No Wall They Can Build, Episode 2: Defining Terms, The Aftermath, and The Travelers

Welcome to Episode 2 of No Wall They Can Build, the Ex-Worker Podcast’s serialized audiobook exploring borders and migration across North America. This installment continues last week’s introduction by Defining Terms—just what do we mean by the border, migrants, refugees, solidarity workers, and other key phrases? To begin the long section describing movement From South to North, The Aftermath lays out an unflinching view of the 500-year history of colonization, slavery, and genocide on which today’s capitalist economy and border regimes are based, followed by a harrowing tale of survival by a desert migrant. The Travelers lays out the forces pushing migrants from Mexico and the Northern Triangle (Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras) north towards the United States, illustrating the economics of the situation through a moving story in which migrants and solidarity workers work out the mathematics of international exploitation together. This chapter demystifies the basic dynamics at play in North American migration and evocatively illustrates their human cost. {April 10, 2019}

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• Table of Contents:
  • The United States Is War {0:01}
  • Introduction {0:22}
  • Defining Terms {0:42}
  • The Aftermath {4:24}
  • Story #1 {7:45}
  • The Travelers {10:06}
  • Story #2 {17:11}
  • Conclusion {20:56}
• Note: For this audiobook, we will not provide full transcripts of the text of each episode as we do for The Ex-Worker or The Hotwire. If you want to read along, you can find the book in PDF.
• This week we heard discussion about intervention in a Border Patrol stop in Tucson, AZ and a roundup of resistance to border wall construction and ICE around the country.
• You can check out our poster diagramming the North American border regime and immigrant solidarity stickers.
• Stay tuned next week for Episode 3: The South, Part 1 - Mexico.