Attention to national borders has figured prominently in the post-9-11 world. At the same time that some national state boundaries are flagrantly ignored - as in the ongoing US-led bombing of Afghanistan - the borders that define First World space are made increasingly out of bounds for many. The beefing up of national security forces at the borders that mark the space for the west is repeatedly portrayed as the first, and most important, line of defense against terrorism .

- By Nandita Sharma

Attention to national borders has figured prominently in the post-9-11 world. At the same time that some national state boundaries are flagrantly ignored - as in the ongoing US-led bombing of Afghanistan - the borders that define First World space are made increasingly out of bounds for many. The beefing up of national security forces at the borders that mark the space for the west is repeatedly portrayed as the first, and most important, line of defense against terrorism .

The idea that terrorism is a Third World import carried in by non-white people has become the widely accepted excuse for increasingly repressive border policies throughout the Global North. In Canada (as in the US, the European Union, Australia and New Zealand), a border panic has been carefully constructed so that the terrorists are always seen as existing outside of our society. Terrorists, first and foremost, we are told are always foreigners. This, of course, conveniently masks the reality of the terror and victimization against people the world over perpetrated by these same western societies (including within them) and misrepresents them wholly as victims.

In North America, major legislative and policy changes concerning the border have taken place since the Big Day. In October 2001, a new, and erroneously titled, Canadian Refugee Protection and Immigration Act was put into place. It will very seriously and negatively effect the ability of non-white migrants, in particular, to ever gain legal and permanent status in Canada.

In December 2001, a thirty-point Smart Border Declaration was signed between Canada and the US in response to the over-heated call for the establishment of a North American perimeter from Washington. Entry-visa requirements between the two countries were harmonized, information exchanges and coordinated intelligence activities to screen travelers were planned and airlines were compelled to hand over passenger lists to the government.

Both of these measures have strengthened the by now common-sense association between terrorism and immigration. Terrorists , it is popularly believed, are able to enter North America because of what the Alliance Party calls lax refugee and immigration practices. This is reflected in a December 2001 Ipsos Reid poll that found that 69% [of those polled] don t trust screening of new Canadians and sees them as a danger to Canadians .

Yet, which Canadians don't trust new Canadians ? The polling questions are clearly directed at those who feel great managerial authority over regulating Canadian space and defining exactly who is safe or dangerous for Canadians . Even a superficial examination of power in Canada reveals that only Whites feel empowered to make such pronouncements and know that they will be heard. Only they have the widely accepted authority to govern over membership of the nation .

It has been long discussed that phrases like immigrant and new Canadians have little to do with one s legal status or even whether one was born in Canada or not but are shaped by racialized understandings of who belongs and who doesn t. Both are euphemisms for non-whites from the Third World . The success of border panics, then, clearly rest on the deep foundation of racism and colonialism that both Canadian and US societies are built upon and pushes it further. This is why it would seem utterly bizarre for anyone to ask new Canadians whether Canadians make them feel safe or not. They are not supposed to even think within the framework of security for this would place them and not Whites - at the center of Canadian life.

Recent attacks against the ability of refugees to make claim in Canada need to be understood in this light. Refugee claimants (often labeled illegals ) are those people who have not usually received prior governmental permission to come to Canada. That is, they have asserted their own will and have determined for themselves that they need to come here in search of relative safety. And, maddeningly for anti-immigration types, they have the recognized legal ability to gain permanent residency status if their claim is successful. This is too much for the White managers of Canada whose historic goal has always been to quash the self-determinant willfulness of non-whites.

In what can only be seen a further institutionalization of attacks against refugees, on January 11, 2002, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that failed refugee claimants facing death can now be legally deported if deemed to be a serious risk to national security . The unanimous court decision further ruled that it is not necessary for the state to show that a particular refugee poses a specific threat to the security of Canada or to reveal to that person the sensitive information used to come to this conclusion. Tellingly, the decision was heralded by anti-immigrant types as a victory for community rights , thereby further enhancing the idea that anti-immigration rulings were good for the Canadian nation .

In March, 2002 this same Supreme Court entrenched discrimination against those who had become permanent residents in Canada by ruling that they can be legally denied work in the public service because of their lack of citizenship. Also in March, Canada and the US agreed to deploy joint customs teams to screen shipping containers at ports in Canada therefore extending the US security perimeter. Also in March the US announced that another 3,000 foreigners (mostly young men, many of Arab origin) would be questioned in Round Two of the Disappearances within non-white communities. While acknowledging that not a single person had been arrested for organizing any terrorist attacks and that not a single plot had been uncovered during Round One, US Attorney General, John Ashcroft, insisted that more Disappearances would enhance our security.

On April 29, 2002 the Canadian government decided to delay indefinitely the part of its own recently passed new Refugee Protection and Immigration Act that created a new appeals process for refugee claimants. In June, 2002 Canada and the US jointly signed a so-called Safe Third Country Agreement that would deny due process to thousands of refugee claimants: anyone claiming asylum at the Canadian border who had traveled through the US would be automatically turned back to the US where the claim would most certainly be rejected. This was seen to create the incentive for people to live and work in Canada as an officially illegal person.

All this time, the Canada-US border became increasingly militarized making any undocumented border crossings a potential death sentence. Armed US National Guard soldiers remain positioned across the continent and there are plans afoot for Canada to allow armed troops to provide the equipment, personnel and training to patrol the Canadian side of the border. A further militarization of North America was advanced in April 2002 when a new US military zone stretching from the Canadian Arctic to Mexico was created. Called the Northern Command. Its head was empowered to deploy armed troops, tanks, warships and combat aircraft in defense of our borders.

Clearly, border panics drive the insecurity discourse. Whether in France, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Britain, Australia, the US or Canada, immigration and immigrants (read: non-whites) are a constant source of worry for those Whites who imagine themselves as the natural governing managers of the west and, particularly, of the western nation . Indeed, no other single area has done more to enhance the power of business, the power of the state and the governing power of whites than have the ongoing debates over immigration (how much? who? are there too many ? should we continue letting them in?).

As Ghassan Hage has brilliantly pointed out immigration debates provide [a] kind of White governmental buzz . That is, whites who feel empowered to weigh in on the immigration debate (through their racialized position as the natural citizen ) are, through them, able to assert their power over Third World people by continually constructing us as the problem that they can manage , contain , control , tolerate or reject . Hage further points out that by constructing non-whites as the object of worry, we are not given any legitimized space to do any worrying ourselves (even though we clearly have a lot to worry about, especially after 9/11!).

Post-9/11 has done much to increase this naturalized sense of national entitlement that Whites feel to spaces defined as Canadian , American and so on. However, it needs to be understood that the latest episode in border panic is part of a much larger re-configuration of power. Within the west , this has taken on the form of simultaneously including and excluding non-whites. We are included in the ranks of the unemployed, as cheap workers with bad jobs, in substandard housing, in jails, as illegals and so on. We are excluded from anything amounting to real power in this society.

This is mirrored within repressive immigration policies as well. Such policies do not have as their goal the shutting down of borders to non-whites per se. Instead, what border controls and immigration debates do is make those non-whites who do get in even more vulnerable during their lives in Canada. By constructing non-whites as the worrisome problem for the nation , even those who gain formal citizen status are denied any publicly acknowledged right to be anything other than what Whites want (the monstrous Other or the charming ethnic enriching White lives through our interesting customes and food).

Secondly, by legitimizing the actual denial of permanent, citizen or other legal status to most who do migrate, a growing number of non-whites are categorized as temporary, illegal and always foreigners within Canada . In Canada the majority of non-whites coming here to work and live are admitted either as temporary migrant workers with no rights to claim protections or benefits from employers and the state or they come as illegals those the state denies status to.

This works to further entrench the power and reach of an imperialist, capitalist, globalizing class that needs borders to be established and maintained for its security . The state, through its internationally recognized right to discriminate between citizens and non-citizens is able to offer employers the cheapest and most weakened group of workers simply by denying most people the ability to gain legal citizenship status. Indeed it can be said that this is one of the key effects of the global system of nationalized borders.

Amidst attacks against non-whites, it is important for us to recognize that such White responses are precisely an indication of the growing power of non-whites within westernized spaces. It is the willful assertion by non-whites of our own power to take up space and determine who and how to be that has contributed to such panic about borders. As Hage has pointed out, as non-whites have gained strength in the west , immigration debates and border panics have ensued. Both are bold-faced attempts to put non-whites back in our place as the subjugated objects of White power.

Yet, while these attacks have undoubtedly served to increase our impoverishment and vulnerability to abuse and exploitation, many of us continue to step out of our pre-assigned place and resist. Before 9/11, and especially since, new energy has surged through anti-racist and anti-nationalist political groupings. For many resisting the war on terrorism in Canada, anti-racism has been recognized as a key plank.

More importantly, an Open the Borders politics has re-emerged in Canada following 9/11. As it becomes increasingly apparent that border panics re-assert a White supremacist, imperialist vision of the world on us all, more and more of us are declaring that the state does not have the legitimate authority to render people illegal and that it is people, not states and corporations, who should determine when, where and if people stay and when, where and if people move.

These movements have developed an integrated politics which accounts for the need to end people s displacement worldwide, to ensure that people are freely able to move and that pro-migrants politics are deeply connected to Indigenous peoples struggles for traditional land and self-determination. This has increased the level of sophistication of analysis and practice within anti-capitalist forces and has created the possibility of movements that are stronger precisely because of their recognition that nationalist practices serve the interests of global capitalism. This is something that the traditional Left-nationalist politics has been unable or unwilling to acknowledge. Open the Borders movements are an indicator that non-whites, even after 9/11, will continue to assert our right to have our own will, to be self-determinate in a way that imperialism would deny us.