Synopses & Reviews
The aggressive exploitation of labor on both sides of the US-Mexico border has become a prominent feature of capitalism in North America. Kids in cages, violent ICE raids, and anti-immigrant racist rhetoric characterize our political reality and are everyday shaping how people intersect at the US-Mexico border. As activist-scholar Justin Akers Chacón carefully demonstrates, however, this vicious model of capitalist transnationalization has also created its own grave-diggers.
Contemporary North American capitalism relies heavily on an inter-connected working class which extends across the border. Cross-border production and supply chains, logistics networks, and retail and service firms have aligned and fused a growing number of workers into one common class, whether they live in the US or Mexico. While money moves without restriction, the movement of displaced migrant workers across borders is restricted and punished. Transborder people face walls, armed agents, detention camps, and a growing regime of repressive laws that criminalize them. Despite the growth and violence of the police state dedicated to the repression of transborder populations — the migra-state — migrant workers have been at the forefront of class struggle in the United States. This timely book persuasively argues that labor and migrant solidarity movements are already showing how and why, in order to fight for justice and re-build the international union movement, we must open the border.
Review
“If you want to understand why international borders are open for the corporate-class, while slammed shut for migrant workers, this excellent, incisive, thoroughly-researched, and thought-provoking book is for you. In The Border Crossed Us, Justin Akers Chacón addresses precisely what most discussions on open borders lack: how their enforcement is entrenched in capitalism and the free market system. He makes clear that there is no ‘security’ or ‘protection’ in militarized divisions, that borders need to be broken down for the sake of humanity’s collective wellbeing, and that it is a working-class, cross-border solidarity movement that can lead us to justice.” Todd Miller, author of Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the US Border Around the World
Review
“In The Border Crossed Us, Justin Akers Chacón asks — and answers — the hard questions about how the corporate capitalist class has been using border militarization and violent immigration enforcement to squeeze every last bit of profit out of workers, casting aside their dignity and humanity along the way. Chacón does the necessary work of staring hard into the everyday reality of people trampled by the border machine. This is an essential addition to border studies, as convincing — of the need to open borders — as it is compelling.” John Washington, author of The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the US-Mexican Border and Beyond
Review
“At last, here is a book showing just how critical the demand for the freedom of workers' mobility is to the anti-capitalist movement. Justin Akers Chacón makes the urgent case for a new internationalism, one that openly rejects the divisive, racist, and anti-worker politics upholding national borders. With a clear-eyed examination of how labor repression is the core of the migra-state, Chacón's call for cross-border — and anti-border — organizing is shown to be a necessary part of working class politics everywhere.” Nandita Sharma, author of Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants
Synopsis
A compelling argument that re-building unions requires solidarity with migrant workers and opening borders.
About the Author
Justin Akers Chacón is an activist, labor unionist, and educator living in the San Diego-Tijuana border region. He is a Professor of Chicana/o History at San Diego City College. His other books include No One is Illegal (with Mike Davis) and Radicals in the Barrio.