Open Borders

In Defense of Free Movement

Mathew Coleman, Sapana Doshi, Reece Jones

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780820354262, 9780820354279
• eBook ISBN: 9780820354286
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Immigration Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Border control continues to be a highly contested and politically charged subject around the world. This collection of essays challenges reactionary nationalism by making the positive case for the benefits of free movement for countries on both ends of the exchange. Open Borders counters the knee-jerk reaction to build walls and close borders by arguing that there is not a moral, legal, philosophical, or economic case for limiting the movement of human beings at borders. The volume brings together essays by theorists in anthropology, geography, international relations, and other fields who argue for open borders with writings by activists who are working to make safe passage a reality on the ground. It puts forward a clear, concise, and convincing case for a world without movement restrictions at borders.

The essays in the first part of the volume make a theoretical case for free movement by analyzing philosophical, legal, and moral arguments for opening borders. In doing so, they articulate a sustained critique of the dominant idea that states should favor the rights of their own citizens over the rights of all human beings. The second part sketches out the current situation in the European Union, in states that have erected border walls, in states that have adopted a policy of inclusion such as Germany and Uganda, and elsewhere in the world to demonstrate the consequences of the current regime of movement restrictions at borders. The third part creates a dialogue between theorists and activists, examining the work of Calais Migrant Solidarity, No Borders Morocco, activists in sanctuary cities, and others who contest border restrictions on the ground.

PART 1

Why Borders Should Be Open

CHAPTER 1

Sanctuary, Solidarity, Status!

THOMAS NAIL

The aim of this chapter is to describe the current possible path toward a world without borders. Rather than provide a speculative vision of what a borderless world might or ought to look like, this chapter begins instead from where we are and, more importantly, what the road ahead will likely look like. In 2019, we are still at the beginning of this path, but a clear trajectory was already established at the turn of the century. Based on these early experiments we now have a solid idea of the kinds of struggles that will be required for the abolition of borders. Whether these struggles will be successful, what kinds of barriers will confront them, and what other kinds of tactics will be needed as part of a larger struggle against capitalist displacement, racism, colonialism, and the state are all questions for other projects.¹ This essay argues that progress is rarely made by benevolent lawmakers and policies alone. Laws are only poor crystallizations of prolonged popular struggles. Whether one is for or against open borders, or somewhere in between, it is worthwhile to consider empirically some of the processes that will be required to get there.

The case for open borders is often argued as a matter of philosophical morality: are borders just? Or it is argued a matter of administrative practicality: how, if at all, might open border policies be practically achieved by the modern nation-state system? These are important inquiries, but not the topic of this chapter. No less important, but not nearly as frequently considered, is the tactical question of what we will need to do to bring it about. Therefore, in this chapter I begin not from the point of view of cosmopolitan philosophy or political administration, but from the more primary point of social struggle, the material and historical origins of the practical demand itself: what are the tactical conditions for the possibility of a borderless world?

This chapter is divided into five short sections, each of which marks a vector in the path toward a borderless world. The first two sections argue that the starting point for political theory and action should no longer be the state and its policies but rather the socially constitutive figure of the migrant and human mobility that produce and sustain society in the first place. The next three sections outline three interrelated tactics that will likely be necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for winning and sustaining a borderless world: sanctuary, solidarity, and status.

The Figure of the Migrant

Today there are more than a billion regional and international migrants, and the number continues to rise; within forty years, it might double due to climate change. While many of these migrants might not cross a regional or international border, people change residences and jobs more often, while commuting longer and farther to work. This increase in human mobility and expulsion affects us all. It should be recognized as a defining feature of our epoch: the twenty-first century will be the century of the migrant.²

In order to manage and control this mobility, the world is becoming ever more bordered. In just the past twenty years, but particularly since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, hundreds of new borders have emerged around the world in the form of miles of new razor-wire fences and concrete security walls, numerous offshore detention centers, biometric passport databases, and security checkpoints in schools, in airports, and along various roadways across the world. All attest to the present preoccupation with controlling social motion through borders.³

This preoccupation, however, runs through the history of Western civilization. In fact, civilization’s very expansion required the continual expulsion of migrant populations. The tactics used to expel populations have included the territorial techniques of dispossessing people from their land through miles of fencing (invented during the Neolithic period), political techniques of stripping people of their right to free movement and inclusion with new walls to keep out foreigners (invented during the ancient period and put to use in Egypt, Greece, and Rome), juridical techniques of criminalization and cellular confinement (invented during the European Middle Ages), and economic techniques of unemployment and expropriation by a continuous series of checkpoints (an innovation of the modern era). The return and mixture of all these historical techniques, thought to have been excised by modern liberalism, now define a growing portion of everyday social life.

This is the century of the migrant because the return of these historical methods now makes it clear for the first time that the migrant has always been a constitutive social figure. In other words, migrants are not marginal or exceptional figures, as they have so often been treated, but rather the essential lever by which all hitherto existing societies have sustained and expanded their social form. Territorial societies, states, juridical systems, and economies all required the social expulsion of migrants in order to expand. The recent explosion in mobility demands that we rethink political history from the perspective of the migrant.

Take an example from ancient history: the barbarian, the second major historical name of the migrant, after the nomad. In the ancient West, the dominant social form of the political state would not have been possible without the mass expulsion or political dispossession of a large body of barbarian slaves kidnapped from the mountains of the Middle East and Mediterranean and used as workers, soldiers, and servants so that a growing ruling class could live in luxury surrounded by city walls. The romanticized classical worlds of Greece and Rome were built and sustained by migrant slaves, by “barbarians,” whom Aristotle defined by their fundamental mobility and their natural inability for political action, speech, and organization.

Some of the same techniques and justifications for political expulsion remain in effect today. Migrants in the United States and Europe, both documented and undocumented, sustain whole sectors of economic and social life that would collapse without them. At the same time, they remain largely depoliticized compared with the citizens their labor sustains, often because of their partial or nonstatus. Just as Greeks and Romans were capable of incredible military, political, and cultural expansion only on the condition of the political expulsion of cheap or free migrant labor, so it is with Europeans and Americans today.

If this connection seems outlandish, then consider how migrants are described in recent media. The rhetorical connection is as explicit as the architectural one of building giant border walls. In the United States, writers such as Samuel Huntington and Patrick Buchanan have worried about a “Mexican immigrant invasion” of “American civilization.” In the United Kingdom, the Guardian published an editorial on Europe’s crisis that ended by describing refugees as the “fearful dispossessed” who are “rattling Europe’s gates,” a direct historical reference to the barbarian invasion of Rome. In France, the presidential front-runner, Marine Le Pen, said at a rally in 2015 that “this migratory influx will be like the barbarian invasion of the fourth century, and the consequences will be the same.” Even the president of the European Council, Donald Tusk, has described the recent refugees with the same “dangerous waters” and military metaphors used by Romans to depoliticize barbarians: refugees are a “great tide” that has “flooded into Europe” producing “chaos” that needs to be “stemmed and managed.” “We are slowly becoming witnesses to the birth of a new form of political pressure,” Tusk claims, “and some even call it a kind of a new hybrid war, in which migratory waves have become a tool, a weapon against neighbors.”⁴

This will be the century of the migrant, not just because of the sheer magnitude of the phenomenon, but because the asymmetry between citizens and migrants has finally reached its historical breaking point. The prospects for any structural improvements in this situation are hard to imagine, but alternatives are not without historical precedent. Before any specific solutions can be considered, including open borders, the first step toward any change must be to start with the migrant as a primary social figure. This means opening up the political decision-making process to everyone affected by the proposed changes regardless of status. The only way forward in the long march for migrant justice and social equality is status for all.

Migrant Cosmopolitanism

While states and other institutions have slowly walled themselves in over the course of civilization, there has always been a group on the other side forcing the gates open or tearing the walls down: the migrants of history. A migrant, broadly defined, is the political figure whose movement is the cause or result of their social expulsion. The migrant is the collective name for all the political figures in history who have been territorially, politically, juridically, and economically displaced as a condition of the social expansion of power. As such, migrants have always been active not only in demanding greater inclusion, but in creating cosmopolitan alternatives of their own. Migrants have always been the motor of social history; today this omission is becoming glaringly apparent.

In the Neolithic world, the nomads of the steppe were territorially displaced by agricultural peoples and so invented a new social organization of their own based on solidarity, inclusion, and undivided territory. In the ancient world barbarians were kidnapped from all over the Mediterranean and enslaved for the purpose of supporting the Greek and Roman political apparatus. Maroon societies of escaped slaves in Chios and communities of revolting slaves in the Servile Wars, including the one led by Spartacus, were by far the most open and diverse cosmopolitan societies of the ancient period. In the medieval world, hundreds of thousands of peasants were forced from their homes by excessive taxation, the invention of money, rent (commutation debt), enclosures (land privatization), and other means, and then criminalized as vagabonds. Vagabonds of all kinds created maroon societies like those of Bacaudae in Gaul that welcomed all displaced people, who created roaming bands of military defectors, paupers, heretics, minstrels, and so on, with open membership. They created universalist and often egalitarian underground societies that dug up enclosure fences in the night, lived in the forests, wastelands, and commons, and preached the cosmopolitan right of the poor to the land.

In the modern world, after centuries of displacement, migrants were dispossessed of everything but their own labor and were forced to move to wherever and work for whatever capitalists desired. The migrant proletariat in the modern period created the Paris Commune and socialist utopian societies of all sorts. Communists, anarchists, and others advocated the universal equality of an international working class against capitalist displacement and all political exclusion. Thus, it was migrants of all kinds throughout history, not states, who were the true agents of political inclusion and cosmopolitanism.⁵ The legacy of migrant cosmopolitanism continues today in three kinds of tactical struggles: sanctuary, solidarity, and status.

Sanctuary

The first major tactic of this migrant cosmopolitanism is sanctuary. Before any larger social or legal changes are instituted, sanctuary will likely be required to defend migrants and provide the first sites of collective resistance. Migrant sanctuary has a very long history, going all the way back to the fourth century, originating as a religious institution. Even today it is churches, more than anywhere else, that have maintained a space of juridical exception where the law of the state does not apply and where the police are not allowed, either by law or by historical convention. Related to but distinct from this religious tradition, the proliferation of sanctuary cities around the turn of the twenty-first century is a clear indication of a growing social desire to protect undocumented migrants and refugees seeking asylum. Sanctuary cities limit their cooperation with federal immigration enforcement in one way or another. On one end of the spectrum are cities like Denver, which does not officially call itself a sanctuary but is still considered by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to be a sanctuary city because it does not enforce immigration policy or ask people about their legal status and share that information with ICE.⁶ On the other side are cities like San Francisco that not only make it illegal for municipal entities to cooperate with federal immigration but also forbid city employees to limit city services or benefits based on immigration status.⁷

In 2017, President Trump signed an executive order to remove federal funding to all sanctuary cities. The recent rise of sanctuary spaces of all kinds, #SanctuaryRising, #SanctuaryCampus, and others after President Trump’s aggressive proposal to deport millions of migrants from the United States, and executive orders to defund sanctuary cities and block refugees to the United States are an important continuation of this very basic gesture of protection that had its first major political demonstration in Le Mouvement de sans-papiers à Paris en 1996 (the movement of those without papers in Paris in 1996)...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART 1: Why Borders Should Be Open
• PART 2: The Problem with Borders
• PART 3: Activism for Free Movement
• Conclusion In Defense of Free Movement
• Contributors
• Index