‘Not everyone alive in the present is automatically included in its sense of “living” or “present”.’ This quotation from Esther Peeren's book The Spectral Metaphor offers a thought-provoking frame for ‘Borders’, the theme of our next three chapters, in which migration into the UK and US vividly embodies colonialism's afterlife.

The process of crossing a country's border is experienced very differently by travellers, depending on what part of the world you are from. EU citizens can travel from country to country within the European Union with minimal hassle. If you hold a passport from the UK or the US, you can travel to many countries without restrictions. The situation is quite different for international travellers trying to enter US or UK borders – even trickier if you are a migrant, potentially hazardous if you are an undocumented migrant.

Migrants, particularly undocumented migrants, face many forced interactions with finance capital. Migrants can be driven across potentially unwelcoming borders by indebtedness incurred at home, only to be burdened with new debts on arrival. In this sense, undocumented migrants become living ghosts in constant motion, never arriving, although their journeys are profitable for various entities along the way.

Our first encounter with borders comes from Kathryn Medien (Chapter 7), who portrays the UK border as a lethal apparatus that criminalizes movements through carceral (i.e., related to prisons and policing) surveillance. Here, Medien draws on the notion of carceral capitalism, a concept proffered by Jackie Wang in her 2018 book of the same name. Wang defines carceral capitalism as a very modern and particular form of racial capitalism, encompassing parasitic governance and predatory lending. Parasitic governance engages in several techniques, including automated processing, extractive practices, confinement and gratuitous violence. Medien examines the private debt-collection agencies contracted to collect debt from overseas patients, using all the threatening techniques for which debt-collection agencies are well known. The intended outcome? To deter undocumented migrants from seeking medical attention for fear of Home Office involvement. The unintended outcome? Driving vulnerable people into the shadows, thwarting national efforts to manage public health.

Medien looks at the border erected at hospitals, clinics and sites that form Britain's National Health Service or NHS. The NHS is a much-cherished British institution, funded through general taxation, enabling everyone to receive free healthcare at the point of use. Not quite everyone. Medien examines the new reality for migrants who must prove eligibility for healthcare or face upfront charges – or deportation. The slow marketization of the NHS, and the expansion of a range of managerial reforms, as well as disastrous ‘private finance initiatives’ (where hospitals lease back buildings at often inflated costs from private developers) introduced since the 1990s, have put strains on the NHS that make it an increasingly stretched public service, even for those who are not forced to endure additional surveillance and charges by virtue of their migration status. In truth, too, the recent turn to an explicitly exclusionary NHS does not come from nowhere; the Commonwealth migrants who were drawn in to staff the NHS after the Second World War were met with racist exclusionary labour and housing markets, and a socialist government comfortable with ongoing colonial trusteeship over their ‘sending’ countries.

Eve Dickson, Rachel Rosen and Kehinde Sorinmade (Chapter 8) contend that twenty-first-century borders have their own temporality. Many social scientists use the term ‘temporality’ to refer to the way in which we experience time, and how we organize our lives around those experiences and understandings of time. The temporality of borders for many racialized migrants could mean that your daily life is structured by concerns about debt repayments and the need to constantly keep up with bureaucratic requirements. The three co-authors transport us across the UK's formal borders, setting us down at the school gates, where they demonstrate how the UK's ‘hostile environment’ erects borders in multiple places.

The ‘hostile environment’ is a UK Home Office policy introduced in 2012, representing some of the harshest immigration policies in Britain's history, solidified through the 2014 and 2016 UK Immigration Acts. Collectively, hostile environment policies suggest that jobs, benefits and services are the sole preserve of British subjects, where British subjects are constructed as white. In this chapter, the border is erected between migrant parents and their children's education.

Britain's state schools are a local government entitlement for most residents; some families are also entitled to free school meals. Migrant parents whose passports are stamped ‘no recourse to public funds’ are often forced to pay for school meals, propelling them into more indebtedness to keep their children educated. Children become collateral, as debts incurred by migrant parents in one place must pay back debts in another place. Dickson, Rosen and Sorinmade redefine a modern British empire built on finance capital's continued extraction of ‘other’ bodies.

Carceral capitalism becomes literal when Christian Rossipal (Chapter 9) examines the US immigration detention system, itself a billion-dollar industry and an extension of the prison-industrial complex. In his chapter, carceral capitalism is manifested through both parasitic governance and predatory lending. Rossipal demonstrates that when undocumented migrants cross the US–Mexican border they soon encounter invisible borders of finance capital. Once detained, some migrants negotiate temporary ‘freedom’ through monetary bonds offered by immigration bond companies operating in a grey zone opened up by US public policy. Such zones are classic haunting territory, as Rossipal demonstrates in his analysis of immigration bond services and their disturbing appropriation of humanitarian language to promote predatory debt.

All three ‘Borders’ chapters interrogate the complex symbiosis between private companies and nation-states to facilitate the flow of global capital through public dispossession.