ‘Data Protection, Immigration Enforcement and Fundamental Rights: What the EU’s Regulations on Interoperability Mean for People with Irregular Status’, Center for European Policy Studies (CEPS) and European Migration Law (Statewatch, 2019), p. 8.
12. Privacy International, ‘Home Office Biometrics (HOB) Programme Brief’, August 2019.
13. Statewatch, ‘Data Protection, Immigration Enforcement and Fundamental Rights, p. 4.
14. See nidsfacts.com, accessed 24 December 2021.
15. See, for example, Oxfam, ‘The EU Trust Fund for Africa: Trapped Between Aid Policy and Migration Politics’, Briefing Paper, January 2020.
16. See id4d.worldbank.org/, accessed 24 December 2021
17. M. Latonero, ‘Stop Surveillance Humanitarianism’, New York Times, 11 July 2019.
18. ‘(1977) The Combahee River Collective Statement’, at blackpast.org.
19. Combahee River Collective, ‘The Combahee River Collective: A Black Feminist Statement’, Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, Zillah R. Eisenstein (ed.) (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), pp. 362–72.
20. Stuart Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’, in J. Donald and A. Rattansi, eds, Race, Culture and Difference (London: Sage, 1992).
7 Algorithms
1. Stephan Scheel, ‘Recuperation through Crisis Talk’, South Atlantic Quarterly 117: 2 (2018), pp. 267–89.
2. See roborder.eu, accessed 24 December 2021.
3. Zach Campbell, ‘Swarms of Drones, Piloted by Artificial Intelligence, May Soon Patrol Europe’s Borders’, Intercept, 11 May 2019, at theintercept.com.
4. Statewatch, ‘EU Pays for “Watch Towers” for Guarding the Georgia–Turkey Border’, 24 April 2017, at statewatch.org.
5. Russell Brandom, ‘The US Border Patrol Is Trying to Build Face-Reading Drones’, The Verge, 6 April 2017, at theverge.com.
6. See ‘Anduril: Our Work’, at anduril.com.
7. European Commission, ‘Smart lie-detection system to tighten EU’s busy borders’, ec.europa.eu, 24 October 2018.
8. Sebastsien Klovig Skelton, ‘UK Facial Recognition Project to Identify Hidden Faces’, Computer Weekly, 18 March 2020, at computerweekly.com.
9. Louise Amoore, The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security Beyond Probability (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 193.
10. Annie Jacobsen, First Platoon: A Story of Modern War in the Age of Identity Dominance (Boston, MA: Dutton, 2021).
11. Ken Klippenstein and Sara Sirota, ‘The Taliban Have Seized US Military Biometrics Devices’, Intercept, 17 August 2021, at theintercept.com.
12. Privacy International, ‘Biometrics Collection under the Pretext of Counter-Terrorism’, 28 May 2021, at privacyinternational.org.
13. Chris Jones, ‘Automated Suspicion: The EU’s New Travel Surveillance Initiatives’, Statewatch, 2020, pdf available at statewatch.org.
14. Felipe De La Hoz, ‘DHS Plans to Start Collecting Eye Scans and DNA — With the Help of Defense Contractors’, Intercept, 17 November 2020, at theintercept.com.
15. See the excellent reports by the migrant justice organisation Mijente: ‘Who’s Behind ICE: The Tech and Data Companies Fuelling Deportation’ (2018) and ‘The War Against Immigrants: Trump’s Tech Tools Powered by Palantir’ (2019), both available in pdf at mijente.net.
16. Todd Miller, ‘More than a Wall: Corporate Profiteering and the Militarization of US Borders’, Transnational Institute, September 2019, at tni.org.
17. Amoore, Politics of Possibility.
18. Palantir worked first with the US military from 2009 onwards, providing software to help predict the location of IEDs in Afghanistan and Iraq, before moving into predictive policing in 2012. This was trialled first in New Orleans, which gathered vast amounts of data on individuals and their associations to identify potential victims and perpetrators of violence, who could then be ‘invited’ to join the city’s CeaseFire programme. See Sharon Weinberger, ‘Techie Software Soldier Spy’, New York Magazine, 28 September 2020.
19. Petra Molnar and Lex Gill, ‘Bots at the Gate: A Human Rights Analysis of Automated Decision-Making in Canada’s Immigration and Refugee System’, University of Toronto International Human Rights Program and the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, 2018, pdf available at citizenlab.ca.
20. Louise Amoore, Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).
21. Tendayi Achiume has made similar arguments in her investigations into new technologies, border-maintenance and racial discrimination. See, for example, her ‘Report of the Current Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance’, at citizen-lab.ca – submitted to the 75th session of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, November 2020.
22. Jacobin, ‘Unionizing Google Workers: We Want Democracy at Work’, 13 January 2021, at jacobinmag.com.
23. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
24. Amoore, Cloud Ethics.
8 Abolition
1. Mariame Kaba, We Do This ’Til We Free Us (London: Haymarket, 2021), p.2.
2. Dan Berger, Mariame Kaba and David Stein. ‘What Abolitionists Do’, Jacobin, 24 August 2017, at jacobinmag.com.
3. André Gorz, Strategy for Labor: A Radical Proposal (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1967), pp. 7–8.
4. Critical Resistance. ‘What Is Abolition?’, available at critical resistance.org, accessed 24 December 2021.
5. See Critical Resistance, ‘Reformist Reforms vs. Abolitionist Steps to End IMPRISONMENT’, available at, criticalresistance.org, accessed 24 December 2021; and Mariame Kaba, ‘Police “Reforms” You Should Always Oppose’, TruthOut, 7 December 2014, truthout.org, accessed 24 December 2021.
6. Dimitris Papadopoulos and Vassilis S. Tsianos, ‘After Citizenship: Autonomy of Migration, Organisational Ontology and Mobile Commons’, Citizenship Studies 17: 2 (2013), p. 184.
7. Nicholas De Genova, ‘Citizenship’, in Deborah R. Vargas, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes and Nancy Raquel Mirabal, eds, Keywords for Latina/o Studies (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2017).
8. Yes, we know we are basically paraphrasing Milton Friedman here. Whoops!