A first-year core course at the University of California Los Angeles medical school requires students to read articles advocating for the abolition of borders as a public health imperative and arguing that the current border crisis is a myth.
Structural Racism & Health Equity (SRHE) asks students to read the scholarly article titled “Beyond border health: Infrastructural violence and the health of border abolition” and a news article, “A system of global apartheid: author Harsha Walia on why the border crisis is a myth.” The readings are assigned for a section of the class titled, “Histories of Imperialism.”
The first article claims that open borders are a remedy to global illnesses such as those ailing migrants originating from the Northern Triangle (an area comprised of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras). It finds the conditions driving mass migration to be colonialism, U.S. imperialism, neoliberalism, and border militarization.
“In place of a tacit acceptance of the modern system of borders, we argue for border abolition as a vital but underused treatment in the repertoire of medical intervention,” the article states. “Outlining the rights of people to stay and to move, and drawing on lessons from the prison abolition movement, we offer policies and practices towards a ‘no borders’ system that privileges liberatory solidarity with migrants by explicitly challenging global infrastructures that drive displacement.”
Republicans are fueling hysteria around the border crisis and exploiting it for political gain, according to the news article that students are asked to study.
“The rising number of migrant children and families seeking to cross the US border with Mexico is emerging as one of the most serious political challenges for Joe Biden’s new administration,” the article said. “That’s exactly what Donald Trump wants: he and other Republicans believe that Americans’ concerns about a supposed ‘border crisis’ will help Republicans win back political power.”
The article also cites author Harsha Walia, a Canadian organizer who helped found the nonprofit No One Is Illegal. Walia has argued that the ongoing anarchy at the border is a hoax. “Actual crises” such as capitalism and climate change, Walia said, create mass migration. The catastrophe at the border, in which nearly six million illegal immigrants have flooded into the country since President Biden took office, is one of the “imagined crises” Walia outlines, the article said.
“The newest invocation of a ‘border surge’ and a ‘border crisis’ is again creating the spectre of immigrants and refugees ‘taking over,'” Walia said in an interview with the Guardian. “This seemingly race neutral language – we are told there’s nothing inherently racist about saying ‘border surge’– is actually deeply racially coded. It invokes a flood of black and brown people taking over a so-called white man’s country.”
When asked for comment, a spokesman for UCLA Health & David Geffen School of Medicine said: “Thanks for your inquiry. We are looking into this.”