Angela Mitropoulos and Bryan Finoki present an incursion, in text and image, into the contemporary borderlands

This post will eventually consist of a report on a meeting facilitated by NoBorders London - Resistance in the UK 's Detention Centres [http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/06/401807.html] [programme posted below] held on 24th June and links to to some of the materials circulated at the meeting covering the recent history of hunger strikes, revolts and organising within detention centres in the UK.

The industrial and mining towns on the Eastern outskirts of Johannesburg are unlovely places. They’re set on flat windswept plains amidst the dumps of sterile sand left over from old mines. In winter the wind bites, the sky is a very pale blue and it seems to be all coal braziers, starved dogs, faded strip malls, gun shops and rusting factories and mine headgear. All that seems new are the police cars and, round the corner from the Harry Gwala shack settlement, a double story facebrick strip club.

But even here the battle for land continues.

We are standing on the brink of an immense revelation. The revelation of people to states. In the UK – the surveillance workshop of the world – people are becoming increasingly visible through IT projects like the Electronic Patients Record and the National Identity Register, as well as a forthcoming points-based immigration regime premised on the ability to identify subjects and then track and cross-reference their data as never before. Joining-up data, and hence governance, is the name of the game.

Where the struggle for migrants’ rights can be risky and divisive, informal organising by ‘illegals’ is a means to ensure survival. But both formal and informal organising can combine to protect an essential buffer zone of invisibility for undocumented workers — writes Unterschreber