May 15, 2025

✨ some notes on borders + our common ground

feat. harsha walia, olufemi taiwo, ta-nehisi coates, & more

If you’re able, please join me in donating to Casa San Jose, a Pittsburgh organization working on immigrant rights and serving the city’s Latino community.

In The Human Condition, Arendt writes of the rebirth, or ‘natality’, as she calls it; the emergence of the will to remake oneself as an adult. This, to her, was the essence of politics; to change the world from the way it was inherited… We must learn to identify with the Other in order to find empathy for those who are not like us. As the world grows smaller and more crowded, the notion of stable, impermeable frontiers retreats into myth.

—Jamal Majhoub, A Line in the River

Dear friend—

In the wake of last year's election, I kept seeing different versions of a similar take:

Trump and the Republicans won because the Democrats failed to present an alternative vision to attract voters who were feeling deep hardship and precarity. The political system has failed these people, and they were looking for change.1

According to one of the most good-faith interpretations of a Trump voter (especially the white working class that so much media focuses on), they were not embracing Trump and all he stood for, but they were at least willing to overlook it for the sake of the promise of a better life for themselves, their families, and their communities.

In this narrative, many voters are experiencing genuine insecurity and hardship. Food is unaffordable. The rent is too damn high. And these voters’ response was to defend their own interests. To tighten the borders around who and what they were willing to defend. And to sacrifice a growing group of “the other”—immigrants, trans folks, women, Palestinians—for their own security.

I found that this frame of mind was embodied by both Democratic and Republican rhetoric around immigration in the run-up to the election. The message was, “We’ll crack down on movement, deport more people, and discourage them from coming to the U.S.”

Harsha Walia’s Border and Rule2 thoroughly illustrates the argument against this rhetoric and the policy it leads to. Borders are more than walls, she writes. They are the systems that maintain division, violently, even far from a geographic border. They are the stories we tell about who is a stranger and who belongs—and, crucially, what manner of sins we justify inflicting on strangers. Most rhetoric about people on the move reinforces this, even if well-intentioned.

“We can’t deport people! Migrants are the backbone of America’s economy,” “This is a safe place for refugees! (But not people ‘just’ looking for a better life),” “We welcome those who learn the language and assimilate”—all this creates (often arbitrary and capricious) thresholds of usefulness, suffering, or belonging that a person must reach to be worthy of compassion.

This sorts people into boxes of “belonging” and “unbelonging” and justifies violence against the unbelonging; from, as Walia details, purposely allowing migrants to drown at sea to keeping them beholden to brutal labor contracts we would never allow for “citizens.”

Now, as we face intertwining crises from the economic to the ecological, we have seen growing support for tightening borders—and for more harm to those deemed strangers.

This is something the United States has seen in spades these past few years. Not just in immigration, but in “America First” populism, in the U.S.-sponsored genocide in Gaza, and in policies toward trans and other LGBTQ+ folks. According to the afore-described election narrative, the white working class was Going Through It, and responded by throwing other groups under the bus.

In his book Elite Capture, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò emphasizes that experience and identity do not dependably correlate to politics. They can bend perspectives in many different ways. Notably, marginalization, hardship, and trauma do not always result in an orientation toward justice. In fact, Táíwò writes, “suffering is partial, short-sighted, and self-absorbed.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates says something similar in his most recent book, The Message, writing that “your oppression will not save you, that being a victim will not enlighten you, that it can just as easily deceive you.”

In the book, Coates reflects on his own upbringing and cultural milieu. He saw Black folks like his father study and admire African empires, in part to counter racist narratives of inferiority. This includes ancient Egypt, where the name “Ta-Nehisi” comes from.

But Egypt itself was an empire raised on the backs of slaves. Coates draws a connection to Liberia, where Black freedmen escaping slavery in the United States became colonizers.

Is it a good thing for us to aspire to such power and empire, having ourselves suffered at the hands of them? he wonders. It’s a reaction he understands, but ultimately rejects as a path forward.

The final essay in The Message is about his experience in the West Bank and Israel. There, Coates sees a manifestation of all this—the generational trauma of thousands of years of persecution, peaking with the horrors of the Holocaust, which Israel points to to try and justify its own perpetrated horrors: ethnic cleansing, land grabs, mass incarceration, apartheid, and now, in Gaza, genocide.

Israel’s actions and systems are unjustifiable. At the same time, Coates can admit, “I see how you get there.”

As he says in an interview with Marc Lamont Hill:

I suspect that more often than not, when people are oppressed, they go on to perpetuate oppression more than they go on to make the world a better place. I think that that’s probably a human challenge.... We wish it were counterintuitive, but one of the things I’m trying to do in that essay is say, ‘Well what if it’s not? And if it’s not, then what is our work?’

I think questions like these are essential to truly understanding—and breaking away from—the paths that history has laid for us.

To be clear, I don’t write this to make false equivalences between vastly different violences, from chattel slavery to militant borders, or to paper over deep power imbalances.3 Only to point out the risk of a pattern across identities and experiences, entrenched by our systems and stories. A pattern in which those who have suffered turn to violence against and power over an “other” in effort to repel more suffering.

The Democrats’ rightward shift on immigration took this pattern as inevitable; that the best they could do was capitulate to it, instead of daring to present an alternative vision.

At the highest level of national ads and speeches, I saw little attempt at messaging that welcomed strangers. Instead, Dems’ border rhetoric validated people’s worst instincts. It said, “Yes, you’re suffering, and the answer is not to join with others to address the root cause—it’s to turn away from them.” They played into what Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba call “the grandest illusion ever created”:

In a world where corporations and governments worldwide are poised to annihilate most life on Earth, we are made to believe that other disempowered people are the greatest danger we face.

I have to believe that we don’t need to make enemies out of other suffering people to deliver a good life for those we love. And, crucially, I have to believe that embracing more people creates the networks of support and the political power necessary to actually ensure a good life for everyone.

The Democratic Party’s failure to reach for this alternative vision stems from the fact that many of its politicians and donors explicitly benefit from the status quo. They are investors and executives of—and receive campaign donations from—the companies that profit from the challenges we face.4 Their wealth grows as private detention centers expand; as social media algorithms alienate us from each other; as corporations exploit more workers and more of the environment; as we send more bombs across the world.

As for the rest of us—we all act within the bounds of a sticky system. As Táíwò points out, our lives are circumscribed by a “common ground,” a shared understanding of the world and what’s possible in it.

The manifestation of that common ground is both material and narrative. It’s the songs we hear and the movies we watch; the products we buy and the infrastructure we depend on; how we relate to our loved ones and to strangers. It is reified by a system of rewards and punishments for our actions.

The system we currently confront rewards greed, hoarding, self-protection, power; it seeks to punish collective action and altruism. For example, healthcare is attached to employment, and you can lose your job for protesting or unionizing. We are thus incentivized to avoid organizing, if we want to maintain access to possibly life-saving medical treatment for ourselves or our loved ones.

This all makes welcoming strangers increasingly difficult because everyone is scared of losing something all the time. It makes expanding the borders around our community (or getting rid of the borders altogether) more risky and dangerous.

In such a world, our worst instincts seem logical and inevitable. You can barely afford to look after yourself and your family! Of course we should tighten the borders! Of course we must hurt strangers to protect our own!

But we do have the power to reject the guardrails on our behavior set by the system, often with less devastating consequences or for greater benefit than we realize. Oftentimes our ideas of acceptable behavior, of the realm of possibilities, are more flexible than we think. 

The vibe in this part of Elite Capture is very, “Remember, you have free will!” We can walk on the wrong side of the sidewalk! We can be a little weirdo! Especially when being a little weirdo means rejecting the rules laid out by the system and working to build a better one!

It often costs us something, because that’s how a system upholds itself, but bearing those costs (which are often smaller than we think) is essential if we are to change anything at all. Writes Táíwò:

We can do the thing that will be punished; we can ignore the potential reward, choose the smaller prize. Moreover, we can accept the rewards and the punishments without accepting the “lessons” they are meant to teach us about who and what is worthy.

The discourse and policies around immigration are meant to impart and reinforce these lessons on worth. In fact, much of the actions of those in power are in service of this project, so as to maintain their grip.

But, as Táíwò reminds us, we have the power to reject these lessons. To act in ways that (in the words of Kaba and Hayes) treat “other disempowered people” not as “the greatest danger we face” but the greatest allies we could have. To change the common ground and thus change everything that’s possible.

To me, this seems like the great, essential challenge of today’s politics and of all politics. As Coates illustrates, this pattern—the harmed using what power they have to perpetuate more harm—repeats throughout history. It’s a pattern we inherit, and perhaps it’s a fantasy to say that we can overcome it entirely. But to not try is to reject the “essence of politics,” as Mahjoub writes per Arendt. The point is, after all, to “change the world from the way it was inherited.”

Take care, chat soon,
—mia xx