Devastating to families from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, in particular--countries where US meddling has long stoked the violence and instability that cause migrants to flee in the first place--this and other policies of the Trump era can be understood, as Ananya Roy has put it, as an ideological commitment to, and renewal of, “white power in statecraft”.

Today, the displaced in Calais are campless. Their lives are lived furtively in forests on the fringes of the city while they seek clandestine passage to the UK.

In 2015 our TV screens, newspapers and social media were full of stories about ‘flows’ of migrants ‘pouring’ into Europe, set alongside photos and videos of people packed into boats at sea or meandering in long lines across fields. Now, this same language is being used to describe the ‘migrant caravan’ of the thousands of Hondurans leaving the violence of their home country and attempting to journey to the US.

After several days spent visiting hospitality centres for refugees in Serbia, we decide to change our plans and take a detour via Bosnia-Herzegovina on our way back home to Trieste. We have just learned during our meetings with the representatives of the Serbian Commissariat for the Refugees that the irregular refugee route towards the EU is now deflected towards that country, and in particular that in Velika Kladuša, a few kilometres away from the Croatian border, a new set of informal encampments was taking shape.

In 2015 and 2016 Bosnia-Herzegovina received almost no migrants during the humanitarian emergency that saw nearly one million refugees moving north to reach the rest of Europe, establishing an informal corridor along the so-called Western Balkan Route. This changed in 2018 when Bosnia-Herzegovina experienced a sharp increase in arrivals coinciding with a related humanitarian crisis in the north-western Canton of Una-Sana, where a significant number of refugees have gathered in the past few months waiting for the opportunity to cross the Croatian border and enter the EU.

In the summer of 2018, Trieste – an Italian port city a few kilometres away from the Slovenian border – seemingly overnight became a new arrival point for the informal refugee Balkan Route. On 25 August 2018, together with a group of other people, deputy Mayor Polidori took the initiative to remove the refugees sleeping outdoors along the Trieste waterfront, near the Port Authority headquarters, and a few hundred meters from the spectacular Piazza Unità d’Italia, the political and tourist core of the city.

Border patrolling brings together racial profiling and passing with pernicious consequences for Indigenous migrants. In the paper, I argue that migrants are differentially vulnerable to deportation based on perceived race, gender and class.

The crucial point to be made here is how the logic of capital grinds out its path to govern minerals and migrants alike at exponential human cost. These dynamics are important to consider as governments the world over have looked to the Australian-style practice of turning back boats and offshoring asylum and resettlement operations.

Our analysis of the production of the NAFTA border and its dispossessions emerges from a community-based project in the Mexico-Guatemala borderlands. Our project included collaborative relationships forged over eight years with four Central American migrant women, two community partners from the region, two practitioners working in Mexico for a North American NGO, and two Canadian researchers.

The geographies of survival for homeless Roma EU-citizens in Malmö are continuous with the macro-scale geographies of the free movement area of the EU. Indeed, practices of geographical mobility among impoverished and racialized EU-citizens might be interpreted as a strategy for remedying enduring obstacles to their socio-economic mobility (Yıldız & Genova, 2017, p. 3).

Whilst geographers have examined and scrutinized many of the more overtly violent spaces associated with immigration and asylum (for instance, immigration detention centers), these reporting sites, which can appear as relatively benign and even outwardly purely bureaucratic, can in fact be understood as operating at the threshold between these more overt sites of incarceration and violence.

The meanings were multiple; the ironies deliberate and critical. We later learned from a visit to the Kempsons, UK artists-turned-humanitarians who live on the northern tip of Lesvos, that many of these life-jackets are worse than useless. Sold to refugees for a small fortune in Turkey, they often turn out to be fakes filled with foam that absorbs water.

In recent weeks, concerns about the Trump administration’s policies of family separation and child detention have sparked a firestorm of media attention and a powerful public outcry. In response, the administration has become increasingly vocal and radical in asserting the legitimacy of its actions and rhetorically assassinating any claims to refuge or protection individuals and families in detention offer in their defense.

‘Hostile environment.’ This phrase has circulated widely in light of the Windrush scandal. Rather than an accidental glitch, this case exposes how hostility, fear and unease are in fact the intended ‘ambitions’ of border control.

With some contemporary environmentalists dismayingly allying themselves with this closed-border vision of the world, we feel it is necessary to highlight the ways in which struggles against national borders and against the racial geographies of capitalism more broadly are of central importance to any fight against climate chaos.