7 Quotes by Harsha Walia

Ensuring labor protections and citizenship status is the most ethical and effective counter to the far right's anti-migrant racism. Otherwise, attacks on migrant workers -- buttressed by ubiquitous anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, anti-Muslim, anti-Roma and anti-Latinx racism -- will continue to work as intended for capitalist interests: channeling irregular migration into precarious migration, lowering the wage floor for all workers, and expanding carceral governance.

Butterflies have always had wings; people have always had legs. While history is marked by the hybridity of human societies & the desire for movement, the reality of most of migration today reveals the unequal relations between rich & poor, between North and South, between whiteness and its others.

I think the notion of dreaming in a time where we are told that it is foolish, futile or not useful is one of the most revolutionary things we can do. To have our lives determined by our dreams of a free world--instead of reactions to a state-imposed reality--is one of the most powerful tools of decolonization.

Territorial diffusion relies on biometric surveillance and disciplinary practices within the state, as well as imperial outsourcing. Put another way, the border is elastic, and the magical line can exist anywhere. Crossing the border does not end the struggle for undocumented people, because the border is mobile and can be enforced anywhere within the nation-state. Internal bordering differentiates those within the nation-state who are citizens from those who are not.

Empires crumble, capitalism is not inevitable, gender is not biology, whiteness is not immutable, prisons are not inescapable, and borders are not natural law.

Right-wing nationalism is a bourgeois nationalism, and in our struggles against capitalist austerity we must emphasize that our enemy arrives in a limousine, and not on a boat.

Borders controls are most severely deployed by those Western regimes that create mass displacement, and are most severely deployed against those whose very recourse to migration results from the ravages of capital and military occupations. . . We are all, therefore, simultaneously separated by and bound together by the violences of border imperialism.