Carlos “smuggles” corn from Guatemala to Mexico. At least that’s what the Mexican government and most state accounts of Carlos’s activities would have you believe. Carlos disrupts this account, however, refuting the borders that the state imposes to criminalize his transfer of vital consumer goods. “The [geopolitical border] line belongs to the government,” he tells researcher Rebecca Galemba, but “the path belongs to the communities.”

Like Carlos, a growing number of people are questioning the purpose and necessity of borders and, by extension, national sovereignty. Understanding borders and citizenship as racialized, exclusionary, and violent formations that are crucial to the existence of nation-states, there is a growing movement proposing to abolish barriers to free mobility and refuse to accept the hierarchical division between “citizens” and “migrants.” As they ignite more and more people’s imaginations and produce tangible and deepening solidarities across—and against—the institution of national citizenship, there are growing demands for a historical account of the construction of border controls. The result has been a deepening analysis of how crucial the construction of citizenship and immigration regimes are for a world defined by gross inequalities and injustices.

Three new books reveal how immigration regimes in nation-states are violent by design. Despite mythical renderings of nations and borders as necessary, laudatory, or even benign formations, these scholars reveal how their immigration regimes and their criteria for “national belonging” are built on racist foundations institutionalized by European colonialism. In doing so, these scholars present compelling evidence that the borders, and the migration policies that flow from them, are immoral and must fall.

In a political landscape rife with commentators that problematize migration and migrants, Gracie Mae Bradley and Luke de Noronha’s Against Borders: The Case for Abolition argues for problematizing barriers to free mobility—the border itself. Contra the mainstream of migration studies, immigration restrictions are not timeless (or even Westphalian) features of state sovereignty but were put in place relatively recently, starting in the early to mid-19th century. While nation-state border controls are a legacy of European colonial empires, they argue, modern immigration laws also broke from prior colonial forms of state regulation of people’s freedom of mobility. “What is important is that the same territorialised, nationstate form is working its deadly magic in new historical contexts,” they write (emphasis added). In other words, even as both world systems (imperial and national) are built on violent foundations designed to divide and hierarchically rank, they are not exactly the same. As important as it is to recognize the continuities between imperial and national rule, so too is identifying their differences. Doing so not only helps us better understand our world today, it also allows us to formulate effective strategies to change it so that it is more just.

Critical to Bradley and de Noronha’s analysis is demonstrating the inherently racist, capitalist function of immigration laws. From their inception, modern immigration laws, the United States being among the first to enact them, established racialized criteria for membership in nascent nation-states by creating racialized hierarchies between “national populations” and “foreigners.” Racist immigration laws allowed for some foreign-born individuals to freely enter national territory, while ensuring others were harshly excluded or demonized and policed upon entry.

For example, the first US immigration law—the 1875 Page Act—explicitly barred the entry of two groups: “Chinese coolies” and “prostitutes” (which largely was used to bar women racialized as Chinese). Such hierarchies of difference also subordinated noncitizens within nation-states by marking them as “migrants” (i.e., not “citizens”), thereby creating a highly vulnerable and exploitable labor market category that enriched nation-states and capitalist investors. “Migrant labor” was—and remains—a valuable labor market category for nation-states and capital.

Sovereignty—perhaps especially in its national territorial form—is violence.

These discriminatory processes have not stopped with the elimination of explicitly racist criteria in national citizenship and immigration law in the latter half of the 20th century. Instead, the intensification of restrictions to citizenship in and immigration to nation-states have done the job brilliantly. Whether one is a “citizen” or a “migrant” in any nation-state has enormous consequences for all aspects of people’s lives, including how much one gets paid for their labor and whether one can be forcibly removed from society. Nationalism, considered a normal part of life by many, has not only added an important weapon to the repertoire of how to construct hierarchies, it has also normalized it.

Lest we absolve those nation-states not defined by whiteness (including the nation-states constructed from former European colonies, each of which also enacts restrictive citizenship and immigration controls and violently targets “migrants”), the authors insist that “we should not comfort ourselves with any suggestion that nationalism is only bad when white people do it,” adding that “‘White supremacy’ will not do all the explanatory work we require of it.” Against Borders is thus, quite refreshingly, a full-throated rejection of nationalisms of all stripes and hues.

Ultimately, Bradley and de Noronha urge us to stop seeing, thinking, and acting like a (nation-)state so that we can better understand that borders quash freedom dreams and further the state’s expropriative and exploitative practices. In other words, all borders—and thus, nations-states—are built on systems of racialized exclusion, extraction, and violence. Mere reform is not enough. Total abolition of borders is required to end the foundational violence of national sovereignty.

Helpfully, Bradley and de Noronha discuss how to start realizing such revolutionary goals. Developing the ideas of André Gorz and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, they argue that to get to a world with no borders requires distinguishing between “reformist reforms” and “non-reformist reforms,” metrics used today by the prison abolition movement. Reformist reforms are those that make some change but ultimately uphold the oppressive structures. For example, Bradley and de Noronha suggest that campaigns to legalize the illegalized or extend citizenship status to those currently denied it are reformist reforms because they fail to challenge the belief (and practice) that territorial sovereigns get to determine who belongs—and who does not—within the political community. Non-reformist reforms, on the other hand, not only ease the harm imposed by structures but also expose the material, ideological, and social basis of ruling. Calls to allow people to access essential goods and services regardless of their citizenship or immigration status, for example, weaken the power of national citizenship as a means of exclusion and are thus non-reformist reforms.

With this, Bradley and de Noronha make an important contribution to the (thankfully!) burgeoning list of books against borders and for freedom of mobility. Their historicization of the contemporary national border regime helps us understand our present and encourages us to act to alter our futures.

Mahmoud Keshavarz and Shahram Khosravi’s edited volume, Seeing Like a Smuggler: Borders from Below, also rejects outlawing people’s movements across our planet. They do so by interrogating the maligned figure of the “smuggler” (and, arguably, their cousin, the “trafficker”), who they argue are falsely portrayed as the reason people crossing borders encounter danger and even death. The demonization of the “smuggler” hides the fact that people (and things) cannot move on their own. This is especially the case for people trying to cross national borders that are increasingly closed and ever more militarized.

Contributors show that “smugglers” are not the main problem for the smuggled. National borders are.

Acts of “smuggling” offend today’s international legal regime, which treats national sovereignty and its respect for national restrictions on political membership as sacrosanct. As the politics of “going after the smugglers” intensify—and nation-states expand the category of who and what counts as “smuggling”—this volume argues that criminalizing “smuggling” serves to normalize nation-states’ restrictions on free movement into nationalized territories. “Anti-smuggling” measures are part of how we are encouraged to ignore the inherent violence of national border controls and scapegoat those willing and able to facilitate movement across them. Like Against Borders, the essays in the volume use history to disrupt narrow portrayals of smugglers as the sole or even main purveyors of violence against migrants.

Contributors further show how today’s smugglers often rely on infrastructures and routes developed long before national borders existed. Many activities now criminalized as “smuggling,” in other words, are nothing more than a continuation of similar activities—trade in goods, for instance—taking place in the same area since time immemorial. As Debdatta Chowdhury points out in chapter 7, practices criminalized as “smuggling” by nation-states reflect people’s adaptations to the imposition of national borders.

Unusually, seeing like a smuggler does not offer a singular view of the world. Those categorized as “smugglers” are not uniform. Contrary to official rhetoric about “organized crime syndicates,” it is only a select few for whom moving people and things across national borders is part of larger business ventures. Perhaps for most, smuggling is instead a critical subsistence activity. That being said, seeing like a smuggler does give us a vantage point that states would rather we ignore: Acts of smuggling (including being “smuggled”) reflect—and attempt to compensate for—gross inequalities in our world. As Aliyeh Ataei tells us in chapter 3, for many people, life dictates that “the border has to be crossed.”

Perhaps the greatest challenge to normative portrayals of smugglers as dangerous and nefarious figures is the perspectives of people whom nation-states claim they are “saving” with their anti-smuggling agenda. People who have been migrantized (a state process of categorizing some people as “migrants”)—the very ones who rely on “smugglers”—are, in fact, the least likely to perceive them as a problem. Instead, for many migrantized people, “smugglers” are problem-solvers, even lifesavers. It is true that smugglers try to conceal people from the law, but people rely on such concealment. Laws against smuggling also conceal something: the fact that states and capital are responsible for the harm done to those they’ve made into “migrants.” Anti-smuggling laws and discourses work to deflect their responsibility and thus depoliticize the violent foundations of today’s world capitalist system of nation-states. But, as Keshavarz and Khosravi remind us, smuggling “is not merely an economic service but puts demands on us to engage with the question of borders ethically and politically.” An ethical stance seeks to repoliticize what the “anti-smuggling” efforts of nation-states seek to conceal: that it is the existence of barriers to free movement, not the smugglers, who subject people to violence, criminalization, and exploitation. As a growing body of research shows, this violence is an essential characteristic of the current world capitalist system of nation-states.

Mapping Deathscapes: Digital Geographies of Racial and Border Violence, a volume of essays edited by Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese, is an offshoot of the internet teaching tool called Deathscapes (archived in the National Library of Australia). In the book, contributors also look at the intersection of various forms and structures of state violence as they harm and kill Indigenous people and migrants. In contrast to a growing body of work that views migrants as “settler colonists,” Mapping Deathscapes makes connections between Indigenous people and migrants by seeing their experiences of violence as manifestations of the same “logic” of what they term “settler states.” They trace the contemporary horrors of state violence (sometimes described in gruesome detail) in people’s homes, police stations, police vans, prisons, and migrant detention camps back to the colonial violence that built and maintained the British empire.

“Countermapping” state violence is also central to the work of Mapping Deathscapes: Digital Geographies of Racial and Border Violence (and the website project it documents). Like other such efforts, the goal is to create alternative maps that challenge dominant power structures. In this volume, contributors foreground those targeted by such structures to bring together social phenomena that states would rather keep apart, specifically the shared deathscapes that both migrants and Indigenous people experience, including prisons, police brutality, and social abandonment. Contributors contend that what connects these deathscapes is the violence of “settler sovereignty.” Settler sovereignty, its editors argue, is founded on the “usurpation of unceded Indigenous sovereignty,” one which “can be seen to be structurally connected to its insistent militarization of the border.”

Addressing the violence states deploy to subjugate, harm, and kill both Indigenous people and refugees as occurring within the same analytic field is very much needed. Its refusal to represent “migrants” as “settler colonists” is especially refreshing. The importance of recognizing that people in both these state categories were the targets of European colonial violence and both were explicitly excluded from the nation-building projects that followed, while crucial, is increasingly dismissed by those who have equated colonization with the age-old act of people moving. Mapping Deathscapes, fortunately, understands that these are distinct processes and that equating them is a form of violence in its own right. For example, Patricia Hill Collins’s essay brings the white in white settler colonies back into the analysis of the violence enacted by nation-states now ruling what the British empire termed its White Dominions (with Australia, Canada, and the United States being the main focus of the volume). Importantly, the contributors also reveal that however hard nation-states try to render invisible and unimportant the violence carried out against Indigenous women and refugees, their victims are remembered and kept alive by movements for social justice.

“migrants”—those who have no claims to national territorial sovereignty where they live and work—can show us the way to a world where everyone has the power to assert their common right to not be excluded.

The volume’s centering of “settler sovereignty,” however, places significant constraints on its ability to reveal either the connections between Indigenous people and “migrants” or the violent social relations that nation-states seek to uphold. In its opening pages, the volume recounts ceremonies in which Aboriginal activists confer “Aboriginal passports” to “refugees.” “The issuing of the Passports covers two areas of interactions between the Traditional Owners of the Lands and migrants, asylum seekers and other non-Aboriginal citizens in this country,” the Indigenous Social Justice Association states, adding, “Whilst they acknowledge our rights to all the Aboriginal Nations of Australia, we reciprocate by welcoming them into our Nations.” The use of passports as symbols of inclusion and reciprocity between Indigenous people and “refugees,” however, overlooks the fact that passports are foundational to the violence faced by “migrants” and, more broadly, to the global regime of national citizenship and immigration controls upon which the capitalist world system of nation-states rests. What remains unacknowledged, unaddressed, and perhaps even unthinkable for the contributors of Mapping Deathscapes is that the right of “Aboriginal Nations” to “welcome” is the sunny side of the nationally sovereign right to exclude.

The assumption, as evidenced by the aforementioned valorization of the “Aboriginal passports,” of Mapping Deathscapes seems to be that the citizenship and immigration practices of “Aboriginal Nations” are or would be inherently different than those of “settler states.” Yet, there are numerous examples of various national sovereigns across the world—in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, the Americas, and Europe—in which the politics of indigeneity is employed to legitimize and intensify the exclusion of “migrants” in the name of protecting the “natives” of the “nation.”

The inattention to these ways of enacting the power of indigeneity is possibly due to the valorization of national sovereignty across the contributions in this book. How practices of national sovereignty turn land into territory, people into citizens, and relationships into hierarchies is not addressed in any of the book’s chapters. Instead, ideas of “Indigenous sovereignty” are presented as eternal and generally good.

Not only does this have the effect of dehistoricizing the diverse practices of all those diverse people now gathered together into the category of Indigenous people (some had hierarchical societies prior to colonization, some did not), it also fails to address the inherent problems in the exercise of sovereignty. Like the dominant system we live in today, sovereignty is both normalized and equated with “the people” whom sovereigns claim to represent.

Favorably cited in Maria Giannacopoulos’s contribution is the Sovereign Union (2013) quoted as saying that “Aboriginal Law must sit on top of whiteman’s law, because our Law is the Law of this land.” This may make sense—clearly Indigenous people in Australia had prior ways of organizing their societies before European colonialism. However, to equate that with “sovereignty” or to equate those societies with “nations” is a historical inaccuracy, one with major and, I would argue, negative political consequences.

A key consequence of the exercise of indigenous national sovereignty—particularly in relation to those people made into “migrants,” which this book wishes to bring into the conversation—is control over citizenship. In this, indigenous sovereignty is more like the sovereignties of Canada, Australia, and the United States than the contributors to this volume acknowledge.

For example, the Mohawk Nation in what is now Canada and the Cherokee Nation in what is the United States have had serious, ongoing conflicts over their criteria for national citizenship. The Mohawk’s attempted expulsion of people who are not considered Mohawk by virtue of their genealogy (e.g., bloodlines) and the Cherokee’s attempted expungement from their citizenship rolls of the descendants of the Black enslaved people held by Cherokee ancestors and brought with them on the “trail of tears” (a forced march west) are textbook examples of how national sovereignty operates to exclude and expel in order to construct ideas of nationhood.

Such acts of bordering are generally left unquestioned. In the volume’s introduction, Perera and Pugliese say that “settler colonialism … is predicated on overrunning existing borders and establishing new ones in their place” (emphasis added). They go on to say that “Indigenous peoples, displaced, dispossessed and stripped of national status, themselves become refugees on their own land losing … the right to offer hospitality within their borders, among other crucial rights of sovereignty.” Mapping Deathscapes naturalizes and depoliticizes borders, at least for “Aboriginal Nations.” Yet, this ignores the structural violence of national sovereignty while also ahistorically treating the existence of (some) “nations” as a timeless and beneficent characteristic of human society. The result is the contributors’ notable lack of discussion of how the exercise of national sovereignty, including of the colonized and oppressed, is the source of much of the violence people across the world experience, be they “citizens” or “migrants” of either “settler states” or “national liberation states.”

In the end, valorizing sovereignty as the basis of a just and equitable world is part of the culture of nationalism and the acceptance of the nation-state. Sovereignty—perhaps especially in its national territorial form—is violence. Its exercise cannot lead to reciprocal relationships between people for the simple reason that the national sovereign rules land that has been turned into “national territory” purportedly for those turned into members of the “nation.” It does so against all those other people in the world who are left out of this equation. Perhaps this is why “migrants” —those who have no claims to national territorial sovereignty where they live and work—can show us the way to a world where everyone has the power to assert their common right to not be excluded.