Borders, Walls, and Transgressing the Limits of "Respectable Grown-Up" Thought

From class struggle to border militarization, the real problem isn’t complexity — it’s thuggery, intimidation, and abuse of power.

Borders and walls aren’t just about nations — they’re about power, control, and exploitation. The same forces that suppress labor movements build the fences that restrict human mobility and maintain global inequality. The real issue isn’t complexity — it’s control, wielded by the thuggish, thieving, sociopathic power elite.

A century ago, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, aka the Wobblies) called for international solidarity and the abolition of the wage system. Today, labor organizers still face retaliation for standing together. The power structures that exploit workers are the same ones that uphold the legitimacy of borders.

Recall the Preamble of the Industrial Workers of the World, featured on the History is a Weapon website:

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people, while the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
[…]
Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."

In his 1917 book Political Ideals Bertrand Russell echoed this:

Capitalism and the wage system must be abolished; they are twin monsters which are eating up the life of the world.

The IWW preamble also contains the celebrated phrase, “An injury to one is an injury to all,” which today remains as relevant as ever. Indeed, Labor Force writes in a recent email:

When New Seasons Market in Portland, OR, fired union treasurer Randy Foster for helping a blind co-worker while off the clock, the Labor Force was there to help fight back. Workers went on strike for NINE days at six area stores, and this community made countless phone calls to management while raising thousands of dollars in direct donations to Randy’s GoFundMe and New Seasons Labor Union’s strike fund.

We’re excited to say: Solidarity works!

Management budged and agreed to a mediated meeting about Randy's discipline. Not only that, but during the most recent bargaining session, management made notable economic concessions after months of stalling.

As one picket sign read, “When you mess with Randy, you mess with ALL of us.”

The Militarized Border

The main purpose of this post is to cross-post an article by Todd Miller, a seasoned journalist who has extensively covered border security and immigration issues. Miller is also the author of Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders.

David Graeber, in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, argued that if borders were opened, the ruling elite would suddenly have to care about economic justice at home. That’s why they build walls instead. Graeber wrote:

Once, during the protests before the World Economic Forum — a junket where tycoons, corporate flacks, and politicians network and share cocktails while pretending to discuss ways to alleviate global poverty — I was invited to engage in a radio debate with one of their representatives. As it happened, the task went to another activist, but I had already prepared a three-point program that, I believe, would have taken care of the problem nicely:

• An immediate amnesty on international debt (An amnesty on personal debt might not be a bad idea either, but that’s another issue.)

• An immediate cancellation of all patents and other intellectual property rights related to technology more than one year old

• The elimination of all restrictions on global freedom of travel or residence

The rest would pretty much take care of itself. The moment the average resident of Tanzania or Laos was no longer forbidden to relocate to Minneapolis or Rotterdam, the government of every rich and powerful country in the world would certainly decide that nothing was more important than making sure people in Tanzania and Laos preferred to stay there. Do you really think they couldn’t come up with something?

The point is that despite the endless rhetoric about “complex, subtle, intractable issues” (justifying decades of expensive research by the rich and their well-paid flunkies), the anarchist program could likely resolve most of them in five or six years. But, you might say, these demands are entirely unrealistic! True enough. But why are they unrealistic? Mainly because those rich guys meeting in the Waldorf would never stand for any of it. This is why we say they are themselves the problem.

Choral Intermezzo

This isn’t just an abstract debate about power — there are real, devastating consequences for people, families, and communities. She Took His Hands is a haunting choral work by Nicholas Cline that tells the story of Elvira Arellano, whose deportation in 2007 became a stark example of how brutal U.S. immigration enforcement tears families apart.

A key paragraph from the Chicago Reporter:

Arellano was a polarizing figure. Pro-immigration activists used her case to illustrate the country’s broken system, while anti-immigration activists wanted her deported and, in some cases, labeled her son an “anchor baby” while calling for the abolition of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

She took his hands
She said to him
Have faith
I will be fine
I will be with you soon
She took his hands

The Militarized Border — Continued

The militarization of borders is no accident — it’s a bipartisan strategy to control movement and maintain power. As Todd Miller points out, administrations from Clinton to Biden have expanded the border wall while pretending that immigration is "too complex" to fix. The key observation in Todd Miller’s post is the following:

In Nogales, the wall itself was a distinctly bipartisan effort, built during the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Here, Trump’s legacy was adding concertina wire that, in 2021, the city’s mayor pleaded with Biden to take down (to no avail).

The following quote from Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States complements Miller’s observation and is crucial for understanding the persistent power elite propaganda. Zinn refers here to the 1830s:

It was the new politics of ambiguity-speaking for the lower and middle classes to get their support in times of rapid growth and potential turmoil. The two-party system came into its own in this time. To give people a choice between two different parties and allow them, in a period of rebellion, to choose the slightly more democratic one was an ingenious mode of control. Like so much in the American system, it was not devilishly contrived by some master plotters; it developed naturally out of the needs of the situation.

The Mass Deportation Handoff