Solidarity Across Borders is a migrant justice network based in Montreal, active since 2003. We are comprised of migrants and supporters, and we organize together to support individuals and families who are confronting an unjust immigration and refugee system. We engage in popular education, support work, as well as political mobilizations, including demonstrations, pickets, delegations, and direct actions.Our main demands are an end to deportations, detentions and double punishment, and support for a full, comprehensive and ongoing regularization program (ie. Status for All!). We also actively campaign to build a Solidarity City, the creation of a community that rejects a system that engenders poverty and anguish, not solely for immigrants and refugees, but also for other Montrealers confronting these same realities.We support open borders and the free movement of people seeking justice and dignity, meaning freedom to move, freedom to return, and the freedom to stay.
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ORGANIZING PRINCIPLES
In addition to our main demands, Solidarity Across Borders is guided by our organizing principles, which helps to orient our campaigns and actions. We actively strive to engage in popular and collective education to make both our demands and our organizing principles a reality, as part of an ongoing process of social struggle. We undertake this work in a spirit of dialogue, openness, discussion, support, and learning.
Solidarity Across Borders acknowledges that we are on the traditional territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka. The Kanien’kehá:ka are the keepers of the Eastern Door of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. The island called “Montreal” is known as Tiotia:ke in the language of the Kanien’kehá:ka, and it has historically been a meeting place for other Indigenous nations. We actively support Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, and undertake to deepen our collective understanding of Indigenous struggles.
At its foundation, Canada is based on the theft of Indigenous lands, and the ongoing genocide and displacement of Indigenous peoples. Its borders were established by colonial wars, to benefit colonizers. This recognition lies at the heart of our rejection of the Canadian state’s borders and the system of multi-tiered status, deportation and detention created by its immigration laws. We reject the legitimacy of the Canadian state as the embodiment of those structures. For this reason, we refuse to collaborate with the state, including police or border agents.
We respect and engage in a diversity of tactics, including popular education, support work, as well as political mobilizations, such as demonstrations, pickets, delegations, and direct actions. We fight to win, and emphasize solidarity and support with our accomplices, allies and comrades. We aim to center our struggle in the realities and demands of people directly affected by the injustices of deportations, detentions, double punishment and borders, consistent with our demands and organizing principles.
Solidarity Across Borders is opposed to all forms of oppression, including ableism, ageism, homophobia, racism, sexism and transphobia. We oppose all forms of racism, including anti-Muslim hatred and anti-Semitism. We are an anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal and anti-capitalist organization.
Solidarity Across Borders as a network supports mutual aid, solidarity, non-hierarchical organizing, and the self-determination of oppressed groups and individuals. We actively oppose far-right anti-immigrant racists and fascists. As an organization, we are non-partisan and autonomous of political parties. We are part of the struggles of oppressed, poor and working class people against the rich and privileged.
We support efforts for radical accessibility, including in our own organizing. We actively oppose police violence & impunity as well as prisons and the prison industrial complex. We support the self-determination and dignity of all workers, including temporary workers, migrant workers, precarious workers and sex workers. We denounce imperialism and global apartheid, and support global struggles for self-determination. As part of building a Solidarity City, we oppose gentrification, and support local struggles against the displacement of any and all precarious, oppressed and working class residents of Montreal, against bourgeois gentrifiers. We support climate justice, and struggles against destructive resource extraction that destroys our shared planet.
Borders and nation-states are inherently racist and violent, and we resist them. We believe in struggling and organizing for a world without borders, with justice and dignity for all!