 Welcome everyone to the Arts Link Assembly, virtual assembly this year. We move from being one day together in New York to five weeks online. This is week four of our five week assembly. And with this week looking at the whole principle and ideas behind the no borders movement and post nationalism. As you probably know by now the Arts Link Assembly is an annual convening that CC Arts Link organizes, which brings together artists and colleagues to really look at the role artists and cultural practitioners play in building both a civil society and achieving the level of social justice that all of us are keen to see in the world. This week I'm very, very happy that Thomas Nail philosopher at the University of Denver has curated the week. There's a whole range of resources that you can see on our website, readings, films, movies, documentaries, a whole range of things that you can use to dive into these, these ideas which in many cases still seem abstract but I hope by the end of today you'll see that they're not only tangible but are being already implemented by many people around the world. Thomas will will will introduce everyone but I just wanted to say that we have a panel today so the format will be three presentations and then the Q&A at the end. I should perhaps say if you're still waiting for the results from Arizona we we're reliably informed that that will be at the end of this but if there's any major developments, I'll certainly bring it to you so don't feel you're missing out. So Thomas is joined by Alex Sega, Alex is Professor at the University of Portland, and we're very happy he could he's able to join us he has a new book just published, which is called Against Borders, and it's why, why the world needs free movement of people. It's a very clear title and he'll be explaining some of the thinking in the book, and we are very happy that Nandita Sharma, Professor Sociology at the University of Hawaii can return. She had a great conversation with Thomas yesterday about her book Home Rule, but Nandita will be part of the panel too. So please use the Q&A box at the bottom of your, your console to submit any questions and we'll take them towards the end. But meanwhile, here's Thomas. Welcome. Thank you, Thomas. And thanks to thanks to everybody for attending and to Alex and Nandita. So the structure of our presentation today will go in order we'll start with Nandita who will will provide some of the grounds for critique and the arguments for the no borders the critiques of nation states how we, how we are sort of framing the problem, and then Alex will go second and then discuss the no borders position and are the arguments and debate around it. And then I'll try to give at least the beginnings of an answer of how, how we, how we go about building a no borders movement and what people are currently doing. So I will, I will hand things over to Nandita. Welcome, Nandita. Hi. Thank you. I'm Simon. Thank you, Thomas. Thanks for everyone at the Arts Link. For organizing this I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I'm going to share a PowerPoint presentation so I'm going to disappear from the screen. I don't know if it's worthwhile or maybe not will I disappear or not disappear. We can see you on the right hand side. Okay, great. Okay, great. And so nationalism, I'm sorry to assault you with this picture. I thought it was an appropriate place to start which is that nationalism is inherently about separation. Anderson told us a long time ago, nations are not only imagined as communities. National communities are always imagined as limited. So no one nation encompasses all the world's people and in stark contrast to the how imperial states acted. Nation states don't want to incorporate all the world's people into their domain. As Donald Trump puts it, a nation without borders all caps is not a nation at all. So, let me just nationalism produces some but never all people who live in its territory as a people. Nation states are also reliant on naturalizing a link between a certain people and a certain place. Nation states therefore require the turning of land, water and air into national territory. Those who are included in the nation therefore become a people of a place or more aptly a nation with a territory. Of course, not all people are a people, at least in the territories that they live in. So nationalism turns those who are excluded from what Bridget Anderson terms the national community of value into a people out of place. The figure of the migrant, which establishes the limits of the nation, and the migrant is always defined by lack, a lack of political status, a lack of national belonging and a lack of a claim to territorial sovereignty. The jealous guarding of the nation's people and its place has become a virtue in in our culture in our laws, certainly codified in international law is the right that that one's rights in this global system of nation states are only a secure as one's relationship with the nation state whose territory you're on. So when people are excluded from the ever changing and ever narrowing criteria of national belonging. They are seen by many as threatening the nation's security. And ultimately of course what migrants threaten is a security of nationalist identities, something that the national form of state power fosters in order to normalize its rule. So I want to talk about a particularly powerful and also uncanny aspect of the, you know, contemporary nationalist politics of separation. And it's the national borders that are erected between people who are constituted as either natives or as migrants. It sounds kind of old fashioned when we think about it but while natives who were, you know, the colonized people were once denied national status right they were often cat we were often categorized as tribes, clans, you know, etc. They were unable and unsuited to wear the mantle of nationhood, nativeness uncannily has increasingly become the real criteria for national belonging. So those who are categorized as migrants are defined as quintessentially out of place, because they're seen as not quote unquote native to it. So separating people into these categories of natives and migrants is no trifling matter. Their separation has been and continues to animate some of the most deadliest conflicts in the world today. Even before mass killings began in June 2012. The separation of people into natives and migrants in Myanmar formerly Burma has been the ideological basis for what, you know, most human rights observers believe is the world's most recent genocide. Not only is Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi silent about it, the quote unquote international community led by the United States and China have largely ignored it. But eager to normalize relationships with Myanmar and gain access to the estimated 10s of billions of dollars worth of verified natural gas deposits bound in the Bay of Bengal, where the targeted and supposedly migrant Rohingya minority inside little mention is made of how Myanmar has stripped Rohingya people of their citizenship, supported the burning looting and killing of Rohingya people and their homes, and place them in what, you know, a growing country where people classify as concentration camps, along with forcing hundreds of thousands to flee Myanmar, all in the names of the indigenous rights of the native Burmese Buddhists in Myanmar. In the Darfur region of Sudan, a populist save Darfur movement has successfully reframed the economic, ecological and political legacies of European imperialism there into a conflict between supposedly indigenous Africans and migrant Arabs. And this is played directly into the hands of oil companies and further fuels, you know, the kind of Islamophobic war on terror. In Rwanda, of course in 1994, those acting in the name of native Hutus killed approximately 800,000 supposedly migrant Tutsis. The most potent and inflammatory label during the Rwandan genocide and the one that was most used to define the Tutsis was that of colonizer. A dissimilar process took place in the 1991 to 2002 Yugoslav wars, where ideas of native belonging fueled the claims to Serbian Croatian and Bosnian homelands. Those people who were targeted for quote unquote ethnic cleansing were defined as foreign elements who are out of place in other people's homelands. 140,000 people were killed and another 2 million people displaced in the process. The ideological basis for the forced expulsion of Asians from Uganda in 1972 was the indigenization of black Uganda. The claims to native rights to rural nation states also led to coup d'etats aimed at unseating quote unquote Asian parliamentary leaders in Fiji from the 1980s into the 2000s. And such a politics continues to shape violent xenophobic attacks on migrants in South Africa. The force also informs white supremacist panics, moral panics about immigrant invasions across Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, as was made painfully clear in 2016. When Donald Trump was elected US president and shortly thereafter erected a quote unquote Muslim ban. And separating natives from migrants can also be seen in an increasingly popular discourse in the United States in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the former bright, the former British white settler colonies, where the white in white settler colonialism has been dropped amid a growing chorus of opinion that asserts that all people who are not native, including those who are racialized as black Asian or Latin X, are settler colonists, because they are migrants. That indigenous activist suckage Ward has even said that the quote the label settler is too historically and politically sterile, and that migrants are nothing less than occupiers. In these reformulations across the world and across the left right political spectrum, migrants are held to be responsible for the colonization of natives, and the stretching of the category of settler colonists to include those who were once largely excluded from the white settler colonial project is a politics of centering indigenous sovereignty over land. We can see this in Canada in the May 1981 adoption of the Ghana walk a Mohawk law and moratorium on quote unquote mixed marriages. Also known as the marry out get out law, as well as in the efforts of the Cherokee nation in the United States to expel Cherokee freedmen, who are the descendants of black people that were held as slaves by Cherokees and brought with them on the trail of tears to the territories that were later defined as Cherokee national territories. So, while these efforts of the Mohawks and the Cherokees were overturned by courts, they demonstrate not only the racialized basis for the idea of nationhood, but also the continuous process of calling. Each of them of course has their own specificities, but they are connected through what I call the discourse of a talk to me in which the migrant or the figure of the migrant is defined as the barrier to the realization of native national rule. And the fact that these a talk to this discourses are plausible and that they could do political work in a remarkably wide set of circumstances, ranging from the far right to social justice movements of some of the most subjugated and oppressed people on the planet. That tells us something really important about the significance of a discourse of a talk to me to the contemporary character of power. Now the term audit on is derived from the Greek autos, which is self and time which is earth, and it literally means someone who has sprung from the earth and refers to an original or indigenous element of a place. Many of the key classical Greek theorists Homer Socrates Plato Aristotle Euripides, all part took in the creation of a myth of a talk to me as the basis of claims to rule. Like a talk to me indigenous the term indigenous also stems from classical Greek political theory to be indigenous literally means to be born inside with the connotation and classical Greek at least of being born inside the house, which is you know, I being the master of a place. Those who are constituted as audit tons are seen to establish the limits of the political community. So they're, they're imagined to be rooted this language of rooting to particular lands and as such, the only ones who have the inherent right to that place. So Aristotelian metaphysics aside, the production of audit tons is both an historical as well as a relational practice audit tons, and their opposite. The audit tons belong to particular kinds of societies, a lot on is predicated on the Greek alo referring to that which is different, as well as the Indo European alo referring to someone or something else. It was first used in geological references in the 19th century to be Alec Thomas was to be originating or formed in a place other than where found originally again talking about rocks, but now talking about people. So in its modern usage, a talk to me is founded on the ideological transformation of class into race. And it's these associations made most clear in the nationalist transformation of classes into masses that Hannah are rent talked about that gives indigeneity so much of its political purchase today. Now the politics of a talk to me rests on another unacknowledged ideological transformation that that conflates human mobility with state controlled migration, and a secondary conflation between processes of migration with processes of colonization and that's what makes calling migration and calling migrants colonizers is what makes this politics of a talk to me on candy. Many of those many of us who were once categorized as natives of various European colonies have become supposedly colonizers sometimes of Europeans which is really bizarre, but at other times of other colonized natives. So for a growing number of people and their political projects around the world and migration, whether it's real or imagine whether it's today or 1000s of years ago has become tantamount to colonization which I think is an incredibly dangerous move. The separation of natives and migrants is, I argue, an integral part of the post colonial new world order in which the national form of state power has become hegemonic. And as much, you know, and created a new international and new interstatal regime of ruling and post colonialism, far from marking the end of the violent relationships of colonialism, instead marks the end of the legitimacy of imperial states and the ascendancy of the legitimacy of colonial states. Post colonialism in my formulation is a style of ruling that actively subsumes the collective anti colonial energies of people into a new separated world of nation states. And in doing so has actually led to a containment of demands for liberation. In the post colonial new world order, both colonizers and natives have been remade into national subjects. And, you know, both have, for the most part, been successful in gaining a nationalized sovereignty. And together, they have made, sorry, I'm a little off here, together they have made a post colonial new world order, wherein again as Benedict Anderson told us, nationness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time. So I'm going to skip ahead here because I think I'm running out of space here but we know that historical research has shown us that the process of making and limiting the nation has always entailed violence. Partitions and forced population transfers have been the order of the day and they continue. They appear to be a requisite part of the process of nationalizing people and territory, a process that produces some people as a people of a place and others as a people out of place. And to make common sense of this to make this make sense to people, the two groups are rendered incommensurable, unable to embark on any kind of common cause. We only need to think of how crucial forced population exchanges were to the accelerated process of nation building after World War One, and again after World War Two to understand this. So we see this mass movement, mass forced migration of people from Turkey into Greece, people from, you know, proper Turks in Turkey, proper Greeks in Greece, proper Pakistanis in Pakistan, proper Indians in India, proper Jews in Israel, and so on and so on. And in addition to these partitions and population transfers of course was the attempted expulsion and later extermination of those who were defined as being out of place as enemies of the nation. And this is again brutally evident in the world's latest genocide in Myanmar against Rohingya people who have been defined as colonizing migrants. So limiting national belonging is not only achieved through these processes of violent, you know, migrant forced migrations or extermination, probably the most important and and far more banal to technology for the realization and of the post-colonial new world order are the enactment of citizenship and immigration controls, preventing certain but not all people from entering national territory, all while deporting those who are denied lawful residency has been and remains an indispensable part of limiting national belonging. And indeed immigration controls is what distinguishes nation states from imperial states, imperial states did not have immigration controls. So there are relatively recent phenomenon. The national borders are also the point at where a globally operative capital and the global system of nation states meet immigration controls fragment a global proletariat into separate national proletariat, each with its supposed state and each competing with other national proletariat right the American proletariat competing with the Chinese proletariat is a common trope in the United States today. It's also important to note that immigration controls are also very productive of creating differences within nation states, citizens, immigrants, temporary foreign workers, refugees so called illegals and so on, not only mark a hierarchy of national borders, they also operate as labor market categories, what how much you're paid, whether you're able to organize into a labor union or access workplace protections and rights, all of them depend on which status you have been marked with by the nation state. So immigration controls and the anti immigrant politics that animate them and legitimate them create highly competitive labor markets within nation states precisely the thing that supposedly anti immigrant politics is is meant to remedy they actually produce the competition that they claim to be trying to remove. So, um, I'm going to conclude by arguing that the dynamism of this post colonial New World Order is maintained through the continuous remaking of the national political body partitions force population transfers expulsions exterminations are not one time events. They are continuously reenacted. There's always new nations being formed new national liberation movements, being, you know, formed and demanding their own territorial sovereignty. And that's because of the contradictions that are that are inherent in any effort to nationalize people, right nation states always fall short of their promises, and those promises when they fail lead to further nationalisms which you know Thomas and I were talking about yesterday as an paradox of this system that we live in. So, let me conclude by saying that a politics of no borders so we can segue into the next discussion, a politics of no borders which I have been active in since 1999 is when I first adopted a politics of no borders. Understands that the historic and gross injustices that are done to people captured in these highly differentiated state categories of national native citizen, immigrant, etc. are intimately connected to one another right they can try and separate us through these state categories, but we're not actually foreign to one another. We actually came into being side by side you can't have a citizen without having a migrant, and we can become inseparable if we choose to be. I believe that rejecting a politics of nationalism and of nativism is crucial to our ability to not fall off the cliff, which, you know the purpose, the precipice of which we are all currently on. Thank you. Thank you Nandita that was that was excellent. So, now this is a great segue into the next talk which is will be by Alex Sager, and he'll be giving a talk on no borders. So thanks Alex go ahead. Thank you Thomas thank you for organizing this just really wanted to be on this panel. What I want to do today is I want to share some insights inspired by the anarchist anthropologist David Graver who recently passed away. I never had an opportunity to meet him but for me David Graver, he was a theorist of hope and possibility and he was the type of theorists that really enabled us to see the world differently and imagine how it could change. You know, quick frankly I think this week, maybe these last few years we can all use a little bit of hope so I want to use some of his his work, particularly from a very short book fragments of an anarchist anthropology. I want to use this to think about alternatives to how nation states conceive of borders and to connect them to the archlyke link theme of radical hospitality. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to kind of start with practice and working into theory so I'm going to start by setting up a problem and some of the ways that people in my own city of Portland, Oregon have responded. So, on June 17, 2018 occupiers set up camp at the US immigration and customs enforcement headquarters in South Portland. The occupation was in response to the Trump administration's separation children. And it was also response to the deplorable conditions in a detention center near in Sheridan Sheridan's near Portland. At a time of widespread outrage against the Trump administration's immigration policies and our mayor Ted Wheeler he initially supported the occupation and declared that the Portland police were not interfere. Now, the protesters they they succeeded in shutting down headquarters until June 28. And then federal officers removed the attempts on the federal property and the rest of nine people, but the camp continued beside ice until July 23 when Wheeler he changed course course and supported the then Portland police chief Daniel outlaw. She's since moved on to Philadelphia and be in the headlines there. So she swept the camp. And the claim was is that the camp was a fire and biomedical hazard and it was blocking access to medical facilities. As far as I can tell those claims were false, but by July 25 2018, the occupation was over. So one lesson we can take from occupy ice and I think the occupy movement more generally is that occupying space works only as long as the state is reluctant to use violence to disperse protesters. States have learned that they can wait until people's attention has has wavered or the protests or the occupations lose popular support and then decided to please. Now, of course, protests against ice have not stopped. So, there's a weekly ritual in Portland, in which protesters and gas masks show up late in the evening at the ice building blasting music. Sometimes they drive a toy and Tifa tank and federal officers they invariably come out and sooner or later they come out with tear gas grenades and rubber bullets and chase protesters through the neighborhood. So, it's easy to despair here. The police they're heavily militarized and they're willing, I think even want to use force. The protesters have shown incredible resilience. There's a photo of couple embracing and the tear gas nearby ice. And, nonetheless, I think many of them and many of the independent journalists who cover these protests every night, they're going to suffer from long term. Okay, so I want to shift away from local struggles and kind of move to the larger picture. I think we should abolish ice, but it's only a piece in a much larger system. And we need a world that treats human mobility entirely different from the way states do. And let me just move to one more example. Let's move from Portland to the English Channel. You know, a tragic story, but in a lot of ways, a very, very familiar story. I looked at the missing missing migrant site that tracks tracks deaths along migratory routes earlier this week. And for this year the figure is 2421, at least as of Monday is probably a little bit higher now. The figure was 5,319. The year before it was 4,937. We go back to 2017. The figure was 6,279. And so on. This goes back decades. The state system and its insistence that sovereign states can restrict migration that reliably and predictably leads to thousands of deaths every year. And these are deaths that are widely reported, acknowledged, and then they're either ignored or quite often they're blamed on smugglers or blamed on the migrants themselves. And I guess what struck me about this was the response from from liberal commentators. You know, they largely focused on the need to create safe legal routes for refugees and other migrants. And again, again, again, we hear that there's the need to allow people to travel so that the claims for protection can be adjudicated by states. The demand or claim there needs to be more resettlement of refugees. There needs to be measures to facilitate family reunion measures to give temporary visas for workers so they can travel legally. I don't really believe any this is going to occur. And I don't think so because I don't think these deaths are a byproduct state borders. They're part of a system. And it's a system that has the dehumanization, the demonization and the criminalization of people at its core. I think, you know, something that unites Nandita Thomas and I is well opposed how states use violence to to illegalize people and criminalize mobility. And we reject carving the world up into citizens and non citizens, sedentary populations belong and migrants who do not. This is an anti racist and an anti caste position, the very category of immigrant. It creates groups of people, usually through racialization with unequal rights, you know, for the purposes of exploiting and abusing them. Okay. What are the implications of these views. Well, I don't think it's reform can reform something that's basically decent and useful, but institutions that exist to harm to oppress to exploit. There shouldn't be reform. There should be abolished. Okay, so we frequently hear that trying to create a world without state borders is naive, utopian, even irresponsible you know you get this in some activist circle. And the objection isn't that this would be a world that would be hard to achieve and that's that's clear but rather than it's a world that cannot exist. Or if it is a world that can exist, it's not a world we want to live in. This is why I want to turn to David Graver's writings on anarchism, take the core and a kissed idea to be that society should be organized on free agreement between people. They were coiled at the thought of using violence to kill and help people to obey. Instead, they seek to persuade people. So anarchism it's this anti hierarchical. And on the positive side anarchist believe in mutual aid. And Graver he has a section called blowing up walls which I took the title this talk from in fragments of an anarchist anthropology. He starts with a familiar dialogue between an anarchist and a skeptic, and the skeptic sympathetic to anarchism or says she is, but asks for examples of societies run an anarchist principles. And this starts giving examples examples of non state societies, worker cooperatives of the Paris Commune, commune, Spanish Civil War, and each case the skeptic objects the example and says that either it doesn't work or the temper is either a failure. He wrote something I thought he really struck me when I first read it. He wrote. The dice are loaded can't win. Because when the skeptic says society, what he really means a state even nation state. So no one is going to produce an example of an anarchist state. That would be a contradiction in terms. What we're really being asked for is an example of a modern nation state with the government somehow plucked away. And he goes on and writes, there is a way out, which is to accept that anarchist forms of organization would not look like would not look anything like a state. Now, my intention today isn't to endorse anarchism as a political philosophy. I do accept the anarchist conviction that there's a strong burden of proof on anyone who wants to justify using force and others. But I think I follow James Scott and giving two, not three years for anarchism. But rather, what I want to do is talk through some of anarchism's implications for borders. If we try to build a world for human mobility that doesn't look like a state, what would it look like, and how would we get there. I'm just going to make three kind of modest points. So I picked this slide because you know waterways don't respect state borders. The first point is that the states try to remake the world in their own image. They never wholly succeed. I think this is a echo of some of the things that Nandita has just told us states that they expanded an enormous amount of energy and violence and maintaining their status. They create national education programs and national celebrations to indoctrinate people. And that's the world way of seeing the world. We write history in their attempts to create a homogenous national ethnic group. We talked about forced expulsions of groups, which is a major part of the creation of actual nation states. Well, this is all true, but you know, let me just mention one more thing states do they have the whole spectacle of border enforcement. And this is to create an insert external enemy to bring bring people together and blame their failures to provide their citizens with it with a decent life so that they skate group, skate skate group groups, as part of creation creating a national identity. Now, despite all the these efforts and the resources and the violence that goes into this states always fail. They've been unable to eradicate diversity, been able to stop people and ideas from crossing borders. They can only partially suppress difference. And, you know, the, the magnificent complexity and diversity of people within their borders, many who live transnational lives. So it's important to constantly remind ourselves how state narratives fail. They don't describe reality, whether they describe a reality that states hope to bring about. The point is that borders only exist when we believe in them and accept them orders and social constructions. This doesn't mean they're not real. They constitute Asian states, and they're maintained by bureaucracies and police forces. They have real, sometimes lethal effects. Nonetheless, their existence depends on our accepting them accept borders by assuming they are part of the social fabric of reality, and by treating as legitimate, the armed police. They don't force them. Enough of us were to stop doing this. They don't just become irrelevant. They actually cease to exist. Now, I don't want to pretend for a moment that we can just imagine borders of existence. There are people willing to use lethal force, maintain them. This is a bit of a Graber's essay dead zones of the imagination and essay on structural stupidity. And his topic here is bureaucracies and the combination of violence, stupidity and lack of imagination that upholds them. Graber observes, this is a quote, one of my favorite quotes is that violence is so often preferred weapon of stupid. And he says this because violence allows people with the power to inflict flicked it to forego the interpretive nature nature or sorry the interpretive labor necessary for human relations. It also makes it clear that police are bureaucrats weapons. So we shouldn't underestimate how fundamental borders are to our reality. The same time, people resist and refuse them all the time. I promise is going to talk about some of those. There's so much of the violence is overt and lethal. It actually speaks to the fragility of borders and the fear that people in power have that they will dissolve. This brings me to my third point. No borders world is already here. There's a tendency to think that groups organized independently of states are something special. It's self organized collectives or cooperatives or people who are trying to enact the type of world they hope to live in. I mean all of that exists. But you know when we think about anarchist spaces in this way they're vulnerable squatters can be evicted with helicopters and tear gas occupiers can be dragging the police fans. And that's written eloquently about how the need to interact with bureaucracies can co-opt or even undermine even things like anarchist direct to action networks. That said, much of our social lives are based on anarchists and no border principles. This is true not only a voluntary associations where nobody has the power to tell anybody to do anything else. This is true of many families, many schools and oddly enough, any decent workplace where people work together for a shared purpose. Friendships special associations, families, they all cross state lines. And if you just look around their examples of radical unconditional hospitality and mutual aid, aid all around us. If we just open our eyes and see them. Right now we're taking part in an international arts festival. And what's notable about these associations is when you look carefully at them they very rarely match the nation states ideal of who belongs and who we are. Now look, I don't want to idealize human relationships. I think human relationships they fall follow a law of entropy takes constant, constant, interpretive and emotional labor to lift people up. Some people are bullies. Some people are sadists and toxic behavior from a single individual can often undermine a group or an organization that's not dealt with. Nonetheless, I think the tendency to despair sometimes leads us to ignore the many aspects for social life that we should celebrate. The question becomes how can we build on these. We can refuse certain relations and institutions. What it is is that exit from these relationships and institutions have costs. So any solution requires constructing institutions worth their alternative requires constructing alternative institutions worth supporting. We just close with another quote from fragments of an anarchist anthropology. anarchists are not actually trying to seize power with any national within any national territory. The process of one system replacing the other will not take the form some sudden revolutionary cataclysm, the storming of a bestial season but winter palace, necessarily be gradual, the creation of alternative forms organization on a world scale. These forms of communication, new less alienated ways of organizing life, which will eventually currently existing forms of power seem stupid. I'd like to add and conclude with the comment that some of this work would not be creating entirely new institutions, but amplifying the best of what we already have. Thanks Alex that was that was great. And that that I think speaking of alternative institutions and gradual changes. That is the topic of my presentation. So I'm going to go ahead and set my timer here. Hello, I'm. Yeah, I'm my name's Thomas, and I am a political philosopher, and I don't think I've ever been in favor of borders but I have. I've been into studying no borders and thinking very seriously about that as a political position when I did a, I spent a year as a Fulbright scholar at the universe and in Toronto to work with the migrant justice group known as illegal about a decade ago in 2009 in 2010 for a year. And the reason I went there was because I, I was, I was doing political theory and I found that political philosophers had very little to say about borders and migration, which struck me as very weird because it seemed an absolutely central part of political theory for very few, not none, but very few political philosophers to take that seriously as as as a deep aspect of political theory, a lot of liberal political theory just focuses on the assumption they start with nation states and then try to figure out and well there's exceptions here and problems here and, you know, migrants don't totally fit, but you know will account for them by these measures or whatever. And I felt that that was giving up too easily and so I spent that year working with and writing about migrant justice movements. And, and the outcome of it was that I wrote two books one was called the figure of the migrant in 2015 and the other called theory the border in 2016 and the project was just to try to rethink political theory from from from the beginning I mean to go back and assume that that they will move and that migrants are primary their constitutive and, and that all other terms are and states themselves and societies are meta stable states, like an Eddie in a river or something they are emergent features that that are produced by human migration. And so, sort of, yeah, taking the migrant to be a constitutive figure of societies and then and writing from there. That's where I'm coming from. That's that's that's my background and motivation in there. But I do I just want to echo something from the other day that went on Dita and I were talking is that we really are at a tipping point, I mean it is not a coincidence. It is not a weird random thing that we're here talking to you today about politics. This is really a lot more scholars are writing about this a lot more political philosophers are writing about borders and migration now that they were a decade ago, and a lot more people are talking about no borders now for a very good reason. Because at the very same time that we're talking about no borders we're also living at a dramatic tipping point where nation states are becoming increasingly more violent that nationalisms are ramping up around the world. That global inequality is absolutely enormous at record levels one percent of the population owns more is wealthier than the rest of the entire world combined that is that's outrageous like how could that possibly be be fulfilling the ideals the premise of the nation state which was supposed to have every group in their place and them all have self you know autonomy and and and equality. That is not what we witnessed the project of nation states is dying and I yesterday Simon was going to hold me to defining nation post nationalism today and I don't think post nationalism means we're out of the nation state is gone. But I do think it means that it's just a critical designation. The post means we're not sure what to do after this but something is in crisis and there's not yet another word for what will come after and so I take a very negative definition of that word. In the 21st century we are dealing with problems that just can't be handled by nation states global climate change. It's not something easily solvable by just by thinking about things in terms of nation states. The incredible amount of human migration is is is a product of nation states it will not go away Hannah are rent was absolutely right in her original designation this is the fund a fundamental problem the nation state. No solution to mass global migration is going to come from the nation state itself. So we there are over a billion migrants today. This is there are more migrants now than ever in recorded history and that number is just keeps getting larger and larger the percentage migration is risen by nearly 50% since the turn of the 21st century, and more than 56,000 migrants have died or gone over the last four years, and that number is just keeps increasing I remember following these numbers for just for for years and and just keeping track like Alex of how many people how many migrants were dying either in the desert and crossing the US border or or crossing the Mediterranean and just being horrified on a regular basis and political theorists not talking about this as a structural problem. And the news media and politicians not knowing what to do they're like well we can't they realize at a certain level you can't really stop those deaths without seriously questioning the conditions under which those people are killed, murdered by borders, and that is the best that the nation state itself. In any case, those, those are our problems that are that are that are structural. And climate change is not going to decrease that it is only going to increase it, some projections are that international migration may double in the next 40 years. And we're already beginning to see a lot of migrants that are are moving related to climate changes. And those are never just climate changes because the climate changes are always politically related certain groups are situated in worse places and under worse conditions than others. And so at the same time as the nation state is is failing to live up to its expectations. We're seeing a, you know, like Nandini was saying this is like this, this paradox which is that there's large groups I mean this is the dominant movement a down at the moment of crisis where we would expect there to be some kind of change in order to deal with these problems. We're getting reactionism, we're getting right wing nationalism xenophobia cracked out like massive rigidification of borders all around the world, especially I mean we could start just by looking at, you know, when we could start post Berlin Wall but definitely since the terrorist attacks of 911. The Syrian refugees, borders are being built just like crazy I mean they are multiplying there's never been this many borders, this many walls. So just for example 30 years ago. At the fall of the Berlin Wall there are only 15 walls in the world. And the fall of the Berlin Wall was supposed to be this big moment of well we're going to, you know, communism is over the walls are going to end and, you know, capitalism will free up everything and make everything move mobile. Well, it certainly let itself made itself mobile. It moved it was able to move around it moved across borders capital flowed and human bodies were criminalized. And now there are over 70 walls. So just this is this is a trend that keeps going and this is all these walls are all examples of people committed deeply to the nation state I mean this is trumps. You know, not that he himself is, I think cogent enough to have much of a political project but this is the project he stands for is a re entrenchment of the nation state as if that will solve the problem but like 902 was saying this is not anything original or novel. This is this is just this is how this is how nation states work, they will, we won't give up on the project the answer is always let's double down again instead of coming with something new. It's not surprising then, and, and this is one of the biggest industries the biggest growing industries right now in the world is the security industry of building borders, both to securitize migrants and also to build walls and you know what walls around cities for for rising tides and due to climate change 742 billion dollars this industry is projected to to be valued at that by 2023. It is very soon, but this has been going on for a while. There are a lot of companies with a lot of interest in detention deportation while building. People are getting very wealthy and they have a vested interest in me in becoming increasingly wealthy, and the way that they're doing that is by securitization. There are a lot of lobbying politicians who then stoke fear and people become afraid of climate migrants and so called barbarians. They're afraid that you know global capitalism is stealing their jobs which in some case may actually be happening. They are afraid of global poverty that is very much a real thing but they are blaming immigrants, and they're blaming foreigners like Nantita was saying, that's exactly where we're at. There are a lot of people that are absolutely making billions of dollars, and elsewhere I've written I've called them the climate migration industrial complex for this vast industry that is making tons of money and lobbying to keep itself in in in in business. Yes, so the borders these the they're an industry, they don't really stop human movement I mean people, people are always moving and these borders all of the studies show I mean whatever you hear on the media whatever you hear elsewhere, your relatives on holidays I don't know where people are saying that these borders are very effective and we just need more of them actually they're very ineffective they're extremely ineffective. The, the, the odds of crossing the US Mexico border just for example is 90% success rate on the third time. People cross these borders, but the very dangerous thing is that these borders kill people. All of the that's that's what they can do. They very much kill people they destroy the environment. They break all kinds of laws, but they don't actually keep people from moving. Sometimes when, when, when people ask me what a no borders world would look like. I'm not in full seriousness but I often say, well it would look a lot like it is now because the walls aren't really stopping anybody so if they're coming anyway, the thing that it would actually do is result is reduced an incredible amount of unnecessary human suffering and death. 7500 people more than that have died trying to cross the US Mexico border since 1994 I mean people are dying in the desert trying to cross because they're funneled, they're funneled in when the cities are fortified and the desert is laid open. They're called the funnel which is called the devil's highway and they and they die in large numbers and that would stop the criminalization, the incarceration, the detention and deportation all of that would stop. But in terms of people that are here, they're going to be here and people are going to move. So anyway, my, my, my, that's, that's my short framing of this problem and most of the substance in my paper is the question of no borders I mean it's, it sounds like we've said it sounds like this abstract idea that sounds very utopian. And in some ways I think it is a very radical claim, but I don't think that we're going to get there overnight. In fact, yeah, just especially this week it feels that we are farther than ever from from from achieving anything like that. But I think that it is a project worth undertaking and considering at every stage, how we might get there. And, and all of the work that people are doing right now that are that are moving us forward in that struggle. So it's not an abstract idea. I think it's pretty unlikely that if we all stood with signs that said no borders now that the government if with enough lobbying or enough signatures we could, we could somehow convince the government or the nation state you know like you do the same as this weird, you know, or actually like Alex was saying both of them really that there's this paradox it's like you know, imagining a nation state without borders. What I mean, there's there's something deep like that's that just twists your mind because like well how could it be a nation state without borders. Exactly. It wouldn't be a nation state anymore and that's what's being asked for so when you ask the nation state to remove its own borders, you're asking for it to like cut off its head or to dismantle itself. So the radical nature of that of that claim starts to become apparent very quickly of what that would mean and I think it's extremely unlikely that if we just yell loud enough the state will somehow abolish its own borders. And so if that's not going to happen and I think it's really unlikely and that's not really how things end up changing anyway. The real struggles are grassroots struggles from the bottom up of people doing everything they can where they're at to build communities that will that resist the nation state at all these different levels. And so those are some of the practices I want to talk about today. And I do want to say that just because Alex was mentioned this as well but that arts link is an interesting institution that it, it, I think it appreciates that that that community building across nation states that that that wants to live in that world where artists can be together and that we can all be together and engage in mutually beneficial projects without the burden of nations. It's a brilliant idea and it would be great if there were if everybody had if arts link was was everywhere and that this wasn't only for some groups of people but right now that's where we're at and that's the struggle we face so I want to talk about maybe just sort of define and give some examples of some key terms that I think it's important to keep to be aware of as part of maybe not necessarily part of but very much conditions for a no border politics. And part of that struggle are sanctuary at solidarity and status and none of those I don't want to say none of those are and then at the very end, if I have time I'll talk about no borders and what that might mean once we get there but I think that's not where we start, even if it's the aims it's not where we're at right now we have a long way to go. So the first, the first term on the way there is sanctuary and maybe you've heard this in the news and folks are familiar with sanctuary or sanctuary cities. That's a tricky term because it doesn't actually have a universal meaning what what sanctuary is mean something at different places people use it very differently. There's not a universally accepted definition of what a sanctuary city is or a sanctuary campus. But what was very interesting is that during Trump's during Trump's presidency, there were, there was an enormous rise in the abolish ice movement I never thought that I would see that I mean being an activist I thought well this is pretty far off and and especially compared to what was happening in the United States, but now coming back to the United States and being in Denver, I was blown away to go to a protest downtown in Denver, and to see everybody wearing abolish ice, ice t shirts. Yeah, like Alex is saying it's not that's not the end of it but that was a very impressive step I didn't think would see we'd see so quickly, but we are seeing the rise of a number of sanctuary movements, especially after Trump's travel ban. A lot of people responded with claims of sanctuary and that was so inspiring to see, but but it produced this debate about what a sanctuary city actually was and what it meant to offer sanctuary. So let me just try to define that along the spectrum. The most minimal thing that I think you that people call sanctuary or sanctuary city is just that the local law enforcement does not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. They don't have to be doing that for totally selfish reasons like it's cheaper, because they don't have to pay and invest and do a bunch of work and fill up their jails and we're worried about you know, all the, all the costs and extra labor that's going to cost so they just don't do it because it benefits them. But federal immigration can always show up so the minimal definition is for that cities might call themselves sanctuary because their local law enforcement don't ask anybody for documentation of citizenship, and that status is not something that will be asked for and if it is discovered it will not be used against them. That's the minimal definition of sanctuary further steps I mean some cities so example like Denver Denver is not technically does not call itself a sanctuary city. And our mayor got a little bit of flak when people asked like are we a sanctuary city because if we're not we definitely should be right now because it's very important. And he was very resistant to call it that but he said a local law enforcement does not cooperate with federal immigration. So that's a step and it's very important because it allows migrants and undocumented people to report crimes without fear of retribution and being deported for reporting a crime. In any case, the sanctuary cities. I can't possibly write I only have four minutes I'm never going to get through this my apologies. I talked too much about the framing and okay, so very quickly sanctuary city can mean very minimal things about just not cooperation. At the large at the at the kind of most intense degree, there are sanctuary cities like San Francisco and Toronto that want to push that much farther than just saying we're not going to criminalize and and we're actually going to provide city services, possibly the right to to vote in the case of local elections to offer it was on the ballot recently in Denver to provide insurance and healthcare for undocumented people it didn't pass but those kinds of efforts at the city level to go beyond just well we won't cooperate to we're actually going to treat you like you live here like you're one of us and that we will not. We will provide all the city services that we can for you be those from the city itself or institutions that are alternative inside of the city. So food banks to to not cooperate and not not scare undocumented people away. I think those are movements in the right direction to create spaces to create campuses that explicitly call themselves sanctuary in an increasing spectrum of solidarity with those people. No more deaths is a movement that provides water and food for people at the border. There's a number of other organizations that I was going to mention but I'm running out of time now but I did want to talk about the final point which was about status is that I think much well before we're going to see any movement for the abolition of status as such. I think it's probably at least one step along the way to advocate for universal status, even though that's a very that's again like one of these that's toward the very end once there's a large movement of solidarity and sanctuary that people can then argue for the increasing range of status so that it becomes something that everybody has regardless of who they are. But then once you reach that paradoxical moment where everyone has status. You're really at the limits of now the nation state because once you everyone has it. It's sort of like it doesn't matter anymore. And that I think those are some of the final stages that would get us to no borders. But I also have to say in my very few my one remaining minute actually which is about no borders policies, more broadly is that I think it's not just enough to abolish borders, because this abolishing borders might actually result in people from other countries. I mean more of them moving to Western developed countries and not that that is bad for for for other countries were losing those those immigrants and those people, but it's also just in the interest of those Western countries to make a ton of money and profit off of all of those immigrants, and they do increase jobs and GDP and wages, they have benefits almost universal benefits for receiving countries. And I think that's the story that we should be telling about open borders, like let's have open borders so wealthy countries can become wealthier. I think that another. This is again, at the very end of the spectrum of how far we can push things is that we, we, we have to abolish capitalism I don't think that this I don't think no borders and I don't think global equality is going to be compatible with capitalism as a structure. There will, if they're as long as there's wealth asymmetries and inequality people are going to be forced to move, and they're not wanting to move, they'll be forced to move, and that's not again, the idea of open borders that the border should be open and people should be forced to move. No people should not be forced to move but the conditions of their forcible removal have to do with the distribution of global capitalism so that also is entailed in no borders. I'm out of time but I hope that I've tried to take you from the beginnings of offering sanctuary to where I think this leads or can lead anyway is to a, a world without nation states without borders and without capitalism. The aspirations won't won't be completely filled until all of those those things are gone. Anyway, thanks. Thanks for your time and if you have questions for for any of us please do put those in the Q&A section and we can go through those so at this point I'll take Alex and then Dita back to show show themselves and we can have a conversation about these topics, and you all can add things in the Q&A I'm not seeing any Q&A yet. So, I would just at this point open it to non Dita and Alex to if you all have any questions or reflections or anything do you want to add to your own presentation or, or, or any of ours. You know, I think it's important for us to understand that migration and the growth of migration. You know, with the advent of neoliberalism really right that we've seen actually a growth in migration precisely when neoliberal reforms were being made to national policies. You know, starting in the 1960s, but certainly after the 1980s, but one thing to recognize is that migration is actually a symptom of the failure of the nation state system. Right, because if nation states promise right that if you're part of the national community you will be taken care of, you know all your needs will be met, you will be free, you know, all of that stuff. And it often shows us that nation states are failing. Right, and, and it also shows us that the system of nation states like the promise of the system is also sovereignty right that each state is somehow completely independent in its decision making process than every other nation state and that's a lie too like it's, it's a system that is hierarchical some nation states have more powers than others and that's always been the case and it will remain the case. So it's also, you know migration, the patterns of migration are also a symptom of that hierarchy within that global system of nation states right like where people want to move to whether they're able to get there or not where they want to move to is dictated by where the wealth and the power flows up into the system and where it's taken from right so that's also really important to pay attention to that it is, you know, I guess a shorthand is migration is structural to this system. Right, we act like it's an apparition like people why are people moving I don't know like it's actually part of the structure of the of the failure of this system. Absolutely yeah thanks for saying that non detail because I think that's that's that's the thing that's so insidious I mean and we, you know there's the migration crisis and the migration problem and like one way is to go back to the beginning actually you know this isn't really a problem for Western countries they like put on this big fuss and pretend like it is like oh no we don't want any immigrants even though our entire economy depends on them and if it if we didn't have them everything would fall apart and we wouldn't be as wealthy as we were like that idea of, of mobilizing people through colonialism and then criminalizing them once they arrive, I mean it's, it's, I don't want to say the perfect system but there's something deeply conspiratorial sounding about it that they're actually producing the displacements that they can then criminalize, and then exploit and charge, you know, and pay them nothing or deport them and abuse them, and then have their entire economy lifted up by them, and then the whole time fussing that's why I think like the right wing xenophobia works perfectly well with the capitalists who can, who can stand back and say you know the Bill Gates and the Googles but we're not racist we employed lots of immigrants and then when you know when Trump's travel ban goes through it's like no he's the racist he's the one you know keeping people out it's like actually you all are working together this is benefiting both of you deeply and you know it, and you're putting on this show for us that you, the xenophobic right things like oh, you know, we're just we're just trying to protect our interests like actually if you got what you want you completely destroy your own country, and the capitalists think they're not racist like actually everything you're doing is predicated on the racist who are criminalizing and racializing these people, and it's like really too perfect of a system in that way but in the worst possible way. So yeah, I think it's not accidental I think it's not a crisis for them it's actually very much the business as usual. And it's a fool's game right like this is the, this is the terrible terrible irony of it that the enormous violence that the anti immigrant, you know politics creates right. And it reveals the people who are actually, you know the kind of foot soldiers of that politics right if anti immigrant politics is supposed to protect, protect our jobs and increase our wages and ensure better social services, and all of that rhetoric. So anti immigrant politics is what is driving wages down right because there is no solidarity between people across these categories like the quickest way to increase our wages and our rights as workers is to act in solidarity with those who are given less than we are not to push those people further down right so it's it's a fool's game on top of all the craziness. I was going to say I saw I see some questions and the question and answer. Okay yes. So there was one the first one was not a question but a nice suggestion about conflict management courses, but the second one is from Emma. The concept of diaspora provides an opportunity to think about how the notion of belonging could potentially transcend beyond borders, or does the discourse of diaspora, particularly given its association with remittances and the political capital of dual equality merely reinforce the idea of the nation of the nation state. Yeah, I personally don't like the concept of diaspora, and in part because it is based on the idea that we are all from some place right so I often get categorized as part of the Indian diaspora and the Indian government loves this term, precisely for the reasons that are outlined here right the remittances the political support for politics in India it's you know political parties in India etc. But it presumes that I will always be associated with some other place than where I actually live and and am right so it kind of concretizes culture in a way that's not real right like I will forever be Indian and the Jewish diaspora will always be, you know, based on this that the Chinese diaspora the Mexican diaspora like it's still rooted in this idea that each quote unquote, people has their own place in the world and I think that idea creates a lot of violence and it creates a lot of hierarchies because if you if you're part of the diaspora that you're not really part of where you are. I don't like that idea, but one last thing after a bra who is a very interesting theorist wrote a book called cartographies of diaspora where she argues rather than associating the concept of diaspora with, you know racialized groups, we actually say that spaces are diasporic right so for example, you know she she worked and was writing about England. And you know she was arguing that England is a diasporic place right that it is a space that has been fundamentally shaped historically and today by a variety of ways of being ways of eating ways of thinking, you know, etc etc so rather than thinking of people as diasporic we could think of spaces as diaspora. That's a cool idea. I haven't come across that but I like that idea very much, but I have maybe a, I don't know, maybe a stupid question but I haven't really seen Mexican immigrants in America called diasporic. And it's just now occurring to me that that is kind of strange, because the country in the world that has the largest percentage of its population outside of its own country is Mexico. And but and yet there's no diaspora but I don't I don't know why that that the literature just gets called something else but I don't know do you have any sense of why that is. Yeah, as soon as I said it I thought oh that does sound kind of weird because I've never heard of that right so it may have something to do with the imagination of legal versus unlawful migration I don't know like obviously we know that most immigrants are lawful lawful permanent residents etc but so I don't know what do you think. I don't know I have no idea I mean all I can think of is that it might be related to asylum versus economic immigration. I really know that for a fact but when I think about diaspora I mean, you know we both of us have spent time in Toronto but there's a lot of diaspora self proclaimed diaspora communities in Toronto that use that term, and that that literature speaks to them and there was lots of conferences while I was there about that diaspora. But for some reason the question is only now occurring to me now how different that is in the case of Mexicans in the United States, who don't who don't call themselves diasporic. It's because but many of them are fleeing forms of political violence, but that that's not the reason they were admitted, possibly it wasn't because of political violence or religious persecution, or whatever like the Tibetan diaspora in Toronto for instance, that's very, it's a very politically charged group diaspora group. I don't know Alex what do you do. I think there's probably something to do with the complex history between, you know, the US and Mexico, and, you know, the fact that, you know, the borderlands are being by cultural and by national and very fluid for for a long time and continue to be so you know wall and all of that. Also say, I mean, Mexico is very complex and there's a lot of very, I think, different migrant pathways between, you know, Mexico and United States, you know, in Oregon, for example, you know, we get a lot of different groups from Oaxaca. You know, I've been long standing, formally circular migration but obviously that's that's changed for enforcement. I would say I remember living in New York and being aware of how aggressively Mexican state was actually interacting with a lot of groups, largely from Puebla. Living in New York City and there was some more of kind of the traditional kind of nationalist diasporic politics and in which people in New York were intervening in politics Mexico and we're being recruited so there's a bit of complexity there and so something about, you know, this is I think one of the dangers of nationalism that we, you know, we take a category like Mexico and we pretend. You know, you can really talk about, you know, one group of people where it's incredibly diverse, both ethically and culturally and of course, in terms of class, you know, as well. I think it's a sub sense something to, you know, Emma's question because I think it's really, it's a great question and I share a lot of the skepticism about how that diasporized mobilized by nation states as a way of, you know, claiming to say ownership, you know, of people. I do though think it introduces a useful notion of complexity. Because even though, you know, nation states like to pretend that, you know, they have a claim to people this is never entirely true in reality. It does speak to the ways that our identities are complex and often transnational, and I think we can focus on those those aspects. And I think it can sometimes be useful, you know, breaking out of this framework, you know, where you have this indigenous, you know, national ethnic groups so put that out there. Well, there are no, no questions in the box, but I, but I feel like we're missing some hard question thrown at us about no borders I feel like we're getting off too easy with this almost. And so I maybe I've just asked it to you all which is, when we read this stuff in the classes that I teach, inevitably some students says like, well if the borders were open, wouldn't people just flood in to the United States and Europe and wouldn't it overcome those countries and be unable to provide to services and wouldn't basically the society be over overburdened with with migrants moving in very suddenly and wouldn't that be a reason not to to open borders that there'd be suddenly tons of people moving around and it would undermine the stability of of western nation states. I can say something to that. I mean, I think one thing people, you know, places like the United States assumes they assume that everybody wants to live here. People, people don't. I mean, some people do. And you know we talked about some of the structural reasons why people are compelled to migrate but I think a lot of nation states really overestimate, you know how attractive they are. The other thing to point out is that if this were really the case. Why would people migrate. You know it just assumes that you know people don't have decent reason for migrating usually when people, you know you actually look in your ass people. You know why why they migrate. They often have reasons you know beyond, you know people don't migrate anywhere they don't just say okay I make more money in your ex country I'm going to move there. Usually they have ties their community connections they have families. You know they have pretty strong reasons you know that's why I showed people you know crossing the English channel. You know you often hear this kind of refrain you know why would anybody you know move from you know France to England. Surely, France is wonderful but you know that there's people in refugee camps in France that desperately want to go to Europe, England. Why. Well, they have ties there they speak the language they have, you know the reason so you know everybody assumes this is the case. When you actually look at the evidence there's not a great deal of evidence that suggests this would actually occur. I think sometimes it actually is, well I'll just say it I think sometimes actually kind of a racist fantasy. You know there's the genre of the camp of the saints. You know this kind of far extreme right when you know literature where this portrayed and, you know, this is a fantasy there's not that much evidence that is actually going to occur. It's kind of a disturbing one. I also think that the question that gets posed when the question is posed that way. It's a question that is actually literally stating that we don't want to share with the rest of the world, the wealth that we have hoarded in the United States. That's also what is being said when that question is being asked. And I think what we, we, you know, one way of answering that question is that we would prevent, you know, these this kind of bulging movements, if the wealth of the world is equally shared. Right, so that, you know, you, you can't have it both ways you can't just say, I want 80% of the world's wealth consumed by, you know, 20% of the world's population in the rich world. Right. And I also want that other 80% of the world to just leave me alone and just go away. You don't get to have it both ways. Right. And that is why, you know, people who wanted both ways call migration a crisis. It is not a crisis. Migration is a solution to people's needs. It is a survival mechanism. And the reasons that they are forced into such precarious survival strategies is what needs to be addressed. And so, you know, you can say, I don't want to let anyone into the United States but that has to come with the political acknowledgement that you also want to hoard the world's wealth for yourself. And you don't care one iota about social justice. Right, you don't care one iota about about what is happening so one of the things that I would say is that I do disagree with some no borders theorists. I don't think this is, you know, I don't. Yes, people are definitely challenging borders and in that sense it's a practical, you know, reality of today. But it's also a revolutionary practice. This is not just some kind of tinkering at the edges of the system. This is an absolutely revolutionary politics. Right. And I think the sooner we acknowledge that the sooner we can get away from like oh this isn't practical. It's like, yeah, it's a revolution. Right. So, transforming class relationships, gender relationships, our own imaginations like I don't belong to a race of people because there is no races I don't belong to a nation because there are no nations like, you know, we need we need a way of thinking and a way of organizing the world that corresponds to our actual reality. That's not the world that we have today. Our world is like a veil. Every single part of our world is a veil to justify hoarding and call it scarcity and then push everyone away by saying oh sorry we don't have enough when we're actually doing all the hoarding. Yeah, thanks Dundito that's very well said and I think that's, I mean if I was only shortly respond and add to what you all are saying I mean there's a way in which somebody put in the Q&A you know like a 10th grader responded how it was no borders how will we protect ourselves. The question's not the ask the other way around is how will those people be safe, but also like by framing it of like, well we couldn't do that because then they would come in as you said take our things. There's an implicit I think it's a very uncomfortable question because what they're essentially saying like you're saying Dundito is, I would rather see thousands of people die with their bleached bones in the desert. I would give up anything of what I currently have based on the history of colonialism. That's another thing that we didn't really talk about we kind of touched on it but I just, I know we're sort of wrapping up here but I would say that we absolutely that colonialism is not gone like we live in that legacy. One justification for no borders is partly just has to do with a kind of reparations like a kind of transformation that we benefit by colonial power we benefit by the history of colonization we can't just say, well let's just bracket that because those were dead ancestors of ours that did that start again with everything we have and pretend like we didn't steal it and aren't still stealing it. I think that's, I think it's yeah, it pushes that button and people often get very upset very quickly when asked to do that. So there is one very last one very one last question and Simon says we have we have time to take it. He says, this is from Emma again. She says, okay, a harder question then, given you asked one. Even the whole borders are clearly socially constructed doesn't the fact that they emerge repeatedly throughout human history demonstrate that although they fluctuate throughout time and space, they represent a human desire for enclosure and the fundamental need for so many to belong to a particular place. I would say, like, you know, one way to answer that question is that borders like that, or a better way of putting it actually is constraints on human mobility, right constraints on human mobility are a part of state societies. State societies, according to many scholars, I'm thinking particularly of James Scott. State societies are about 5000 years old, right, Homo sapiens, which is what we are today, Homo sapiens are over 200,000 years old. So of that 200,000 years we've got 5000 years of state societies which try and constrain people's mobility. It's not human nature. It is not a natural aspect of, you know, wanting to have a firm sense of identity, having, you know, an association with particular places, the constraints on human mobility are part of ruling relationships people don't constrain their mobility. People's mobility is constrained by those who benefit from it right they benefit from the constraint of our mill mobility through slavery through immigration controls, etc. So, I think that one definitely starting point of a no borders politics is to acknowledge how how how closely linked constraints to human mobility are going against human nature. I think they are forced on us they're not part of who we are. Awesome. Thank you. Alex, did you did you want to answer that as well or I would just just add, I think I'm going to make an important point I mean place matters. But I don't think a no borders politics or an open borders politics says that anybody should not be allowed to cultivate and build a place in a community. And, you know, people are often, and the world we have right now, people are often forced to move, you know, for a variety of reasons. But you know, I guess I would say, sometimes you know that the phrase no borders bothers me because I think what it means is it means that we don't want to have state borders or nation state borders. You know, our lives are, you know, we navigate our social world through categories. And, you know, we have all kinds of borders in every aspect of our life, often the pores, you know, often, you know, they're open in different ways, but nonetheless, you know, our social life is structured by borders that define our relationships and you know where we participate. And so I think part of the question is, you know, what kind of borders do we want to do we want to promote and you know which ones we want to reject. And, you know, Reese Jones is, you know, has the wonderful phrase, you know, violent borders, you know, we want to reject violent borders borders imposed by, you know, armed guards, and all of that but I do think it's a real kind of interesting question if we move past that well what kind of communities do we want to construct. Because we do want to have communities and that involves some form of closure, closure isn't the same thing as saying we're not going to accept new members, rather it's a way of navigating things. Let me just say one last thing about social categories. You know, I think one thing we want to abolish or I want to abolish is the whole category of immigrant, the idea that the world can be divided into people who are, belong to the story of soil or spring from the soil to use you know that Nandita's, you know, term and the idea of, you know, immigrants were somehow apart. I think dividing the world up in that way and that's kind of the question of borders is creates an enormous amount of harm and it's arbitrary and it doesn't represent people very well. So, my thought for no borders philosophy, you know, we would get rid of that category of immigrant altogether. We use other social categories for thinking about how we relate to others in the world. Excellent. Well, thanks to both of you for a great conversation and thanks to those who asked questions in the Q&A. We're, we're, we're, yeah, we're wrapping up, we're out of time. So anyway, thank you to everybody. And thanks. Thank you Simon. Thank you Simon. Thanks Thomas.