Borders Are For Poor People

Myfamily just applied for UK visas which cost $130 each. The private company doing it charges $25 for a ‘Gold Premium Package’ and other random charges. If you want get your passport in five days (instead of two months) you can pay her Majesty nearly $700. And of course, your application has to include proof that you’re rich, or they’ll reject you and keep the money. The whole thing is a fucking scam. International borders are just open discrimination against the colored and especially the poor.

Meanwhile the rich—even those with apartheid passports like Sri Lanka’s—can buy their way out. They can jump through these hoops or even get ‘investor passports’ or other bullshit. It’s all pay-to-play, but laundered through so much dreary paperwork that it appears fair. But it’s not fair at all. The whole thing is premised on the idea that rich people deserve more freedom of movement than the poor, and they don’t.

I was sitting there waiting to collect our passports and an old lady comes up with a cane. She’s brought her medical reports because somebody told her to. The security guard—a guy who wouldn’t get a visa himself—tells her she’s in the wrong place, she needs to go to Horton Place, which is all the way across town. He asks where’s her family and there’s no one. She’s all alone. There’s no fucking fuel in the city. What’s she going to do?

I help her put her mess of documents back in her bag and I wonder. Are we not colonized, still? We still use the name ‘Horton’, some colonizing bastard, and we’re still paying money to the fucking private companies and foreign royalty that looted us so many years before. And we’re still doing this to ourselves, that’s what gets me. The colonial armies that brutalized us were us and the bureaucratic armies that now brutalize us still do.

Lately I hear about the Sri Lankan Navy ‘capturing’ migrants on boats and I’m like, what’s wrong with us? We should sail to Australia, free their concentration camp islands and ram our freedom through. Instead we do the enforcing for these fuckers. From Morocco to Rwanda to Sri Lanka, the face a brown migrant sees stomping them is usually brown. White people don’t even have to get near us to keep us far away. That’s how colonized we still are.