“The asylum system is a rejection of anything that disrupts American universalism. It’s kicking people out who offer an alternative view of the world.”
Tag: Borders
Riding with Du Bois
Railroads—in the Jim Crow South just as in today’s Ukraine—employ physical infrastructure to create racial divisions.
Public Thinker: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on How to Upend Settler Colonialism
“One of my objectives in writing the book was a plea to immigrants to not become settlers.”
Borders Cast Long Shadows on Nations: Talking with Malini Sur
“Borders continue to gather life’s promises, even when walls and checkpoints brutally divide nations and societies.”
Migrant Lives, Global Stories
How can migrants speak? And what can listening to them reveal about the system of national sovereignty, the persistence of legal exclusion, and the longing for home?
The Perspective Is the Story
Jenny Erpenbeck’s fiction is an attempt to grasp the underlying precariousness of our sense of identity and belonging.
One Border, Two Walls: Douglas, Arizona, and Agua Prieta, Sonora
The sun is setting behind the Tohono O’odham Nation Reservation, and ...
The Immigration Crisis Archive
Back in 1954, the Eisenhower administration shut down the US government’s last remaining long-term immigrant holding facility, an ...
Loving Wilderness, Loving Borders
The Wednesday after the 2016 election, my son, Julien, arrived home from school crying. “Do we have to go home, too?” He had been talking with some of his ...
The Future of Migration
In 2008, in a town of about 2,000 people, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained 389 workers and charged them with civil immigration violations and identity theft. The Bush ...
Francisco Cantú Talks Borders, Rhetoric, and Climate Change
Twenty pages into my first reading of The Line Becomes a River, I laid the book ...
Citizens to Come: Building Beyond the 14th Amendment
On the 150th anniversary of the 14th Amendment we are called upon ...
Motherhood in the End Times
Having a child forces you to confront all of those abstract threats you might have previously labored to ignore: physical entropy, the planetary future, human ...
Zombie Guts and Border Walls
In Season 2 of the zombie apocalypse show Fear the Walking Dead, Nick, a gringo junkie from Los Angeles, survives separation from his family by slathering himself with zombie guts and walking ...