March 27 to July 10, 2025
Solidarity reading and discussion series
Thursday every 2 weeks; 8pm ET / 5pm PT, on Zoom
Anti-migrant racist nationalism has powered the rise of far right parties into power in countries throughout the global north, and is a central organizing idea in new fascist movements around the world. Just a few years after some in the left were announcing the end of the nation state, borders, detention, deportation, and racist exclusions are reentrenching the already deep divisions of power that rift the imperialist and third worlds, while also remaking the identities of imperial subjects. Where is this anti-migrant panic coming from and how can we defeat it?
In this reading series, we will study the origins of imperial borders and nations and the history of anti-migrant racist nationalism in the US and Europe and within the labour movement, in order to critique and better fight the current crisis as an expression of politics inherent to capitalism.
This discussion series is open to all Solidarity members, friends, and others in and around social and socialist movements who want to join in. You do not have to commit to the whole series in order to participate, and you do not have to read all the readings.
Each class’s readings are divided into “main” and “supplementary” readings – with main readings being between 20 and 100 pages. Read whatever you’re able; we will begin each discussion with a presentation from special guest presenters, often from authors of the readings for the week, so all participants can catch up. We have also included movies and podcasts each week so participants who don’t have the inclination or capacity to do the readings also have a way to prepare for discussions each week.
Register here. If you have any questions, email info@solidarity-us.org.
Overview
- Week 1, March 27: Origins of a debate: Migration as a socialist question in the Second and Third Internationals
- Week 2, April 10: A white man’s country? A century of Asian labor and anti-Asian racism
- Week 3, April 24: Anti-migrant panic in the 21st century
- Week 4, May 8: The National Question and the creation of imperial borders
- Week 5, May 22: Foundations of Trump’s deportation, detention, and surveillance machinery
- Week 6, June 5: Migration and Eco-Fascism in a time of climate and capitalist crisis
- Week 7, June 19: Enforcing national borders, making nationalist racism
- Week 8, July 10: No borders! Smashing anti-migrant racism (public panel)
Week 1: Origins of a debate: Migration as a socialist question in the Second and Third Internationals (March 27)
Presenter: Mike Taber
Second and Third International debates about migration
David L. Wilson, “Marx on Immigration: Workers, Wages, and Legal Status,” Monthly Review, February 1 2017.
Wilson examines Karl Marx’s thinking on tensions between Irish and English workers in England circa 1870. He also tries to clarify Marx’s views on the question of the impact of immigration on wages–and what the contemporary Left might draw from those views.
Mike Taber (ed), “The Debate on Immigration,” in Reform, Revolution and Opportunism: Debates in the Second International 1900-1910 (Haymarket Books, 2023), pp.83-105.
This is a collection of documents, gathered by Mike Taber, on debates over immigration within the Second (Socialist) International, the body linking socialist and labor parties from around the globe, at its 1904 Amsterdam Congress and 1907 Stuttgart Congress. These were truly debates, ranging from strongly anti-immigration perspectives to other viewpoints favoring solidarity with immigrant workers.
Eugene V. Debs, “Letter about Immigration,” International Socialist Review, Vol. XI, No. 1. July 1910.
Here American socialist leader, Eugene V. Debs, offers a rebuttal to anti-immigrat and xenophobic currents within the socialist workers’ movement in the United States (some of those views were showcased in the documents assembled by Mike Taber).
Records of anti-Asian racism in the US labor movement
Alexander Saxton, “The Progressive Era,” in The Indispensible Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (University of California Press, 2020).
A/V
“Mike Taber on the Second International: Debates around reform versus revolution,” Why Marx? Education and Discussion series, May 28 2023. YouTube lecture, see opening comments and question at 33 minutes.
Week 2: A white man’s country? A century of Asian labor and anti-Asian racism (April 10)
Presenter: Rob Connell
Progressive-era Anti-Asian racism in the US and Canada
Henry Tsang, White Riot: The 1907 Anti-Asian Riots in Vancouver (Arsenal Pulp Books, 2024). Ch. 3: “Uprooting the Racism in Our Ranks: Reflections from a Labour Perspective” (Asian Canadian Labour Alliance: Stephanie Fung, Anna Liu, karine ng, Chris Ramsaroop)
Jean Pfaelzer, “The importation of females in bulk,” and “‘She had stolen nothing from him but herself’: Chinese women and the body politic,” in California: A Slave State (Yale University Press, 2023).
Migrant Asian labour in the global care chain today
Susan Ferguson and David McNally, “Precarious Migrants: Gender, race, and the social reproduction of a global working class,” Socialist Register 2015 (Merlin Press, 2014)
Arlie Hochschild, “Global Care Chains and Emotional Surplus Value,” in Justice, Politics, and the Family (Routledge, 2014).
A/V
360 Riot Walk: A 360 Video Walking Tour of the 1907 Anti-Asian Riots in Vancouver, https://360riotwalk.ca/
Supplementary
Kelly Lytle Hernandez, “Not Imprisonment in a Legal Sense,” in City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965 (Chapel Hill: University of South Carolina Press, 2017).
Week 3: Anti-migrant panic in the 21st century (April 24)
Presenter: Rachel Ida Buff, Professor of History and Director of the Culture and Communities Program at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee
Language and politics of anti-migrant racism
Rachel Ida Buff, “Enemy Alien (pg 80),” “Illegal Alien (pg 118),” and “Zero Tolerance (pg 226),” in A is for Aslyum Seeker: Words for People on the Move / A de Asilo: Palabras para Personas en Movimiento (2020)
David Scott Fitzgerald, “The Euro-Moat,” in Refuge Beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 192–218
The anti-migrant movement today
Cynthia Wright, “Migration Politics and Criminalization: Review of Harsha Walia, Border and Rule,” Against The Current, no 219, July/August 2022.
Dianne Feeley, “Defend Immigrants!” Solidarity Webzine, January 14 2025
Vinit Ravishankar, “The Rise and Rise of the Anti-Migrant Left,” The Left Berlin, January 13 2025
A/V
“Deportation Nation with Chris Newman,” The Dig with Daniel Denvir, February 9 2025. Podcast, 2 hours 35 minutes. https://thedig.blubrry.net/podcast/deportation-nation-w-chris-newman/
Le Havre (2011, Aki Kaurismäki, France, 94 minutes). Download here and enable english subtitles.
Supplementary readings
Al Jazeera, Irregular border crossings decline as EU immigration policy stiffens, Al Jazeera, October 28 2024.
Kevin Appleby, How Europe is Slowly Closing Its Doors to Asylum-Seekers, Center for Migration Studies, April 30 2024.
Mica Rosenberg and Perla Trevizo, “Four Years in A Day,” Propublica, February 7 2025.
Week 4: The National Question and the creation of imperial borders (May 8)
Presenter: Ronald Grigor Suny, Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor
The national question in theory
JV Stalin, “Marxism and the National Question” (1913)
E. Tendayi Achiume, “Revisiting the Right to Exclude,” part III of the long essay, “Migration as Decolonization,” Stanford Law Review, vol 71, June 2019.
Border making, state making
Laura Robson, “The Partition Solution,” In States of Separation: Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East (University of California Press, 2017)
Gregory Mann, “Governing Famine,” In Mann, From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel: The Road to Nongovernmentality (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Supplementary readings
Joel Beinin, “Arab Liberal Intellectuals and the Partition of Palestine,” In Arie M Dubnov and Laura Robson (editors), Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism (Stanford University Press, 2019).
Partha Chatterjee, “The Nation and Its Women,” in The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton University Press, 1993)
A/V
Yintah (2024, Michael Toledano, Jennifer Wickham, Brenda Mitchell, Canada, 2024). Stream for free (you have to make an account) on CBC Gem, or on Netflix.
Week 5: Foundations of Trump’s deportation, detention, and surveillance machinery (May 22)
Presenter: Leah Montange, Professor of geography at University of Toronto and migration justice organizer
Roots of detention
Kelly Lytle Hernandez, “‘The Days of the Wetback Is Over’: Migration Control and Crime Control in the US-Mexico Borderlands,” in Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2010).
Mae Ngai, “Deportation Policy and the Making and Unmaking of Illegal Aliens,” in Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
Experiences of detention
Behrouz Boochani, “Under Moonlight / The Colour of Anxiety,” in No Friend But The Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (Sydney Australia: Picador Pan MacMillan, 2018).
Updates on Trumpism
Montange, L. (2022). Political Detentions, Political Deportations: Repressive Immigration Enforcement in Times of Trump. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, View html or download pdf here
Supplementary readings
Montange, L. (2023). “They Will Destroy Themselves Wanting Purely American”: Labor and Carceral Immigration Enforcement in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 113(2), 409–424. View html or download pdf here
A. Naomi Paik; Carceral Quarantine at Guantánamo: Legacies of US Imprisonment of Haitian Refugees, 1991 – 1994. Radical History Review 1 January 2013; 2013 (115): 142–168. View html or download pdf here
A/V
Megan Ybarra – Hunger Strikes: A Call to End Immigrant Detention
Week 6: Migration and Eco-Fascism in a time of climate and capitalist crisis (June 5)
Presenter: David Bacon, photojournalist, author, political activist, and union organizer focused on labor issues, particularly those related to immigrant labor.
Capitalist crisis
Immanuel Ness, “Underdevelopment and Labour Migration as Economic Imperialism,” In Migration as Economic Imperialism: How International Labour Mobility Undermines Economic Development in Poor Countries (Wiley Blackwell, 2023).
Climate crisis
Sam Moore and Alex Roberts, “A history of far-right ecologism,” In The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right (Polity Press, 2022).
Bill McKibbon, “Where Will We Live?” (Review of Harsha Walia, Border and Rule, Benjamin von Brackel, Nowhere Left to Go: How Climate Change Is Driving Species to the Ends of the Earth, and Gaia Vince, Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World), New York Review of Books, October 6 2022.
Noam Chen-Zion, “Caught in Europe’s net: ecological destruction and Senegalese migration to Spain,” Review of African Political Economy, 2022, VOL. 49, NO. 174, 584–600
Migrant defence strategy today
David Bacon, “The Evolving Strategy for Defending Immigrant Workers,” Rosa Luxemburg Siftung, January 21 2025.
David Bacon, “Full Immigrant Rights in 50 Years?” Dollars and Sense, November-December 2024. (*David’s article is half way down the page)
A/V
Black Girl (1965, Ousmane Sembene, Senegal, 65 minutes) (Stream here)
Amy Goodman, “Ecofascism: Naomi Klein Warns the Far Right’s Embrace of White Supremacy Is Tied to Climate Crisis,” Democracy Now! September 17 2019 (Radio/Video interview)
Week 7: Enforcing national borders, making nationalist racism (June 19)
Presenter: To be announced
Race and migration across empires
Ian Sanjay Patel, “Race and Immigration in a Decolonising World” and “Inflating the Threat: The Global Immigration Crisis of 1967,” in We’re Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire (Verso Books, 2022).
Patel provides a historical overview of the late 20th-century development of antiracist discourse and international policy in the wake of successful decolonization movements. He then develops a case study of South Asian in East and Central Africa whose ambiguous national status rendered them undesirable to the pro-‘Africanization’ states of Kenya and Uganda where they resided, to Britain (despite their holding UK citizenship), and to India (their ancestral homes).
Connor Woodman, “The Imperial Boomerang: How colonial methods of repression migrate back to the metropolis” and “How France used colonial methods to massacre Algerians in Paris.” From 5-part series on Verso Books Blog.
Woodman describes the ‘imperial boomerang effect’ whereby imperial powers use their colonies to pioneer and experiment with new methods of repression, counter-insurgency, and ideologies that are later used to simllarly impose social control in the imperial metropolis. He presents the 1961 case in which tactics used against rebellions in colonial Morocco and Algerian were brought back and used against Algerian migrants in Paris, alongside more recent examples.
Anti-Blackness and anti-migrant racism: mass incarceration, immigration enforcement, and racial profiling
Angélica Cházaro, “III. Challenging the Goals of Deportation” (pp. 1083-1112), in “The End of Deportation,” 68 UCLA Law Review 1040-1128 (2021).
Cházaro rejects the assumption that pro-immigrant advocacy should focus on aligning deportation with due process and rule of law, arguing for the elimination of deportation itself (by rejecting rationales for deportation that further colonial goals).
Race, class, and the resurgence of far-right nationalism
Harsha Walia, “Refusing Reactionary Nationalisms: Class Through the Prism of Race,” in Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, (Haymarket Books, 2021)
Walia outlines the dangers of liberal multiculturalism, constructing the working class along racial/national lines, left defenses of nationalism, and eco-fascism.
Supplementary readings
Iyko Day, “The New Jews: Settler Colonialism and the Personification of Capitalism“, in Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2006).
Philip Kretsedema, “Race, Nation, Immigration: Stranded at the Crossroads of Liberal Thought,” in The Immigration Crucible: Transforming Race, Nation, and the Limits of the Law (Columbia University Press, 2012).
Philip Kretsedema, “Concerned Citizens, Local Exclusions: Local Immigration Laws and the Legacy of Jim Crow,” in The Immigration Crucible: Transforming Race, Nation, and the Limits of the Law (Columbia University Press, 2012).
Silky Shah, “The US Prison Boom and the Growth of Immigrant Detention,” and “Deterring the Crisis: Prosecutions, Prisons, and the United States-Mexico Border,” in Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition (Haymarket Books, 2024).
Brendan O’Connor, “Only Strong Measures Will Suffice,” and “Every State Is a Border State,” in Blood Red Lines: How Nativism Fuels the Right (Haymarket Books, 2023).
A/V
Interview with Harsha Walia, “Border and Rule,” Under the Radar.
Interview with Silky Shah, “The Border Itself Is the Crisis,” Time to Say Goodbye.
“Work, Borders & Beyond: A Conversation w/ Harsha Walia, Syed Hussan, Gilberto Rosas & MWAC Members”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRgJWgsIsiU
Week 8: No borders! Smashing anti-migrant racism (July 10 – public panel)
Public forum discussion focused on migrant defense strategy – readings and presenters to be announced.