Thinking (and Moving) Beyond Walls And Cages: Bridging Immigrant Justice and Anti-Prison Organizing In the United States

Abstract

We continue to find that the prison is itself a border. This analysis has come from prisoners, who name the distinction between the free world and the space behind the walls of the prison. This is an important inter? pretation that undoes the illusions of the powerful nation-states on the one hand and the seeming disorganization and chaos of capital's travels on the other. There is a very specific political economy of the prison that brings the intersections of gender and race, colonialism and capitalism, into view (Davis and Dent, 2001: 1236-1237). Understanding the prison as a border enables us to tie the present in? tensification of border fortification and expansion within long and unique histories of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. The important particu? larities of these histories, and the people whose lives have been shaped by them, are brought together through these borders as much as they are kept apart. At the 2008 Left Forum conference, for example, two of the current authors participated in a session on the connection between walls and cages and organizing strategies to move beyond them. One of the panel's speakers recounted a story about the dif? ficulties of recognizing the commonalities of apparently different forms of migration policing in Queens, New York. Following September 11, South Asian and Muslim communities were rounded up here and nationwide in the name of national security