Borders and the Exchange of Humans for Debt
Borders and debt are new instruments of violence in a system that has had many names.
Heba Gowayed
The jagged shoreline of the island of Lesbos, Greece, which runs into the Aegean Sea just miles from the Turkish coastline, is a site of the macabre and systemic practice of “border externalization,” where wealthy states enlist less wealthy states — often indebted ones — to intercept and brutalize human beings destined for their borders.
It is here that 23-year-old Ahmed — who left Gaza in 2021 to find refuge from a life behind Israel’s Iron Wall and violence, which promised “no future, no work, no possibilities” — was beaten by Greek border patrol and left adrift on a dinghy with a broken engine. It would take five attempts, full of terror and humiliation, for Ahmed to reach Greece, which was just one stop on a longer journey to Germany to reunite with cousins.
Still, Ahmed was lucky — thousands of others have drowned in the Aegean and Mediterranean seas.
Greece does the dirty work of beating back, imprisoning and even killing migrating people on behalf of the European Union (EU) because the EU promises financial relief to the deeply indebted country. Panos Kammenos, Greece’s defense minister, explains the trade-off directly and callously: “If [EU creditors] strike us, we will strike them. We will give documents to migrants coming from anywhere in order to travel in the Schengen Area, so that this human wave could go straight to Berlin.”
Greece’s subjugation through debt and its participation in the dirty work of border externalization is a stark example of a pattern more commonly observed among countries in the Global South, which, as Guyanese historian Walter Rodney puts it, were underdeveloped by their colonizers through theft, enslavement and oppression that destroyed their economies. Then, these countries were left beholden to those very same colonizers through new relationships of domination — including debt.
As Thomas Sankara, former president of Burkina Faso, explained in a prescient speech in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1987, “Dominated by imperialism, debt is a skillfully managed reconquest of Africa.” Externalization is a prime feature of this reconquest.
An In These Times exposé in July 2023 (“How Europe Outsourced Border Enforcement to Africa” by Andrei Popoviciu) revealed how Europe is equipping countries like Senegal and Mauritania with Israeli-manufactured phonecracking Cellebrite technology to track migrants moving toward European shores. Deeply indebted Libya — a country that has suffered under fascistic and genocidal Italian colonialism, the dictatorship of Muammar Gaddafi, and the U.S.-fueled imperial intervention that participated in killing him — uses its EU-funded coast guard to push back, enslave and torture migrants.
Recently, in a particularly shocking example of how common and depraved this global practice of the trade of debt for human life has become, rumors circulated that Egypt, suffering under staggering debt burdens, turned down an offer of a large debt write-off in exchange for receiving the population of Gaza in a forced displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their land. Leaked documents showed Israel had indeed considered this plan.
The Western Hemisphere, too, features these externalization arrangements. A climate-embattled Panama, concerned with corruption, inequality and debt, accepted resources from President Joe Biden’s administration to help in deterring asylum seekers headed to the United States.
Mexico has long enforced the border of the United States, agreeing to deport people in return for foreign aid and investment. The U.S.-Mexico border is the world’s most deadly land migration route as people, hoping to avoid the denial they will face if they attempt to seek asylum, take treacherous routes through the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts — and the death toll is likely to rise with Biden’s imposition of quotas for asylum in June.
To explain why countries in the Global South brutalize people of the Global South on behalf of the Global North is to understand how colonial oppression persists through new institutions that contour global borders and impose debt.
In the two decades after World War II, European empires began to unravel and ushered in a new world order. The United Nations formed in the immediate postwar period, animated by a fiction that the world is composed of independent nation-states on equal footing — a fiction that ignored the colonial period that preceded it.
The coming decades would see formerly colonized people revolt against their colonizers, building their own countries with a sense of self-determination and pride, accompanied by tangible, often socialist, policies of self-sufficient, closed economies with nationalized industries and robust public services.
Led by Egypt, Yugoslavia, Ghana and Indonesia, among others, 120 countries from the Global South formed a Non-Aligned Movement to resist allying with either the United States or the Soviet Union — to resist colonialism, imperialism and racism.
These formerly colonized peoples, however, stood little chance against pressure from the new, global, racial capitalist system that derived its wealth from centuries of colonial theft. The United Kingdom, as just one example, stole $45 trillion from India during the colonial period.
Organizations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, dominated by the United States and often described as tools of imperialism, led the charge in the 1970s and 1980s to pressure formerly colonized countries to eschew socialist systems in favor of export-oriented growth. Loans were offered to facilitate their ability to compete, which came with interest, fees and requirements to restructure economies away from socialist models — decreasing the public services on which citizens relied.
Between 1970 and 2022, formerly colonized countries paid $2.5 trillion in interest alone to creditors, their former colonizers. They faced soaring inequalities as public services were slashed. Today, $203 billion leaves Africa each year, including $68 billion in dodged taxes.
Given this history, UCLA law professor E. Tendayi Achiume argues that migration should be thought of as decolonization and criticizes a world order that centers the right of states to defend their borders, rather than the right of people to move between them.
Externalization is evidence not only of the rigidity and brutality of global borders, but a trend of the wealthiest countries shirking their responsibility to the right to asylum enshrined in global agreements like the 1951 Refugee Convention and 1967 Refugee Protocol to which they are signatories. What’s more, the right to asylum is necessary only because of the colonial histories that preceded it, the wars that are produced by its divide-and-conquer strategies, the nation-state system that rigidly parcels our world.
Borders and debt are new instruments of violence in a system that has had many names — colonialism, post-colonialism, racial capitalism— but has for decades, centuries even, been intent on dimming, subjugating, destroying, the lives of Black and brown people for the sake of its financial gain and its continuity.
“We cannot pay because we are not responsible for this debt,” Sankara declared in that 1987 speech. “We cannot repay but the others owe us what the greatest wealth could never repay, that is blood debt. Our blood had flowed.”
Heba Gowayed is an Associate Professor of Sociology at CUNY Hunter College. Her work centers the lives of people who migrate across borders and the unequal and often violent institutions they face. She is author of Refuge, published with Princeton University Press, and is working on her second project, The Cost of Borders, where she argues that borders, rather than moral markers of sovereign land, are better understood as a series of expensive— and often deadly — transactions. She is published in academic journals as well as in Slate, Al Jazeera English, The New Humanitarian, and Teen Vogue, and has had her work featured in various outlets including her favorite podcast Code Switch.
