Borders Archives - Public Seminar

What’s Lost Along the Polish-Belarusian border

In an ancient forest, tourists and people on the move walk parallel paths

June 26, 2025 • by Inga Hajdarowicz

On the narrow roads of the Białowieża Forest, the last primeval forest in Europe, military vehicles occupy the space with the roar of their engines. A line of cars on the forest road signals the presence of a mobile police checkpoint at the Polish-Belarusian borderland. A border guard carefully stares ...

What’s Lost Along the Polish-Belarusian border

Migration

At the Border

Going into Poland’s forests to help migrants gave me a sense of peace but the journey is far from over

December 17, 2021 • by Pawel Knut and Franciszka Sady

Before leaving for Podlachia I naively assumed that my trip would have a beginning and an end, that I would gain a better understanding of the ongoing crisis and the role people such as myself could play in it. I seem to have reached some geographical and symbolic end. However, ...

Migration

The Supreme Court’s DACA Ruling & Me

On being superfluous

July 1, 2020 • by José Ángel Navejas

When I crossed the border from Mexico in 1993, there were no doubts about what I would do once I arrived in Chicago: find a job in a factory, or wash dishes, or get down on my knees to scrub dirty toilets, whichever came first. In Mexico, I had grown ...

Migration

Borders in the Time of COVID-19

What the pandemic reveals about the regulation of mobility

April 17, 2020 • by Ayelet Shachar

The COVID-19 pandemic has reminded us of the significance of borders. While much attention has been paid to debates surrounding Donald Trump’s campaign promise to build an “impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful southern border wall,” the current crisis reveals that governments seeking to restrict mobility rely only partly (and increasingly rarely) ...

Migration

Why Nationalism Hurts Us All

Eliminating borders would be revolutionary

February 7, 2020 • by Nandita Sharma

Nationalism is central to the maintenance -- and expansion -- of border control regimes. Defense of laws denying freedom of mobility across national territorial borders animate large swaths of those defined as the nation-state’s “citizens.” Anti-migrant politics is sold as an effective response to experiences of impoverishment, expropriation, and exploitation. ...

Feature

The Stansted 15 and the Criminalization of Migrant Solidarity

Solidarity is framed as a crime and anti-terror legislation is mobilized to suppress dissent

April 2, 2019 • by May Robson

In December 2018, laws designed to deal with terrorism – not peaceful protest – were used to convict the Stansted 15. In March 2017, the group of activists had locked themselves around an aircraft to prevent a charter flight due to deport 60 people from taking off. The case is well-documented, with ...

The Stansted 15 and the Criminalization of Migrant Solidarity

Feature

After the ‘American Dream’?

How Mexico Responds to U.S. Deportations

February 6, 2019 • by Guadalupe Chavez

“Fixing” the “illegal” immigration “problem” has been at the forefront of Donald Trump’s rhetoric from the first weeks he took office until today. Despite Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric, undocumented persons across the U.S. are taking to the streets in protest, demanding that politicians uphold their rights, and seeking sanctuary ...

Feature

Tempest Tossed

Is the US a ‘safe country’ for asylum-seekers?: A conversation with Professor Sean Rehaag on new challenges to the US-Canada

October 24, 2018 • by T. Alexander Aleinikoff

Under an agreement signed in 2002, Canada can return asylum-seekers to the US if they have traveled through the US or lived there prior to arriving in Canada. Recent policies north and south of the US-Canadian border pose new challenges to the agreement, as Sean Rehaag, professor at Osgoode Hall ...

Feature

From Here and There: Diaspora Policies, Integration and Social Rights Beyond Borders

An excerpt and interview from Alexandra Délano Alonso and her latest book

May 27, 2018 • by Alexandra Délano Alonso

In From Here and There, Délano Alonso, Associate Professor and Chair of Global Studies at The New School, offers an exclusive insight into and a critical evaluation of an area of migration governance that is rarely discussed: the processes through which Mexico and other Latin American countries are establishing programs to give ...

From Here and There: Diaspora Policies, Integration and Social Rights Beyond Borders

Feature

Recovering Community: Part I

Remembering the Jungle at Jules Ferry

May 23, 2017 • by Siraj Izhar

We know the scene; there is a gathering, and someone is telling a story. We do not yet know whether these people gathered together form an assembly, if they are a horde or a tribe. But we call them brothers and sisters because they are gathered together and because they ...

Feature

Donald Trump On Mexico-U.S. Ties

An Open Letter

January 5, 2017 • by Alexandra Délano Alonso

Dear President-Elect Donald Trump, I write to you as a citizen of the United States and of Mexico, and as a fellow New Yorker. My American grandmother was brought to Mexico as a teenager when her father was commissioned with the expansion of a soda business there. She met my Mexican ...

Feature

Borders and the Politics of Mourning

A Response in a Post-Trump World

December 19, 2016 • by Anne McNevin

It seems an understatement to emphasize the timeliness of the recent edition of The New School’s journal Social Research on “Borders and Politics of Mourning,” edited by Alexandra Délano Alonso and Benjamin Nienass. The title takes on a whole new meaning in the aftermath of the US election. The politics ...