A World Without Police

by Geo Maher

  As Pocan tacitly admits, Democratic proposals to abolish ICE, like proposals to reform the police, are more brand than substance. This isn’t surprising: Hillary Clinton, who supported child deportation before it was cool, hasn’t changed her tune all that much. Two decades after her husband blew wind into nativist sails, she went so far as to blame the victim, suggesting that “migration … is what lit the flame” of the racist right. Perhaps it was a gift, then, that within a few short months, and faced with midterm elections, the call to abolish ICE had all but disappeared from Democratic Party talking points. And just when it seemed that the use and abuse of abolition could not get any worse, Juliette Kayyem, a former Obama-era DHS official, reached new heights of absurdity by writing in The Atlantic, in July 2020, that rather than taking aim at ICE or DHS, “the only thing that needs to be abolished is the Trump administration.”21 With Biden in control of the deportation machine today, such partisan alibis lose their force.

  There is no question that ICE should be abolished, immediately and unconditionally, but lost in the widespread outrage was the question of what abolition means. Abolition is about more than enforcement, and it is far broader than even ICE itself. Of course, it’s a good thing that ICE is an easy target today—the strengths and weaknesses of calls to abolish ICE are one and the same. After all, as a relatively young institution—younger indeed than many of those reading this book—it’s easy to imagine a world without ICE. It’s much harder to imagine a world without border patrol, much less a world without a border to be patrolled. The task of abolition is to build bridges that connect the widespread outrage at exceptional evil to the banality of its everyday function. This means shifting the focus from those wrongly imprisoned to the entire system of mass incarceration. It means connecting individual instances of police murder to policing as a murderous system. It means leveraging the momentum of calls to abolish ICE toward the abolition of DHS as a whole; abolishing border patrol rather than renaming those overseeing it; and ultimately abolishing the border itself.

  As with all abolition, moreover, this is about more than eliminating institutions—and certainly more than simply rebaptizing them with new names. For Uhlmann, “it is also about building anew,” about reimagining—and reorganizing—our understanding of the borderlands as a whole.22

  —

  Abolishing the police, ICE, Border Patrol, and the border—all are part of a single struggle against a shared process of criminalization: an interlocking bipartisan effort to demonize migrants, people of color, and the poor. This process has seen millions deported or allowed to die in the desert while others are earmarked from birth for mass incarceration, and in all cases at the hands of police. But the similarities run deeper still.

  The police were born when poor whites chose their race over their class, and even today anyone that does so is the police. For W.E.B. Du Bois, this betrayal rested on the myth that Black slaves represented competition and that, if freed, they would drive wages down to the detriment of white workers. “What they failed to comprehend,” Du Bois wrote with a palpable exasperation, “was that the black man enslaved was an even more formidable and fatal competitor than the black man free.”23 In other words, it was not slaves but their condition as slaves, as the cheapest of cheap labor, that drove down wages across the board. The point was so simple and so obvious, but capitalism loves nothing more than a working class divided, and sowing this confusion was enough to provoke bloody race riots across the North.

  Even Abraham Lincoln felt the need to respond to the “imaginary, if not sometimes malicious” argument that free slaves “would injure and displace white labor more by being free than by remaining slaves … Emancipation … would probably enhance the wages of white labor and very surely would not reduce them.”24 Despite this, the Great Emancipator himself favored shipping slaves out of the country—a process often euphemistically described as “colonization,” but which here he at least called by its true name: “deportation.” As legal theorist K-Sue Park has shown, today’s self-deportation policies—which entail making migrants’ lives so intolerably harsh or dangerous that they will choose to leave and discourage others from coming—originated with similar strategies deployed historically against slaves, Indians, and Chinese people.25

  By arguing that migrants threaten American workers by stealing jobs and driving down wages, anti-migrant rhetoric today traffics in precisely the same kind of myth. But just as it was not free slaves but the slave system that drove wages down, the same goes for migrants today. Study after study has shown that migration has little to no impact on wages, because it isn’t migration, but border policing and enforcement, that weakens workers and drives wages down. What the border does is to segment the labor force, introducing an artificial divide among workers that the bosses can leverage to increase profits and exert control. By casting many migrants into a gray area—no labor protections, no minimum wage, no right to unionize—criminalization creates an ideal situation for capitalists, who can pay the bare minimum and hire and fire at will. A defenseless and deportable class is in no position to demand higher wages, and the bosses know it. Research bears this out, showing a clear correlation between immigration enforcement and wage stagnation among undocumented workers, but here’s the kicker: by holding down the wages of undocumented workers, immigration enforcement suppresses wages across entire branches of industry, impacting both documented and undocumented workers.26

  Criminalization is the cause of low wages, not the solution. The absurdity of a myth doesn’t make it any less tenacious, however, especially when coupled with a desire to believe. The idea that migrants are to blame for low wages is at the very heart of Trump’s faux populism, and remains prevalent among his more nativist supporters. His handlers, namely Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, made this claim a central plank of their ostensibly colorblind “economic nationalism,” which sought to scramble class solidarities and convert at least a sector of Black and Brown workers to the anti-immigrant cause. Migrants, they argued, compete with Black and established Latinx workers, driving their wages down. While both Bannon and Miller are undeniably white nationalists, they distanced themselves from ethno-nationalism—what Bannon called a “collection of clowns”—in favor of a broader electoral strategy. In Bannon’s own words, “when we get to 25 and 30 percent of the black working class and the Hispanic working class voting for us, we will have a realignment like 1932,” referring to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s landslide victory and the period of Democratic hegemony it inaugurated—“we’ll govern for fifty years.”27

  This strategy, which Daniel HoSang and Joseph Lowndes call a “multicultural right-wing populism,” even appeals to the history of anti-Black racism to divide communities of color along national lines. Black Americans are portrayed as “law-abiding citizens preyed upon by undocumented immigrants” even as they are described as victims of racial violence within American society.28 At its worst, as with Black Trump mouthpieces like vloggers Diamond and Silk, this has taken the form of a resentful politics that, rather than recognizing a shared process of criminalization, instead asks: If we break the law we go to jail, so why don’t they? More perversely still, this same logic can be found in the ostensibly radical American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) movement, which shatters even Black internationalism by demanding reparations be reserved only for Black Americans. Appeals to Black nativism against migrant communities are nothing new, HoSang and Lowndes insist, and they “ultimately reward white supremacy,” and—we could add—capitalism as well.29 Luckily, these appeals don’t seem to have much traction: Black support for Trump’s border wall is only half that of even Latinx respondents, and the project of economic nationalism faltered at the ballot box in November 2020.

  Occasionally, anti-migrant arguments infiltrate sectors of the self-described left as well. This is the case for Angela Nagle, who published a now-notorious article in the conservative American Affairs journal entitled “The Left Case against Open Borders.” The venue,
once known as the Journal of American Greatness, was a strange choice, but the arguments are stranger still. The left, Nagle insists, has always been against open borders, because—in her view—migration weakens union bargaining power. It is the right, by contrast, that wants to abolish borders in favor of the free movement of capital. By neglecting the concrete demands of labor unions to restrict migration in favor of an abstract moral imperative to defend migrants at all costs, Nagle concludes, the left has become “useful idiots” for capitalism’s own strategy of globalization.

  On every point, Nagle is comically wrong. The left has a long history of internationalism, notably among radical unions like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which explicitly rejected “race prejudice and imaginary boundary lines.” Nagle’s attempt to conscript an entire radical pantheon into her anti-immigrant crusade—from Marcus Garvey and Frederick Douglass to Karl Marx himself—falls flat, since none opposed migration per se, only capitalism’s use of migrants as weapons.30 Nagle is wrong that migrants drive wages down—they don’t—although she doesn’t hesitate to appeal to George Borjas, the same discredited economist cited by Trump advisor Stephen Miller. And she misses the mark wildly when she suggests that the right supports open borders. The bosses don’t want open borders; they want NAFTA, and for the same reasons that the left abhors it: because while capital moves freely, the border remains—and is increasingly militarized—to provide leverage in the form of wage differentials. US companies would never set up shop in Mexican maquilas if it didn’t mean crossing a border for lower-wage and less-protected workers. And they want their migrants undocumented by design.31

  Speaking at the 1907 International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart, Germany, Karl Liebknecht recognized clearly what Nagle apparently cannot grasp more than a century later: that the “sword of deportation” hangs over the working class like that of Damocles, and that overcoming it was “the first condition for foreigners to stop being predestined to squeeze wages and break strikes.” Workers will continue to migrate—the question is how to prevent them from becoming a weapon in the enemy’s arsenal. Looking back on the Stuttgart resolution, Lenin himself later insisted that “one cannot be internationalist and be at the same time in favor of such restrictions” on migration, sparing no venom for the likes of Nagle: “Such Socialists are in reality jingoes.”32 Angela Nagle is Bannon-lite, a “useful idiot” of white nationalism whose arguments could be just as easily used to oppose the abolition of slavery, the Great Migration, and workplace desegregation.33

  While Nagle was quickly ostracized by the left, however, similar arguments remain among those who downplay police racism, who discredit calls to defund and abolish the police, and who welcome police within labor unions—all in the name of a wooden class-first politics. Ironically, what all these approaches share is an impoverished view of the working class as mostly white members of conservative unions—a vision that stops at the border and excludes undocumented people within. They neglect the stratification by race and status and misunderstand how the police powers of the state uphold these divisions—which only hurt workers and the poor. And all paradoxically in the service of a watered-down social democratic politics, a glorified liberalism that sacrifices so much to demand so little. Such an amputated view of the working class of today occludes the radical potential of the working class of the future: a transnational, multiracial, and militant class that far exceeds whiteness, the police, and the border.

  Also left out is the fact that this horizon is also a living, breathing reality, as became apparent on May Day 2006, when “Latinx workers initiated the largest general strike in the history of the Americas … this mass action breathed new life into a labor movement that had been in disarray for decades.”34 Its closest, indeed its only rival to that claim, was the mass labor walkout of the Civil War, in which hundreds of thousands of slaves abandoned plantations for freedom, and which Du Bois insisted was also a “general strike.” This image of a hemispheric, even global, working class shares nothing with the globalization from above of NAFTA or Fortress Europe, which masquerade as borderless while immiserating workers and throwing up ever more walls.

  It is not migrants who drive wages down, but the criminalization of migration and the permanent, unprotected underclass it produces. By confronting, attacking, and abolishing those barriers dividing the global poor, the class as a whole grows stronger.

  —

  Why talk about the border in a book about the police? Because the police were born from the division of the working class, and because without police, the border is just a line on a map or in the sand, an unthreatening cable sagging loosely between two posts. Which is basically how the southern border functioned for a century. As scholar A. Naomi Paik notes: “For most of the United States’ history, its borders have been as porous as they’ve been mobile. People crossed them without a marker, a checkpoint, or border patrol officer in sight; for much of the country’s history, people may not have been aware that they were even crossing a border.”35

  This porosity served a function: as historian Greg Grandin shows in The End of the Myth, this was less a border than a frontier, an outward-oriented and expansive reflection of imperial white personhood. From Indian Removal and Manifest Destiny to the infiltration and seizure of Texas, the frontier underwrote a massive, colonial land grab—that is, until the land ran out, the myth of expansion came to an end, and colonial contradictions were internalized in the resentful nativism of today. Border policing was essentially nonexistent until the late nineteenth century, and even after the US Border Patrol was formally established in 1924, setting into motion the long process of criminalization that would reach its apex in 1996, it was less concerned with policing the border line than with policing the boundaries of whiteness and disciplining the racialized labor force of the borderlands. In other words, they did exactly what police do, and have always done, everywhere.

  These new border police drew their recruits from the same wellspring of resentment as slave patrols in the South: poor white men. Kelly Lytle Hernández tells of young white boys who grew up fighting Mexicans on the playground before joining the ranks of the Border Patrol to do essentially the same.36 The policing of slaves, moreover, was synonymous with the wages of whiteness, providing both a psychological sense of superiority and a material wage, and consolidating a cross-class alliance in which poor whites did the work of their class enemies. While the relationship between Border Patrol and agribusiness was certainly more complex—these were not the mercenaries of capital that the Texas Rangers had been—the function was the same: to discipline a racialized labor force while elevating themselves to middle-class status.37 And in the end, to police the border was to police that division internal to the class that was the most powerful weapon in the arsenal of the bosses.

  For Daniel Denvir, the deep resonances between the criminalization of poor people of color within the United States and the migrants crossing the border can be traced, in large part, to the question of migration more broadly. “The logic animating white resistance to the black Great Migration and freedom struggle,” Denvir writes, “has been similar to that behind the anti-immigrant movement—and that the latter in many ways grew out of and alongside the former.”38 Black Americans, previously contained to plantations by the proto-police, moved north to segregated communities with equally policed boundaries. If those boundaries have been relaxed today, their armed custodians remain, and struggles over desegregation, busing, policing, and mass incarceration map onto broader nativist sentiments. “Segregation was and remains a system of domestic bordering,” Denvir concludes, to which we can add that border enforcement was and remains a system for policing whiteness and labor.39

  If US policing and US imperialism were born on the same day, border policing followed close behind, and if policing the population and policing the planet shared so much, policing the border lay squarely between the two. As historian Kathleen Belew demonstrates in Bring the War Home, the biggest p
redictor for the growth of the Ku Klux Klan and other racist paramilitaries was the aftermath of war, when the violence workers tasked with imposing global white power returned home to do the same. It was no coincidence that the first border fence would be built with materials recycled from the wartime internment camps built for Japanese Americans, or that Border Patrol commander John P. Longan, who helped spearhead the mass deportation campaign known as Operation Wetback in 1954, would deploy many of the same methods a decade later in a wave of counterinsurgent terror across Latin America.40 Or that after Vietnam, the KKK formed a Klan Border Watch that harassed not only Latinx migrants but also Vietnamese refugees. And it’s absolutely no surprise that today’s ICE agents are “predominantly male and have often served in the military, with a police department or both.”41

  Like the police and the military, Border Patrol and ICE uphold racial divisions among the global poor, upholding the barriers of segregation dividing Du Bois’s “dark proletariat.” The Fraternal Order of Police and the “unions” representing ICE and Border Patrol enthusiastically embraced Trump’s 2016 candidacy, but their enthusiasm didn’t stop there. Some agents “thumped their chest as if they had just won the Super Bowl” after Trump emerged victorious, and former ICE director Thomas Homan praised Trump for “taking the handcuffs off” border agents.42 In a joint statement, the CBP and ICE unions reported that “morale amongst our agents and officers has increased exponentially.”43 In other words, they didn’t need to be asked to do their violent work—a fact that became viciously apparent in the peculiar temporality of the Muslim Ban, which CBP began to voluntarily enforce hours before it was required to do so (and continued to do so even in violation of several court orders). These were Trump’s most willing executioners, a fact only underlined when the then-president deployed elite Border Patrol agents to the George Floyd protests in Portland, Oregon.