Hardeep Dhillon

What is a border and how do we map or trace it? Hardeep Dhillon, a PhD candidate in history, writes a history of law and migration that reconceptualizes border-making. “If we imagine borders only as territorial entities and spaces of sovereignty, we are engaging the earth through a lens of disciplined mapping. We’re drawing boundaries on what and how we see. I engage borders in a different way—where migrant journeys provide us with the matter we need to conceptualize borders.” 

Dhillon traces a group of labor migrants who move between South Asia, specifically Punjab (India), and the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, an era often described as a time of “closed” borders, in part because many countries and empires restricted Asian immigration. However, for Dhillon, legal borders in this period expand beyond legal strictures and legal spaces. “They bleed into the life of those who move and arrange claims on the earth. They shape migrant journeys continuously.”

For Dhillon, these laws in the form of border-making are mapped across the journeys of migrants. “In my research, borders are the barriers people experience from the moment they try to leave their home regions. They are fundamentally tied to migrant experiences of place and space, law, and empire. I write a history of borders at different points in the trajectories of immigrants based on the experiences they had,” she says. Her work weaves together histories of South Asia, the British empire, Pacific Ocean, and U.S. settler colonialism.

“We need to re-engage our conceptualization of borders—what they are, where they lie, how people experience them—on an earth where human movement is only increasing and where climate change will continue to forge new geographies and modes of movement. This requires a fundamental shift in the way we think about territory, law, and sovereignty,” Dhillon says.