As the international crisis of capitalism intensifies, the number of global immigrants, according to the United Nations, rose to 281 million in 2024. Around 28 million were from Syria, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Ukraine, all countries at war, mostly as a direct result of U.S. and NATO interventions. Most of the rest, around 220 million individuals, were displaced by capitalist climate-related disasters. 

Displacing workers

Both war and environmental disasters are, of course, neither “natural” nor “acts of God.” They are the results of decades of political and economic decisions, based entirely on the self-interests of the rulers of the U.S., Russia, and Europe. The interests of these political states continually clash. 

The movie Green Border, a 2023 co-production from Poland, the Czech Republic, France, and Belgium, illustrates the awful toll on workers and their families as they try to escape the savagery of inter-imperialist rivalry.

In 2020, the European Union (EU) imposed sanctions on Belarus under President Alexander Lukashenko, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin of Russia. (This alliance would intensify after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.) The EU sanctions led to the Belarus–European Union border crisis of 2021, the subject of this movie.

Lukashenko orchestrated a crisis involving thousands of migrants and refugees attempting to cross into the EU, particularly through Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. By the summer and fall of 2021, thousands of migrants—most of them from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Yemen—arrived in Belarus with the aim of entering the EU. The movie shows how these migrants were then dumped at the border, left in the Białowieża Forest, and told to head into Poland, a NATO and EU country. 

Neither Belarus nor Poland wanted these refugees; they were poor, and many were not white. Green Border shows these migrants being quite literally tossed back and forth over the border’s barbed wire fences. The guards on both sides of the fence are systematically indoctrinated with racist, anti-refugee ideas, much the same as the “training” for ICE and border guards in the U.S. The migrants are dehumanized as criminals, terrorists, and infiltrators. Most of the Polish police accept this racist ideology—but not all. 

Green Border is an example of how dialectical thinking—rather than one-dimensional propaganda, can make for great art. Despite their enormous ideological differences, Karl Marx admired the writings of Honoré de Balzac for his richly detailed and insightful depiction of French society in the early 19th century. Balzac illustrated the economic, social, and moral dynamics of his time. He showed how nothing stays the same, and that people change.  

In the film Green Border, ordinary Poles break the law by hiding refugees. A middle-class white family gives shelter to Black African boys. Medical workers risk being shot by their own border police to help wounded migrants in the forest. A Polish border guard refuses to carry out his orders to arrest or shoot at migrants.

These scenes gain even more power in a period when Donald Trump is promising to deport one million undocumented immigrants from the U.S. each year. On the one hand, Green Border shows the brutal effects of a racist, fascist system that incarcerates, deports, and shoots people fleeing war and poverty. But the film also shows that ordinary people will stand up to oppose capitalist brutality.