Liberatory

What would freedom actually require here? What are people already doing to build it, and what remains unresolved?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.

This lens holds three arguments open and resolves none of them. Whether the working class is a national body with a border to defend or an international one that borders exist to divide. Why one reparations campaign in this country won when others have not. And whether a system like this can be reformed or has to be abolished, a question the movement reached forty years before it became a hashtag. The material is arranged so the room argues rather than nods, which means the strongest version of each position is here, including the ones this school does not hold.

Anchor questions

• Is the working class a national body with a border to protect, or an international one that borders exist to divide?
• Japanese American redress won an apology and a check. Why that one, and not others?
• “Abolish ICE” sounds like 2018. It was argued in 1980. What changed, and what did not?
• A union you admire ran its own border patrol. What do you do with that?
• If the border makes the race, what would it mean to be free of it? Would that be a world without borders, or a world without this one?

Materials

Free unless marked otherwise. Each source’s standpoint is named. Several of these are here to be argued with, not agreed with.

Debate one: open borders, or a labor-protectionist left

This is a real and bitter argument inside the tradition, and it will not be settled by noticing that one side is popular with people you dislike.

• Harsha Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism (2013). The movement-facing book, written with more than twenty organizers: what no-borders politics looks like as practice rather than slogan. Free to borrow: archive.org. Her position stated short and free, in an interview: roarmag.org
• Angela Nagle, “The Left Case against Open Borders” (2018). The most-cited left argument for restriction: open borders is what capital wants, cheap labor is the point, and the open-borders left is being played. Read it, because the argument is real and the room will meet it. Flag two things honestly: it ran in a national-conservative journal, and its sourcing was widely and credibly criticized, including for citing no actual left open-borders advocate. Free: americanaffairsjournal.org
• Bernie Sanders, interviewed by Ezra Klein (2015). The better anchor for that pole, and the harder one to dismiss: a lifelong socialist saying “Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal,” because it “would make everybody in America poorer.” Nobody can wave this away as right-wing entryism. Free: vox.com
• Solidarity, “The Left Case for Open Borders.” The direct socialist reply: restriction has never protected the working class, it has divided it. Free: solidarity-us.org
• The empirical answer to the wage argument is Aviva Chomsky’s “They Take Our Jobs!”, in the theoretical lens. Read it before taking a side here, because most of this argument is conducted without evidence on either side.

Debate two: the reparations campaign that won

The companion theme stages Coates against Reed on reparations as an open question. This theme carries a case where it happened: an apology in statute and a check in the mail. That makes the question sharper, not softer.

• Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Personal Justice Denied (1982). The federal government’s own commission concluding, unanimously, that the incarceration was caused by “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” Free: archive.org
• Civil Liberties Act of 1988. Fourteen pages: an apology in law, twenty thousand dollars per surviving detainee, and a finding of racial prejudice written into the US Code. Free: govinfo.gov
• Maki, Kitano, and Berthold, Achieving the Impossible Dream (1999). How a small, politically inexperienced minority organized and won this from a hostile administration. The strategy, step by step. Free to borrow: archive.org
• Densho, “Redress movement.” The movement’s own split, stated without a winner: a class action in the courts, or grassroots lobbying in Congress, and each camp thought the other was wrong. Free: encyclopedia.densho.org

Debate three: abolition or reform

• Zócalo Public Square, “Before Abolish ICE, There Was Abolish INS.” In 1980, a thousand people from two hundred organizations met in San Diego and concluded the system could not be reformed. The demand is older than the acronym. Free: zocalopublicsquare.org
• Freedom for Immigrants, “Why Abolition?” The case stated by people who run a national detention hotline and hear what happens inside. Free: freedomforimmigrants.org

The relation, in one case

• “The Mariel Boatlift, Haitian Migration, and the Revelations of the ‘Black Refugees’” (Anthurium). Cubans were received; Haitians were detained and sent back. Same years, same water. If you want one reading that shows the two themes are one machine, this is it. Free and peer-reviewed: anthurium.miami.edu

Debates and disagreements

Some threads to hold open rather than resolve:

• Is the border a class weapon or a class defense? Walia says the border is how capital sorts and disciplines labor, so no border can serve workers. Sanders says an open border is what capital wants and would make everyone here poorer. Both are socialists. Both cannot be right. The room has to decide what the working class actually is before it can answer, and that is the real question underneath.
• Why did redress win? Because the class was small and legible? Because twenty thousand dollars was cheap? Because the wrong had a start date, an end date, and a paper trail, which slavery’s afterlife does not? Because a Republican president could sign it as a story about American self-correction? Reed’s argument that reparations are politically impossible has to answer a case where they were not. Coates’s has to explain why the precedent did not transfer.
• Abolition here, abolition there. Set the abolish-ICE argument beside the prison-abolition argument in the anti-Blackness theme’s liberatory lens and ask whether they are one position or two.
• Solidarity, and its price. The UFW ran a wet line and turned undocumented workers over to the INS. That is in the practical lens, and it is the labor-protectionist argument not as an essay but as something a beloved union did to people at the border. Anyone persuaded by Nagle in the abstract should read it and say plainly whether that is what they meant.

Further reading

For resources behind a paywall, see the note on access.

• Overland, A left case against borders: a response to, among others, Angela Nagle (2018). The most substantive of the rebuttals to Nagle, and the fairest to her, which is why it is the one worth reading if you only read one. Free: overland.org.au
• American Friends Service Committee, What you need to know about the call to abolish ICE. The Quaker service-organization framing, more cautious and more reformist. Useful precisely because it does not go as far as Freedom for Immigrants does. Free: afsc.org

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. One honest weakness: the strongest written statement of the left-restrictionist position may not exist. Nagle’s essay is the thing the argument happened around and its sourcing is genuinely weak, which is why the Sanders interview carries that pole instead. Contributions welcome, especially a serious left case for restriction that survives scrutiny, if one exists.