Archive of Immigration and Asylum

A reading list on the changing role of borders and how we consider freedom of movement, globalization, and humanitarian crises across the world.

John Washington, author of The Dispossessed, shares his thoughts on Biden's immigration policy, the ethics of storytelling, and what to expect in the growing fight to open borders.

Luke Butterly charts the plight of undocumented migrants in France, the Gilet Noirs, during the COVID-19 crisis

In a violent and warming world the rich can afford to protect themselves—with gated neighborhoods, getaway homes, and walled nations—and the poor are left with few options but climbing over the barriers and sometimes cramming their life stories into a sympathetic narrative. As other doors have been slammed on migrants by successive administrations—the “line” to get in has become so long and serpentine, it effectively serves as another wall—claims of fear are increasing.

How did security become the rallying cry for the US government to restrict immigration in the post-war period?

On December 8th of last year, seven year old Jakelin Caal Maquin died in Border Patrol custody. Her death came at the hands of Prevention Through Deterrence, a border security policy implemented under President Bill Clinton. 

On the 1st October, undocumented migrant workers at 12 companies in Paris went on strike. The strikes called for improvements to pay and the exploitative conditions of work, but the unifying call across all sites, though, was that they be given the right to live and work legally in France. Luke Butterly reports on the organising campaign, and the struggles of undocumented workers in Paris.

The Global Detention Project has identified more than 2,000 detention centers worldwide. For corporate powers and global elites borders have been erased, but migrants fleeing violence and economic insecurity are faced with deportation or detainment in inhumane detention centers. Todd Miller responds to the crisis at the border and exposes the contradictions in the government justifying the use of concentration camps to detain migrants.

In place of conventional warfare, securocratic wars, waged to protect and secure not individual nations but the international class of wealthy nations, insert themselves into the yawning gaps of global inequalities. Wars on drugs, on terror, on immigrants have created never-ending battlescapes, often along borders.