Luke de Noronha: Angela Nagle argues that when we make arguments for open borders, we end up in chorus with free market capitalists – and much of the organised left seems to agree. But a politics of no borders – not open borders – is precisely one which refuses all forms of border violence. This refusal is based on the recognition that there is no way to restrict people’s mobility in a world this unequal except through extreme forms of state coercion. This refusal provides the starting point for our solidarity with migrants, not because we romanticise all forms of migration but because we abhor all forms of bordering.
Nativist ‘leftism’, on the other hand, is so devoid of imagination, so adrift from the struggle for collective liberation, and so profoundly parochial (read racist) in its imagined constituency, that it offers nothing for those concerned with making this floundering world liveable. Nagle and her kind present the worst tendencies within the left: a kind of necropolitics of borders in which the global poor, who are owed more than we can pay, are let die on an unimaginable scale, told to stay where they belong, and subject to the greatest excesses of state power should they dare to move without authorisation. More here.