Borders as promises of leisure and passageways to freedom-making: leisure at the cost of labouring bodies

News concerning nation-state borders and border crossings feel socio-politically charged and more divisive in this information era due to the reach and impact of accessible digital media and reporting. While there is an understanding that borders are sociopolitically constructed and prescribed, these arbitrary borders segmenting Indigenous land are consequential to individuals crossing. Many migrants/arrivants following promises of future abundance, safety, stability, and social and global mobility. However, under capitalism, freedom and leisure are bought, and the labour cost for some is greater than others.Capital is the vehicle through which freedom and certain privileged forms of leisure are experienced. We articulate enmeshments of borders, leisure, labour, and respective mobility of the body politic, which reproduces, reifies, and redraws borders. Informed by critical leisure and transdisciplinary scholarship, we (re)articulate borders as liminal gateways to leisure vis-a-vis labour; by positioning boarders as: (a) tools for reinforcing individual class privilege; (b) re-inscribing imperial dominance and colonial claim-laying, and (c) passageways for freedom-making by way of labour/capital accumulation.