Mobility is a strange thing. I consider moving one of my favorite hobbies. Dancing, itching, biking, shifting in my seat. I feel in control. I have the luxury of mobility because I was born within the Western womb. My passport claims it so.

This past week I have been thinking about the realities of immigrants. We are in an alarming point in history in which people are being separated by borders and at borders. This has always been a part of our history, but complicity has never been so visible and shocking to neoliberal western eyes. It makes me think of my own mobility and how I flash my driver’s license between state lines or wave my US passport to skip the heavy lines of immigration that are labeled “NON-US CITIZENS.” Borders are physical acts against mobility. Yet, they have been congealed in nationalist rhetoric and today many of us can’t imagine a world without borders to call our own. They offer a sense of identity but at what cost?

Mobility is subject to power. I think about the foundations of our own system based on the capitalist nation state. If we are to be critical about how mobility is constructed, it’s important to understand who is controlling what. Capital itself is inherently dynamic and requires movement. It is built on this and feeds off of never-ending growth. Yet labor is subject to capital rather than the other way around. We are at the mercy of mobility of capital.

I feel very disillusioned by what mobility has to offer today. Our clients at MFS are some of the most resilient folks I am coming to know, yet many are tied to single A4 sheets that outline their limits of mobility. This week I’m left thinking how we can reimagine what mobility looks like.

Re: This is a great paper I’ve been thinking a lot about. Discusses Europe, Modernity, and Eurocentrism (i.e. conceptions of modernity, othering, and how borders were first imagined).  Shouts out Enrique Dussel. http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/wan/wandussel.pdf