Greetings troublemakers.
Welcome to Trouble… my name is not important.
The past couple of years have been a real
kick in the teeth for those of us who dream
of a world without borders...
not to mention the countless people around the world
who had the distinct misfortune of not being born
in the United States
yet still had the audacity
to imagine they'd be able to visit Disneyland
at some point in their lives.
Oh well.
I guess Euro-Disney's still a thing... right?
Standing in firm opposition to bleeding-heart,
snowflake values of multiculturalism, equality
of opportunity, solidarity, and the inherent
value of all human life,
a strident new form
of nationalist reaction has been steadily
gaining ground in countries all around the globe.
Often narrowly associated with Brexit,
the rise of the European far-right,
and the election of Donald Trump,
this racist and panic-driven
form of populism is a truly global phenomenon
– and one with incredibly deep roots.
Nationalism is, after all, a central pillar
of state power, and a default go-to
during times of crisis.
So it's no great mystery that after nearly
a decade of punishing austerity measures,
and more than fifteen years living under
the spectre of a global War on Terror,
many have fallen prey to the tempting illusion
of security conjured up by strong walls,
and the politicians who promise to build them...
...and make Mexico pay for it.
But even within this context of generalized
paranoia and resurgent nationalism
there are many who continue to bravely fight for
a better world – a world in which human beings
are granted the same freedom of movement
currently reserved for commodities.
Over the next thirty minutes, we'll share
the voices of some of these individuals, as
they speak about their experiences resisting
increased border militarization,
thwarting immigration enforcement...
and making a whole lotta trouble.
People have been crossing through this area
since.... forever.
A lot of the areas that we work are actually
routes that people used to migrate through,
seasonally -- a lot of the folks whose land
this is: the Tohono O'Odham and Yaqui people.
But more recently the whole idea is, you know...
to get from Mexico to the US.
I'm a volunteer with the organization
No More Deaths.
We are a non-hierarchical, consensus based
group and we do humanitarian aid
in the border regions.
We put out water on known migrant trails.
We also do search and rescue.
We document abuses by border patrol and different
organizations, and we also provide assistance
to people who have been deported and provide
harm reduction kits for people who are going
to be crossing the desert.
As we've expanded our work, we've expanded
the areas we're working in, and that includes
some of the areas in the west desert around
Ajo Arizona where people are walking across
Organ Pipe National Monument, into Cabeza
Prieta National Wildlife Refuge and then across
about 20 miles of active bombing range.
The journey north has changed
a lot in the last 15 years.
The urban centers were sealed in the mid-90s,
pushing people out into the geography of the desert.
It's a very intentional strategy on the part
of the US government and border patrol
to increase human suffering and death along the
border as an ostensible deterrent.
Over the years we've also seen the areas we've
done water drops and the areas that we've seen
water drops moving have also become more remote.
Essentially what we've done is we've mapped
north-south trails and we'll drive roads
and do drops.
But a lot of the drops that are closer to
roads we've just seen a really big uptick
in vandalism, and we've also seen an increased
amount of use in extremely remote areas.
A lot of migrants get separated from their
guides because the border patrol dusts them.
A helicopter will come and fly very close
to a group, people will scatter, get separated
from their guides and in this manner get lost
and frequently spend weeks walking in circles.
Folks generally travel at night,
the pace of the group is very quick.
If folks can't keep up with the group
they're frequently left behind.
So a lot of the patients we get at camp are
very close to death when we find them.
There's also been an increase in militarization
in the immigration enforcement in Mexico,
so Mexico actually deported more Central Americans
last year than the United States did.
And part of that is with US support
through Plan Frontera Sur.
The United States is actually funding the Mexican government
to implement border security
on their southern border with Guatemala.
I've talked to people who were riding the
train and then to get around checkpoints walked
for 8 or 9 days in Mexico.
So by the time they get here they've often
traveled for over a month.
Being identified as a migrant in Mexico from
further south makes people vulnerable to extortion,
kidnapping and assault.
I would say many of the women who have made
it to the US-Mexican border experienced some
form of traumatic violence during their journey.
The goal is for people to have such a devastating
and traumatic experience crossing that they
are deterred from further attempts.
It's very short-sighted and it does not take into
account the reasons that people are migrating north
A lot of reason that folks are coming from
Central America have to do with US economic
and foreign policy, now and in the past.
One of the things that happens under the auspices
of democracy-building, with things like Plan Frontera Sur
or the Merida Initiative is that
the US government is funding military, and
via extension paramilitary in torture techniques
and repression of social movements.
So not only is it keeping people from traveling
north to escape violence, it's actually creating
and perpetuating more violence.
If you look at the School of the Americas
and the funding of the Mexican military to
fight terrorism and to fight drugs, one of
the groups, the Zetas, was initially an arm
of the Mexican military and then they decided
to break off and kind of took over the drug
trade in Texas and in Matamoros and Tamaulipas,
and they've become one of the most violent gangs
And they were trained and funded and given
guns by the US government.
It's like a joint business venture between
the US government and cartels.
They have similar interests and they are exploiting
vulnerable populations for money
through different routes
Cartels make money because people have to
contract with them now to cross, and then
the US government and private corporations
make money by incarcerating undocumented people
before deporting them.
There's a group called the American Legislative
Exchange Council comprised of Republican legislators
and corporate interests and one of the corporations
involved in this group is the Corrections
Corporation of America, one of the largest
private prison groups in the country.
They got together and they wrote SB 10-70,
which was the law in Arizona that got passed
a few years ago that deputized police
to check immigration status.
We live in the border zone.
Within 100 miles of the border police and
border control have always had discretion
to do whatever they want.
But this kind of took that experience of the
border lands and internalized it and expanded
it to all of Arizona, and then with copycat
laws that were passed, to other parts of the country
It makes the risk of deportation
that much higher.
So if, y'know, an employer refuses to pay
their employee and they wanna seek justice,
it's really easy for an employer to just threaten
calling ICE on them.
And it creates an extremely,
extremely vulnerable population.
And that seems very intentional, because it
definitely benefits a lot of companies who
are able to exploit this group of people
who are now here.
I watch Trouble
We gotta Stop it
The colonial construct widely known as Canada
is often depicted as the US' mild-mannered
and polite neighbour to the north.
Oh hey there!
Do I know you from somewhere?
Oh me, no.
Then what can I do for you buddy?
Well this is a mugging?
What?
Yeah I’m sorry about that.
If I could just get that waller right there
Ok!
Keeping in line with this popular caricature,
many well-meaning and progressive Canadians
see their country as a bastion of multiculturalism,
and a welcoming home for refugees escaping
war and persecution around the globe.
We have a celebration of diversity here that
is just not found anywhere else.
I mean is not much a question of the rules,
so much as it is the spirit of openness, that
we cherish, that we’re finding ourselves
increasingly alone in the world with that spirit
But behind this self-righteous veneer lurks
a more sinister reality of Canada’s history
and its place in the world.
Putting aside the inconvenient facts that
the country was founded on the genocide of
the land's original inhabitants,
a near-blanket ban on non-European migration
until 1967, and remains one of the only countries
in the world to allow indefinite migrant detention,
it's often overlooked that Canada only shares
a land border with one country
– the United States.
I would not build a wall on the Canadian border
This particular quirk of geography has long
granted the Canadian state near-total control
over who enters its borders, and shielded
it from mass influxes of irregular migration,
outside of a few historical examples, such
as the Underground Railroad and Vietnam-era
draft-dodgers, or the more recent arrival,
in the summer of 2010, of a ship carrying
490 Tamil migrants
on the shores of so-called British Columbia.
But as the political atmosphere south of
the border continues to worsen for undocumented
migrants and anyone perceived to be a Muslim,
Canada is witnessing a rise in refugees seeking
to make use of its porous frontier to flee
the overt hostility and repression of Trump’s America
This is cardamom.
It’s a nice smell, nice,
very very nice with coffee.
This is kanafeh, it’s Palestinian.
I made it
Now when you take the coffee,
you can taste it, it’s very very nice.
You’ll like it, man.
My name is Omar Ben Ali, I’m from Palestine.
I left my country almost ten years ago.
I left my family, left my kids, left everything.
Because everybody here knows what the Israeli
occupation does to the Palestinian people.
This is my son, Yazan.
This is my small daughter, Tala.
She’s thirteen years old now,
when I left she was three.
This is my father, he died in 2014.
This is my mother, my love, my heart.
She died, she left me in September.
I didn’t see her.
I made a refugee claim in the airport in 2008.
After three years, I sat down with
somebody from immigration.
And in 20 minutes he refused me!
And he sent me a letter with around 38 reasons
why he refused me—38!
And he sat with me for 20 minutes.
I can’t return because I’ll be in danger
if I return.
They didn’t let me bring my family here.
Now if you ask me what I really want, well
okay, I live here and I’m safe, but my family
is not safe.
I need my family, I need my life,
I need my wife.
We’re at the Lacolle border crossing.
This is the main border crossing between Quebec
and the United States.
This is highway 15 on the Canadian side,
and on the other side of the border crossing it’s
I-87, that will take you down to Plattsburgh,
and Albany, and New York City.
And this is the border crossing that you want
to avoid if you want to make a refugee claim,
because according to the Safe Third Country
Agreement, if you’re coming from a safe
third country—which the United States is
defined to be—if you try to make a refugee
claim here, at the Canadian border crossing,
you will be turned back.
Then if you try to make a irregular crossing after that
and they realize you’re making a regular one
you’ll be forbidden from making a refugee claim.
So there’s an incentive, there’s a logical,
completely understandable reason why people
will make irregular crossings.
We’re on the Quebec side of the Quebec-US
border, and this is a place called Roxham Road
Roxham Road ends right there, and it continues
right over that little hill on the US side.
And it’s a place that’s internationally
famous, because people come here from the
US in order to enter Canada irregularly and
make refugee claims.
Last time I was here there was an abandoned
baby carriage on the other side, you know,
here you have some kids clothing that was left.
So this is about as far as I can go
Because if I went further another step or two
I'd be on the American side, and that’s technically
illegal, and I’m not gonna do that with
the cops right there.
People will come up this road, get off whatever
vehicle they’re in, or cab, and then come across
“Stop, if you cross here you will be arrested.
Do you speak French, do you speak English?”
Plattsburgh New York is the main gateway,
and you can get to Plattsburgh in a several
hours ride from New York City.
It also has an airport,
so people can fly in there.
And in Plattsburgh, you can take a cab here.
There’s nothing mystical or dangerous about it.
There’s thousands of miles of border.
So we’re here at a place where the RCMP
has 24 hour surveillance, but there aren't
walls, there aren't drones, there are motion
detectors, but there’s no way this can be
fully enforced.
And if there are basic networks of mutual
aid on either side, we can effectively render
this border nonexistent.
We are in Dundee, Quebec, the border is actually a few kilometers from here.
Since January, there have been a lot of people,
more than usual, that have been crossing here.
A lot of people in the region have seen, have
helped, and it just so happens that a community
group which deals with a lot of the community
groups in the area was having a spaghetti supper
So we came down from Montreal
to give them information.
Here we have people that are fleeing persecution,
people that are afraid for their lives, people
that want to have a better life
and want to participate in society.
And they’re being told that “sorry, if
you want to come here, you can’t come to
our port of entry or to our airports.”
So for us it was evident that, not just making
information for the people in this region,
but also for the people crossing, to give
them a little bit of a step up.
What are the hurdles
that they’re going to have to face?
And we’d like for them to know about it
before they come.
The attitude that our team takes regarding
these people is, if someone is here for nefarious
purposes or to commit crimes, we want to do
everything we can to find out before we give
them to the Canada Border Services Agency.
Once they’ve crossed, as you said, you can
actively help, you can organize in your community
to help people.
And I think it’s also important to say,
there’s absolutely no reason to think—absolutely
no reason to think—that people who have
crossed irregularly, or illegally, however
you want to put it, are any more dangerous
than anybody in this room.
And so even little gestures, like putting
up a poster that says “welcome refugees,
welcome immigrants,” that makes a difference
you know, it just sets a tone.
During the summer of 2015, the world watched
in collective awe as tens of thousands of
migrants arrived on the shores of Greece,
and began gradually making their way north,
past heavily militarized borders in Macedonia,
Serbia, Croatia and Hungary before ultimately
reaching destination countries
such as Germany and Sweden.
At the time, sympathy for the refugees, many
of whom were fleeing brutal wars in Syria,
Afghanistan and Iraq, was high.
But it wasn't long before popular opinion shifted.
That year during New Year’s Eve celebrations,
a spate of sexual assaults took place in cities
across Germany, most notably in Cologne,
where hundreds of women reported being attacked
by groups of young men
from the Middle East and North Africa.
While it later emerged that some of these incidents were fabricated
such as an alleged
mob attack by Syrian refugees in Frankfurt,
the horrendous events of that night nonetheless
cemented the racist caricature of the “rapeugee”
in the popular consciousness, and helped kick-start
a furious anti-migrant reaction that was soon
exacerbated by terrorist attacks in France
and Belgium.
In the months and years that have followed,
the gates of Fortress Europe have slammed
shut, and the Schengen treaty guaranteeing
free movement within Europe's interior borders
has been effectively torn up, leaving thousands
of migrants stranded in perpetual limbo.
Responding to this dire situation, many anarchists
and other activists have stepped up to try
and help provide services and a sense of community
to those who have been rendered stateless
in a foreign land.
We had a tent camp in the beginning, for two
months, in the outskirts of Amsterdam.
Where people were camping in the mud, in the
rain, in bad tents, getting sick, without
any assistance from the state, just from the
neighbors, and people like me being there
to support them.
So they had a hard time, they suffered, and
then winter came, and there was an empty church
building, that was facilitated by
squatters in the neighborhood.
And from there, they took about 25 other buildings
to give shelter to We Are Here.
We Are Here is a collective of refugees from
different countries, different nationalities.
We focus on the people who
demand asylum in the Netherlands.
Since 2002, a lot refugees have been kicked
out on the street.
Women, children, have been detained.
In Holland, there’s a long tradition, especially
in Amsterdam, to take empty buildings and
use them as a space for living, for working,
for culture, for anything.
However, the state has managed to control
the squatting movement by making it illegal,
so it’s hard to squat and stay inside.
Because opening a building is one thing, but
staying inside for a longer time is something
completely different.
And in a way you could say that We Are Here,
the refugee collective, has saved squatting.
Because it’s easier for people to accept
squats for refugees than for punks from England,
or tourists from Spain.
So the squatters were quite eager to help
find buildings for the refugees.
And for the police, and for the justice and
the politicians, it was not so easy to evacuate
a thing that’s raised a lot of compassion
and solidarity and sympathy among the society
in general.
People need to move from place to place because
we’re always facing eviction from one building
to another.
It’s very important for the system to keep us
busy with something, because if they give
you a chance to relax then you will think
on your situation, and you’ll create more
demonstrations, and that will stop the system.
So that’s why they have to keep you busy,
from building to building.
We are here to get a life, a better life,
than we had in Somalia.
Life is not so good, like it is in Canada!
And this building here, we will stay here!
But still, we don’t have anything, we’re waiting.
We still have hope that we will have something.
The self-organized solidarity towards refugees
started more or less two years ago, when we
had the first Afghani refugees stranded in Athens.
So what happened was we had a lot of refugees
residing in a nearby park, in the Exarchia
neighborhood.
We tried somehow to help them out with water,
and stuff like that.
Then we realized that they were around 300
people, and water wasn’t enough.
So we made the call to an assembly, hoping
that we would get enough people to support
them for another five days at least.
And hundreds of people showed up,
from all around Athens.
All together, we tried to self organize, and
at the same time re-learned what self-organization is
So for a month we provided medical care, clothing,
three meals a day, tents, sleeping bags that
they could take with them on their journey.
That was the beginning of the major self-organization
of solidarity towards refugees.
From there, two more initiatives popped up.
One was Notara squat, the first housing squat
for refugees, and the other was Platanos,
a self-organized camp that was in Lesbos,
that was in the front lines.
When we were in Chios island,
there were demonstrations.
We talked with them,
we made friendship with them.
They told us “when you go to Athens, we
know a place that’s very good.”
So the first time we came to Athens,
we went to City Plaza.
I would say that City Plaza is a refugee accommodation
space, but not just this, it’s also a political project
More or less 400 people are living inside of City Plaza.
You have so many different nationalities inside
here, so many different people with so many
different backgrounds and intentions.
I know the history of Plaza, it was a hotel
for the Olympics in Athens.
It was closed, and nobody used it.
So the anarchists, they opened it, they repaired
it, they helped lots of people, lots of refugees,
to come here and live a little bit better
than the other camps.
As far as I know, we haven’t lost even one
immigrant or refugee.
No one has committed suicide or got killed.
In camps, you have all the time suicides,
desperate people, people that are dislocated
from the major city centers.
And in contrast to that, you have the squats
that are inside the fabric of the city.
Especially in Exarchia, where we have more
than six squats, housing squats for refugees.
You see the people in the squats that are
not integrated, but they feel like they’re
a part of this small community.
Given the central role that they play in shaping
and determining the course of our lives, and
the massive amount of resources put into militarizing
and securing them, it's important to remember
that, at the end of the day,
borders are just imaginary lines.
For the vast majority of human history,
borders didn't exist.
They are, and have always been, tools of colonization,
used to divide the world into distinct populations
that can be placed at the service of competing
centres of power.Their imposition has always
provoked resistance, and has only been made
possible through the massive application of
organized violence.
Under today's increasingly globalized capitalist
system, their primary function is to carve
the world into distinct economic markets that
can be more easily managed by local governments
for the benefit of a transnational corporate elite.
Politicians and media outfits simultaneously
present borders as impenetrable barriers and
fragile bulwarks of civilization constantly
under threat from dangerous outside forces...
but the reality is that they are arbitrary
make-believe lines intended to keep regular
people divided and fighting amongst ourselves.
By demystifying borders and robbing them of
their power to control our lives, we can come
to a better understanding of our collective
interests as human beings and begin to act
together to dismantle the system
they're meant to uphold.
We were something like 80 people on that boat.
It was so dangerous.
They just told us “you have to go straight.”
They said “you have to just go straight
and those mountains in front of you:
that is Greece.
And anybody of you know how to drive this boat?”
The current political climate is pretty terrifying
for a lot of directly-affected communities,
and it's not clear how it's gonna shake out.
This is a really crucial moment for people
to be doing organizing against the internalization
of the border.
Having a criminal history, even if that just
means crossing, disqualifies you from most
forms of relief.
So what that means is that anybody who has
been caught crossing the border has almost
no prospect of ever having legal status in
this country as it stands currently.
So it's really important to push against this
idea that it is okay to deport criminals,
or that somehow the category of criminal
is a legitimate one.
People should approach local organizing, wherever
they are, with the same urgency that we approach
organizing on the border.
If you can keep somebody in their community
by doing anti-deportation work or creating
protection networks, that means people aren't
going to be coming back through the border
and aren't going to be crossing through the desert.
That might be putting together protection
packets and different things.
It's not always glamorous work but it's extremely
important to keep communities whole.
Just show up and be humble, and be ready to
listen and do your homework and learn about
what's going on, and have a real open heart.
Once they're here, or they've crossed the
border... where are they gonna go?
What are they gonna do?
What's their possibilities of staying?
How are we going to help give them the proper
community support that we would want in the
same situation?
We need to make regular and normal irregular crossings.
We need to make regular and normal the idea
that it's perfectly natural to just walk across,
and that these states that are defined as
the Canadian colonial state and the American
imperialist colonial state are things that
we resist and we oppose, but we're not going
to let the borders get in the way of us having
mutual solidarity.
We can't say “hey we don't want you here.
But we go there and we destroy your land and
we take your resources, and we say hey now
there's no clean water, but we got tonnes
of clean water here.
We're not gonna help you.”
We all have a history and we all have a lineage
of how we got here, to this exact place on
the earth.
There's an expression that often the police
is in our head, and I feel the border is in
our head as well.
Yes... if you cross right here, the RCMP are
right there, and there's likely some level
of ICE enforcement going on.
But just a few hundreds of meters that way
or that way, you could cross.
There's no way that this thousands of miles
of border can be enforced.
I think, you know, closing borders is not
really the solution and it's not gonna work.
As long as they close the borders, the longer
the people will get more motivation to communicate
with each other.
Look, the Berlin border, which divided West
and East Germany before.
Look at after how long, people were breaking out.
And Germany now is one country.
I'm not sure about you but I was born with
two legs and they function, so I walk.
And I walk where I want to go.
That's called freedom of movement.
We found out ourselves in the street, the
only one thing we can do to help ourselves
- solidarity and togetherness,
that's how we start.
Solidarity and creating visibilities.
In my view solidarity requires the capacity
to step into the other's shoes.
Not so much erasing the differences, but using
the diversity to move forward.
We learn from them how to evolve our language
and how we can break the borders of our mind
and political beliefs and lower them so that
we can listen to them.
So the whole process of finding the common
ground with people who come from completely
different cultural, social, political background
and meeting somewhere in the middle and there
trying to form a new kind of space...
I think it's one of the best political actions
that can happen.
Because you know, afterwards what follows
is that the person who is next to you... he/she
might not say anarchist, but you know he/she
is a comrade in a much deeper kind of sense.
Charity is not the right approach in my view,
because that's not solidarity.
Compassion is okay.
Compassion in the sense of trying to feel
what the other feels and see how you can walk
along together.
But again, compassion itself is not enough.
You have, as an individual, to use your powers
and your skills and put them to use
like everybody else
And I think that we can learn a lot from each
other as long as we're rooted and grounded
geographically in our place.
It's great to go other places to learn about
struggles... as long as you can bring it home.
We have a tendency to react to things.
They do something and we react to it.
We have to create the events that they will
make the others react to us.
If it's a movement it has to be everywhere.
We have to create a network.
We have to, all-together, to organize.
Self-organize into something grander.
Migrants who are not able to return to their
country and are not allowed to stay...
where can they go?
They ask for a normal life.
As we continue to face increasingly destabilizing
wars, surging global inequality and climate-change
fueled ecological devastation, the coming
century is poised to see unprecedented levels
of human migration.
Exactly what form this takes will depend,
in part, on our collective initiative, and
our capacity for enacting meaningful solidarity
that stretches across, and ultimately undermines
the borders that currently divide us.
So at this point, we’d like to remind you
that Trouble is intended to be watched in
groups, and to be used as a resource to promote
discussion and collective organizing.
If there are no local migrant support or anti-border
initiatives in your area, please consider
getting together with some comrades, screening
this film and discussing what kind of project
would work best.
Interested in running regular screenings at
your campus, infoshop, community center, or
even just at your home with friends?
Become a Trouble-Maker!
For 10 bucks a month, we’ll hook you up
with an advanced copy of the show, and a screening
kit featuring additional resources and some
questions you can use to get a discussion
going.
If you can’t afford to support us financially,
no worries!
You can stream and/or download all our content
for free off our website: sub.media/trouble.
If you’ve got any suggestions for show topics,
or just wanna get in touch, drop us a line
at trouble@submedia.tv.
We’re excited to see that people have been
busy setting up trouble-maker chapters, and
wanna send a shout out to new chapters in
Williamsburgh, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Cotali,
San Antonio, Cambridge, Burlington, Amsterdam,
Milwaukee, Springfield, Sockell, Sherbrooke,
Doonside, Ottawa, Chicago, Madison and Slovenia.
This episode would not have been possible
without the generous support of Brandon, Julian
and Ross
Now get out there, and make some trouble!