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indigenous rights
In the Struggle for Undocumented Liberation, US Citizenship Is Not the Answer
When we reject the state’s power to define who belongs, and instead build systems of care that honor all people’s right to exist and thrive, we move toward real justice.
Feb 28, 2025
I am one of the 11 million undocumented immigrants who refuse to live in the shadows of the United States. Now that President Donald Trump’s policies are violently escalating, it’s critical to understand that none of this is new. Family separations, concentration camps, and the displacement of people are part of a long history of ethnic cleansing disguised as immigration policy. U.S. citizens are only now seeing it for what it’s always been.
I once believed anti-immigrant sentiment stemmed from a misunderstanding or a lack of empathy. But over the last decade, I’ve begun to accept what I need other undocumented people and allies to understand: U.S. citizenship is not the answer. True liberation for undocumented people will never come from assimilating into a colonial system built on our oppression. Instead, we must center the fight for Indigenous sovereignty, recognizing that dismantling these colonial ways of existing in the world—not gaining U.S. citizenship—is the key to our collective liberation.
At its core, U.S. citizenship is a legal and political status that grants individuals rights and privileges in exchange for adhering to certain laws and being loyal to its institutions. While it’s often framed as a beacon of belonging, security, and inclusion, in practice citizenship has functioned as a tool of exclusion. Programs like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), introduced by former President Barack Obama in 2012, highlight this tension, offering relief to some while reinforcing the “good immigrant” versus “bad immigrant” narrative.
Citizenship alone won’t free us—but solidarity will.
I was sitting in my high school English class when the program was first announced. What started as hope quickly devolved into disappointment when I realized I was ineligible due to when I arrived in the United States. To qualify, applicants must have arrived before age 16, lived in the U.S. continuously since 2007, and meet education or military service requirements. They must also pass background checks. These requirements underscore that only undocumented individuals who contribute to the U.S. economy through intellectual achievements or who advance the nation’s war machine are deemed worthy of living without the constant fear of deportation.
While DACA has shifted the material realities of some young undocumented people by providing work permits, it simultaneously puts them in danger. Recipients must voluntarily disclose their undocumented status to federal authorities, submitting fingerprints, addresses, and other personal information—a process that must be renewed every two years. Despite being billed as a relief program, DACA inadvertently creates a new system of surveillance targeting undocumented youth.
The disclosure of personal information not only risks recipients’ safety but also discourages resistance. With their standing in the U.S. contingent on being “productive” and “deserving,” DACA recipients are pressured to become complacent and silent about the broader criminalization of undocumented people. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has targeted undocumented activists from across the country in retaliation for their advocacy efforts. Thus, DACA is not merely a program meant to protect; it also functions as a system to surveil and neutralize a whole generation of young people.
At the same time Obama instituted the DACA program, his administration also militarized the border and expanded deportations. The actions of the so-called “Deporter-in-Chief” demonstrate that programs like DACA are insidiously compatible with anti-immigrant sentiment. By creating a distinction between so-called “good” and “bad” immigrants, citizenship divides our community and reinforces the narrative that our worth is conditional. We are reduced to exploitable and expendable resources, mere cogs in a capitalist system.
Moving forward, we must center the material realities of undocumented people who don’t have an immediate path toward legal citizenship on the horizon. As a short-term strategy, we must continue to support harm-reducing legislation such as the New Way Forward Act, which severs ties between the immigration and carceral systems. In the longer term, we must also attend to Land Back movements, acknowledging that Indigenous people are the rightful stewards of this land.
Citizenship alone won’t free us—but solidarity will. When we reject the state’s power to define who belongs, and instead build systems of care that honor all people’s right to exist and thrive, we move toward real justice. Our futures are intertwined, and only by dismantling these violent structures together can we create the world we all deserve.
At its core, U.S. citizenship is a legal and political status that grants individuals rights and privileges in exchange for adhering to certain laws and being loyal to its institutions. While it’s often framed as a beacon of belonging, security, and inclusion, in practice citizenship has functioned as a tool of exclusion. Programs like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), introduced by former President Barack Obama in 2012, highlight this tension, offering relief to some while reinforcing the “good immigrant” versus “bad immigrant” narrative.
Citizenship alone won’t free us—but solidarity will.
I was sitting in my high school English class when the program was first announced. What started as hope quickly devolved into disappointment when I realized I was ineligible due to when I arrived in the United States. To qualify, applicants must have arrived before age 16, lived in the U.S. continuously since 2007, and meet education or military service requirements. They must also pass background checks. These requirements underscore that only undocumented individuals who contribute to the U.S. economy through intellectual achievements or who advance the nation’s war machine are deemed worthy of living without the constant fear of deportation.
While DACA has shifted the material realities of some young undocumented people by providing work permits, it simultaneously puts them in danger. Recipients must voluntarily disclose their undocumented status to federal authorities, submitting fingerprints, addresses, and other personal information—a process that must be renewed every two years. Despite being billed as a relief program, DACA inadvertently creates a new system of surveillance targeting undocumented youth.
The disclosure of personal information not only risks recipients’ safety but also discourages resistance. With their standing in the U.S. contingent on being “productive” and “deserving,” DACA recipients are pressured to become complacent and silent about the broader criminalization of undocumented people. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has targeted undocumented activists from across the country in retaliation for their advocacy efforts. Thus, DACA is not merely a program meant to protect; it also functions as a system to surveil and neutralize a whole generation of young people.
At the same time Obama instituted the DACA program, his administration also militarized the border and expanded deportations. The actions of the so-called “Deporter-in-Chief” demonstrate that programs like DACA are insidiously compatible with anti-immigrant sentiment. By creating a distinction between so-called “good” and “bad” immigrants, citizenship divides our community and reinforces the narrative that our worth is conditional. We are reduced to exploitable and expendable resources, mere cogs in a capitalist system.
Moving forward, we must center the material realities of undocumented people who don’t have an immediate path toward legal citizenship on the horizon. As a short-term strategy, we must continue to support harm-reducing legislation such as the New Way Forward Act, which severs ties between the immigration and carceral systems. In the longer term, we must also attend to Land Back movements, acknowledging that Indigenous people are the rightful stewards of this land.
Citizenship alone won’t free us—but solidarity will. When we reject the state’s power to define who belongs, and instead build systems of care that honor all people’s right to exist and thrive, we move toward real justice. Our futures are intertwined, and only by dismantling these violent structures together can we create the world we all deserve.
Trump’s Plan for Gaza Would Make Colonial Plunder Great Again
In an interview, economist James K. Boyce discusses the relationship between war and economics, and how Trump’s talk of taking over Gaza and turning it into the “Riviera of the Middle East” is similar to the U.S. dispossession of Native Americans.
Feb 27, 2025
Can economics fuel conflict and war? Absolutely, and history is full of such examples. But economics can also pave the way to lasting peace, according to progressive economist James K. Boyce.
In the interview that follows, professor Boyce discusses the economics of war and the role that economics can play in peacemaking, including in places like Ukraine and Gaza, although he acknowledges that daunting challenges lie ahead for these two war-torn areas of the world. As for U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan for Gaza, Boyce puts it side by side with the dispossession of Native Americans in the United States.
James K. Boyce is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a senior fellow of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI). He is the author of Investing in Peace: Aid and Conditionality after Civil Warsand editor of Peace and the Public Purse: Economic Policies for Postwar Statebuildingand Economic Policy for Building Peace: The Lessons of El Salvador.He received the 2024 Global Inequality Research Award and the 2017 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. This interview is based on his seven-part video series released by the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
C. J. Polychroniou: Conflicts across the world have surged since 2020, making this one of the most violent periods since the end of the Cold War. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza have been most visible in the news, but there have been dozens of other conflicts, too. What lessons can we draw from history about the economics of war, the topic of your recent video series from the Institute for New Economic Thinking? How about if we start with the wars of conquest during the era of colonialism?
James K. Boyce: Economics is not just about mutually beneficial exchanges entered into by mutually consenting adults, though you could be forgiven for thinking so if your only acquaintance with the subject was a typical textbook. Real-world economics also is about coercive relationships in which one side benefits and the other loses. Such interactions—which can be grouped under the general rubric of plunder—involve not only outright force but also the manipulation of governments and markets, often occurring in the grey area between what is legal and what is not.
Trump often is described as “transactional” with good reason: For him, policy is about making deals.
The colonial wars of conquest were a particularly naked example of plunder. Slavery, the appropriation of lands and minerals, and the monopolization of commerce were common features of the time, thinly cloaked, if at all, by the pretense of a “civilizing” mission. But it would be wrong to imagine that plunder disappeared with the end of formal colonial rule. It remains a ubiquitous feature of the world economy, now sometimes cloaked by the veneer of “modernization” or “development.” Because plunder is inherently antagonistic—it pits the plunderers against the those whose resources and livelihoods are plundered—it can and often does morph into violence and war.
C. J. Polychroniou: What about more recent conflicts, like the wars in Bosnia (1992-1995) and Afghanistan (2001-2021)? How did economics figure into these?
James K. Boyce: Economics is not the whole story in these or most conflicts, but it is an important part of why they begin, how long they persist, and how they finally end.
Bosnia emerged as an independent nation during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Some commentators blamed “ancient ethnic hatreds” for the violence that accompanied Yugoslavia’s dissolution, but tensions arising from economic disparities among its provinces were also at play. Within Bosnia, three main “ethnic” groups lived side by side—Muslim Bosniaks, Catholic Croats, and Orthodox Serbs—and the fighting largely devolved along these lines (I place “ethnic” in quotation marks, because apart from religious origins the three were hard to distinguish). But another underlying axis of conflict was the deep economic gulf between urban Bosnians (often Bosniaks), who benefited in Yugoslavia from good education, health, and pension systems, and rural Bosnians (often Serbs), who were excluded from the benefits of engagement in the formal economy.
Once war broke out, opportunities for plunder became a key driving force in the conflict. Hardliners who engaged in ethnic cleansing—killing minorities and driving them out—not only sought to establish homogeneous enclaves for “their” people but also to gain personally from seizing the businesses, homes, land, and other property the victims left behind.
Economic incentives, in the form of promises of postwar reconstruction aid, played a key role in the end of the war, too, persuading the warring parties to sign the 1995 Dayton Peace Accord. Dayton, in a sense, was an aid-for-peace bargain. So economics was very much implicated in all phases of the Bosnian conflict.
The 2001-2021 war in Afghanistan was in many ways a resumption of the 1979-1989 war, with the difference that now it was the United States instead of the Soviet Union that occupied Kabul while the countryside largely remained under the control of the Taliban and regional warlords. As in Bosnia, pronounced economic disparities between urban and rural areas fueled the Afghan conflict, and the Taliban tapped into rural discontent. Wide disparities between Kabul and the rest of the country predated the Soviet and American invasions, and were further exacerbated by the wartime influx of foreigners and their money. Meanwhile, by controlling the opium traffic and taxing cross-border trade, the Taliban built a viable economic base of their own.
Economics played a central role in the U.S. war strategy, but it was not a pretty picture. In 2002, then-U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld instructed his senior aides to come up with “a plan for how we are going to deal with each of these warlords—who is going to get money from whom, on what basis, in exchange for what, what is the quid pro quo, etc.” The U.S. government poured nearly $1 trillion into Afghanistan—$145 billion in reconstruction aid plus $837 billion in military expenditures—this in a country with a GDP of less than $20 billion. War “became the Afghan economy,” as The New York Times put it. The Afghan leadership, unsurprisingly, was more attentive to the demands of foreign donors than to the needs of their own citizens. Massive corruption fueled by external assistance fatally undermined any possibility of building a legitimate and effective state. “Our money was empowering a lot of bad people,” a senior U.S. official recalled. “There was massive resentment among the Afghan people. And we were the most corrupt.”
Today 85% of Afghanistan’s people subsist on less than one dollar a day. Whether the Taliban government or the so-called international community will act to address their deprivation and build a lasting peace is an open question.
C. J. Polychroniou: What role can economics play in peace building?
James K. Boyce: There is much to be said on this topic—it is the focus of the video series—and space precludes a full answer here. Let me highlight just two points.
First, economic policies can either reduce inequalities and the accompanying tensions or exacerbate them. This means not only “vertical” inequality between rich and poor, but also “horizontal” inequalities between groups defined on another basis, such as region, ethnicity, race, or religion. A single-minded focus on the total size of the economic pie—the conventional goals of growth and efficiency—is misplaced when conflicts over how it is sliced threaten to smash the pie.
Second, economic policies can either strengthen or weaken the bargaining power of pro-peace forces vis-à-vis those who seek to perpetuate the conflict. In Bosnia, for example, a crucial postwar issue was the return of refugees and internally displaced persons to their former homes. In some municipalities, local leaders welcomed them; in others, they actively obstructed returns, in part to protect their ill-gotten loot. In its “Open Cities” program, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees used reconstruction aid to reward municipalities that welcomed returns and to induce leaders on the fence to come down on the pro-peace side. The program’s implementation was not perfect, but the idea was sound. Again, “who” matters as much as “what.”
C. J. Polychroniou: How can we apply economics to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza? Can economic policies help to drive peace in those two war-torn areas?
James K. Boyce: The Trump administration’s “America first” stance seems likely to lead to a U.S. pullback from engagement in the tasks of peace building and state building in war-torn societies. In part, this reflects a disillusionment born of the dismal failures in Afghanistan and Iraq, and as those experiences suggest, disengagement may not be entirely a bad thing. But Ukraine and Gaza continue to loom large on the U.S. foreign policy agenda.
Trump often is described as “transactional” with good reason: For him, policy is about making deals. In both Ukraine and Gaza, economic considerations will be a big part of any deals we see. But it is by no means clear that forging a lasting peace will be the top priority for the dealmakers. If not, the end of the current wars could merely set the stage for future ones.
The Ukraine war is exhibit No. 1 of the dangers of fossil-fueled oligarchy. In addition to enormous environmental costs, fossil fuels carry a high political cost: They enable the autocratic rulers of petrostates to govern with little accountability to either their own citizens or norms of international law. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a case in point. As Ukraine illustrates, fossil fueled-oligarchy can metastasize into fossil-fueled war.
Putin has oil and gas; Netanyahu has the United States.
Oil and gas revenues have sustained the Putin regime, notwithstanding international sanctions. The sanctions do, however, drive a wedge between the world market price and what Russia receives, so the prospect of lifting them could act as an incentive for Russia to accept a negotiated settlement. But if the Trump administration eases the sanctions without a peace agreement, while at the same time cutting military and financial aid to Ukraine, this will tilt the terms of the settlement in Russia’s favor.
On the Ukrainian side, the prospect of large-scale reconstruction assistance—as well as an end to the carnage—may provide an incentive, too. It now appears that the responsibility for funding Ukraine’s postwar reconstruction will fall mainly on Europe; whether the European nations will be willing and able to shoulder this burden remains to be seen. In an effort to shore up U.S. support, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has offered a minerals-for-aid deal that would give the U.S. access to Ukraine’s deposits of lithium, uranium, and other critical minerals. But the minerals will be in the ground regardless of who controls the land above them, and it is not evident that the Trump administration will care much about that.
In Gaza, the latest war tragically illustrates what I call the “partition dilemma.” The 1994 Oslo Accord sought to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by establishing the Palestinian Authority as a step toward a two-state solution. In the short run, partition can be an appealing way to stop the shooting. But in the longer run, it can set the stage for renewed conflict, as demagogues on both sides invoke fear of the other to enlist public support from their own people. Partition severely undermines the viability of leaders and parties that would appeal to pro-peace constituencies on both sides.
It is not surprising that 30 years after Oslo, we find Hamas on one side and the Netanyahu government on the other. The two feed off each other in a de facto alliance, each holding up the other as justification for its own politics of demonization. This helps to explain why the Netanyahu government not only tolerated but actively facilitated the flow of cash from Qatar to Hamas. In a candid moment back in 2015, Bezalel Smotrich, who is now Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s finance minister, said that “Hamas is an asset.”
The chances that partition will lead to a lasting peace grow even slimmer if one side receives large-scale financial and military support with no strings attached—without peace conditionality—while the other does not. By emboldening one side and embittering the other, the resulting imbalance is a recipe for renewed conflict. Putin has oil and gas; Netanyahu has the United States. Rather than a negotiated settlement, the Israeli government now appears to be seeking a winner-take-all victory. Under the new U.S. administration, Netanyahu will face even fewer constraints than under the last one.
Trump’s talk of taking over Gaza and turning it into the “Riviera of the Middle East” is reminiscent of plunder during the colonial era, including the dispossession of Native Americans in the United States. Yet in purely economic terms it makes a certain amount of sense: Beach resort development would indeed be a more profitable use of the land than maintaining Gaza as a place of confinement for 2 million refugees. Where other politicians see territory, Trump sees real estate.
The problem, of course, is what to do with Palestinians. There is one place that many of them might go willingly: the land of their grandparents, Israel. The fact that option this is unmentionable, even unthinkable, tells us a lot.
If the war in Gaza and ongoing displacement in the West Bank do not end with the complete expulsion or annihilation of the Palestinians—a prospect that still seems inconceivable—the eventual outcome will be a single state in which the surviving Palestinians have a subordinate and marginalized status. Their struggle will then become one for equal rights. Economic policies could prove helpful at that point, but history suggests it will be a long, hard road.
What We Can Learn From Leonard Peltier: ‘I Rise Only When I Help You Rise’
The release of Leonard Peltier after nearly half a century in prison offers a chance for a reflection on the nature of justice and how we treat each other.
Feb 20, 2025
“...I write today from a position rare for a former prosecutor: to beseech you to commute the sentence of a man I helped put behind bars.”
Thus begins one of the most stunning letters I have ever read, written almost four years ago by former U.S. Attorney James H. Reynolds to then-President Joe Biden, pleading with him to exonerate former American Indian Movement (AIM) leader Leonard Peltier, who had been convicted of murdering two FBI agents at South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975.
In one of his last acts before leaving office, Biden did so: freeing Peltier, now 80 years old and beset with health problems, after nearly half a century in federal prison, allowing him to serve the rest of his sentence—lifetime imprisonment—from the Chippewa reservation in North Dakota that is his home. Peltier was released from prison on February 18.
Hey, big news—kind of. Much of the mainstream coverage has been careful to present it as simply a kind-hearted act by the U.S. Department of Justice, allowing an elderly, convicted murderer to spend his final years under home incarceration. It has downplayed not only the serious flaws in the case against Peltier and the worldwide demands for his release—from Amnesty International, from Pope Francis, from Nelson Mandela, and so many others—it has avoided any mention of the larger context: that white America has long been at war with the continent’s Native population, taking their land and attempting to obliterate their culture, essentially declaring them to be subhuman.
For that reason, the fact that Reynolds’ letter is now poking itself into the present news cycle is utterly mind-boggling.
The Pine Ridge shootings occurred on June 26, 1975, when two FBI agents entered the reservation to arrest a resident for stealing a pair of cowboy boots. According to Peltier-supporters’ account, the agents entered private property without identifying themselves. Many AIM members happened to be present at the time. A shootout took place—the reason uncertain—and the two agents, along with a Pine Ridge resident, were killed. The reservation was soon surrounded by about 150 police and FBI officers. Peltier, a Native rights activist, was among those arrested and eventually became the focal point of the government’s case.
Reynolds’ letter to Biden continues: “Leonard Peltier’s conviction and continued incarceration is a testament to a time and a system of justice that no longer has a place in our society. I have been fortunate enough to see this country and its prevailing attitudes about Native Americans, progress dramatically over the last 46 years.”
He then goes into detail about the case itself, explaining: “We were not able to prove that Mr. Peltier personally committed any offense on the Pine Ridge Reservation. As a result, we shifted our stance on the theories of guilt throughout the prosecution and appeal.”
Ultimately, the entirety of the case against Peltier, he writes, was that he was present at the reservation and was in possession of a weapon. There was no evidence that he shot the agents—or evidence against anyone else at the reservation. Indeed, The Guardian, writing about the case, notes that a witness who testified that she saw Peltier shoot the agents “later said she had been coerced into testifying and recanted her testimony.”
All of which sets the context for the largest point Reynolds makes to Biden, transcending the case itself and looking directly at the country’s evolving social consciousness:
“I believe,” he writes, “that a grant of executive clemency would serve the best interests of justice and the best interests of our country. In my opinion, to continue to imprison Mr. Peltier any longer, knowing what we know now, would serve to continue the broken relationship between Native Americans and the government.”
“I urge you to chart a different path in the history of the government’s relationship with its Native people through a show of mercy rather than continued indifference. I urge you to take a step toward healing a wound that I had a part in making. I urge you to commute Leonard Peltier’s sentence and grant him executive clemency.”
All I can do is let these words sit there for a moment. My God, this is a larger look at the nature of justice than I would expect from at actual member of the Department of Justice. Mr. President, let us take action now to begin healing our broken relationship with Native Americans. Let us look at ourselves!
It took Biden several years to take action on Peltier’s incarceration, and it’s not as though Biden’s commutation was also an exoneration—a declaration of his innocence... nor was it an apology for the nation’s, or for Europe’s, five centuries of land theft and cultural dehumanization of Indigenous people of the Americas.
But let me dig for a moment into the words of Peltier himself, who has written an account of how, as a nine-year-old boy, he (along with his sister and a cousin) were taken from their homes and sent off to... uh, boarding school, perhaps more accurately called dehumanization school, the point of which was to take away their language, their culture, their humanity. Upon arrival, the children were stripped naked, forced into hot showers, then “they put DDT all over us. The poison even got in our eyes and mouths.”
The children were told it was to kill lice and other insects—but in reality it was no doubt to eliminate the “Indian” in them. “They made it clear we were hated,” he wrote. “With every look, with every cruel word, they continued a war our ancestors had fought since their ancestors landed here back in 1492.” Some of the kids wound up committing suicide; they were buried in unmarked graves on the school grounds.
Peltier also noted: “We spoke our language. We sang our songs. And we prayed in our languages, all in secret.”
Proof of his guilt—he broke the rules!
He concluded his boarding school memories by writing: “You don’t treat people badly like that. I rise only when I help you rise. Despite all those beatings, I still believe it. It’s a law, like physics, and it’s true. You get nowhere being mean and disrespecting the feelings of others, especially the most vulnerable. I have seen both kinds of people and more than my share of evil ones, and I know I’m right. I rise only when I help you rise.”
This isn’t what the boarding school taught, but apparently this is what he learned. And now, his intention is to teach it to the world.
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