This chapter argues that the contemporary policing of migrant lives is part of a longer trajectory in which the state has always sought to control the movement of the displaced and the dispossessed. Today’s global border regime is a (post)colonial infrastructure of state violence which enables an ‘imperial mode of life’ for some through the containment, abandonment, and super-exploitation of others. To take this seriously is ultimately to reject the idea that migrant justice is attainable through humanitarianism, citizenship, and more open borders. Such measures might go some way towards dampening the violence that is unleashed on migrants on a daily basis, but are incapable of uprooting the violent structures that render migrants disposable, precarious, and super-exploitable. In place of state-centric reforms, the chapter theorises borders as a crucial site in the antipolitical struggle against racial capitalism and the state.