1. Why we need open borders

Borders are violent

The first argument for opening borders is simple: by doing so, we would end the violence of border controls.

In November 2019 the British public were shocked by the discovery of the bodies of 39 Vietnamese migrants in a refrigerated lorry, who had paid traffickers to be smuggled into the UK. While this tragedy rightfully led to public shock and dismay, it is among thousands of cases of migrants dying while attempting dangerous journeys. Between 2014 and 2019 almost 20,000 people died in the Mediterranean while attempting to cross the EU’s external border with Turkey and North Africa. These deaths primarily occurred because border controls forced people to take dangerous routes, often via sea on ill-suited vessels. The situation deteriorated in 2016 following the EU-Turkey deal, in which Turkey agreed, in exchange for €6 billion, to seal its border with Greece to prevent migrants travelling into the EU. This led to an increase in the number of migrants who were driven to try and reach Europe by sea, significantly increasing the number of fatalities from sea crossings.1 Those attempting dangerous journeys are typically moving because of poverty, conflict or persecution. The UN refugee agency estimates that over 70 million people were forced to flee their homes in 2018 alone – the highest numbers on record. But in response to rising numbers of people attempting to move, around the world states have been clamping down on irregular migration. There are now over 50 border walls across the world, a phenomenon almost unheard of in the middle of the 20th century, and the sums being spent on border enforcement have surged in recent years.2

Mainstream reaction to the deaths of migrants on precarious journeys often points the finger at the callousness of smugglers.3 But this narrative is deeply flawed. It fails to acknowledge that if movement was unrestricted by border controls, people would not be forced to resort to such desperate measures. And when states impose greater barriers to movement, the resulting suffering is often made worse.

This suffering is not merely caused by the dangerous routes migrants

have been forced to take. Today’s increasingly militarised borders all too often produce violence directly. Consider, for example, the long and tragic list of people killed by border guards the world over. Since 2003, along the US-Mexican border 97 people have been killed as a result of encounters with the US border force.4 Between 2001 and 2017, 936 people have been killed along the Bangladesh-India border by the Indian Border Security Force and other state forces.5

Human Rights Watch has reported numerous incidents of Turkish border guards shooting at and killing Syrian refugees as they try to cross the border.6 Murders at the US-Mexico border include those of 16-year-old Mexican Jose Rodriguez, killed by a US border patrol agent in 2012, shot from behind by 10 bullets as he ran away.7 They include the murder of 15-year-old Bangladeshi Felani Khatun shot by India’s border security force in 2011, her dead body left hanging on the barbed wire border.8 Or a group of at least 15 migrants travelling from Morocco to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta who died after being shot at by the Spanish Guardia Civil, unable to stay afloat in the water.9

Murders at the border almost never result in convictions. The killer of Jose Rodriguez was acquitted of murder and manslaughter,10 the killer of Felani Khatun found not guilty due to insufficient evidence,11 while a Spanish judge deemed that the case against the killers of Larios Foto, one of the Moroccan migrants, had no merit.12 Instead, the institutional and legal response to these murders is, typically, to deny, cover up and lie. In the US, border patrols have justified their violence by faking statistics to show a sharp rise in the number of assaults against them.13 And after the 2014 Ceuta shootings, the Spanish Interior Minister Fernández Díaz initially denied that shots were fired; the lie was quickly exposed through private footage. The Spanish police then released propaganda footage of a large number of people approaching the border fence in a bid to deflect criticism.14

A further dangerous trend in border control in recent years is the way in which rich countries have outsourced this violence to other countries whose state institutions are even more repressive. The EU is particularly guilty of this. Beyond driving migrants to dangerous sea crossings, a further consequence of the 2016 EU-Turkey deal was that thousands of migrants faced human rights abuses at the hands of Turkish authorities.15 The EU has agreed similar arrangements with Sudan, Morocco and Libya,

leading to abuses in all cases. The case of Libya is particularly troubling – with joint support from the EU and Italy, the Libyan Coast Guard and Ministry of Interior have been implicated in the abuse, extortion, torture, sexual violence and forced labour of migrants.16

The violence of borders is not confined to those attempting to journey to another country, however. Repressive immigration controls continue within the territory of states. For borders to be enforced, states must have the power to snatch migrants from their homes, imprison them in detention centres and forcibly deport them. This often involves brutal treatment – for example, the UN observes that in all regions of the world migrants are detained in “appalling physical and hygiene conditions” which violate international human rights law; and physical and sexual abuse is widespread in detention centres.17

In their attempts to double down on border control, states have resorted to criminalising those acting in solidarity with migrants against border violence. At the time of writing Pia Klemp, a German boat captain of the charity Sea Watch, is awaiting trial in Sicily, threatened with up to 20 years in prison after rescuing more than 1,000 people from drowning in the Mediterranean Sea.18 In 2018 Hungary passed a law making it a crime to assist any migrants in acquiring a residence permit.19 In the US, four women have been charged for leaving food and water along the US border for migrants crossing the desert in the baking heat.20

Despite the huge architecture of repression designed to control the movement of people, the fact remains that people still move in huge numbers, ‘legally’ or otherwise. Indeed, the migration of groups of people is a constant feature of human history. Border controls impose upon a natural and inevitable process a huge dose of fear, insecurity, suffering and death.

Borders are a form of global apartheid

Borders may be violent, but what is their function? Most directly, today’s borders serve to exclude people from the global south moving to countries in the global north. As author and academic Reece Jones points out, this is part of a long historical trend dating back many centuries – it is the world’s poor whose movement is controlled, from master-serf relations in the middle ages through to the electrified fences and walls of today’s national borders.21

Excluding people from the global south from moving to the north prevents them from having the opportunity to significantly increase their income. It is worth noting the scale of this phenomenon. A professional earns eight times more in the UK than in Mali,22 even accounting for the UK’s higher cost of living. Around 50% of the variation in personal incomes across the world can be linked to a person’s country of residence.23 Calculations at the time of the study found that “compared to living in the poorest country in the world (DR Congo), a person gains more than 350% if she lives in the United States, more than 160% if she lives in Brazil, but only 32% if she lives in Yemen”.24 Each country has a range of potential incomes, from which it is very difficult to escape.

Further, the income disparities resulting from this exclusion relate to a whole raft of socio-economic disadvantages. For instance, compared to those in wealthier countries, people born in the poorest countries are “five times more likely to die before the age of five”, “ten times more likely to be malnourished” and much less likely to have access to clean water, shelter and basic education.25 There is a further dimension to this problem. Borders don’t merely prevent people from poorer countries moving to richer ones. They also compound the disadvantage experienced by workers in poor countries. This is because, by limiting the ability of workers from those countries to move, they compel them to accept poorly paid, dangerous work. The era of neoliberal globalisation has intensified this problem – as capital has become able to move around the globe more freely, businesses are able to locate themselves where labour is cheapest and least well protected. Notoriously, industries such as the garment industry are concentrated in countries where poorly paid workers are faced with often horrendous conditions. This was tragically revealed by the Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh in 2013 in which 1,134 people ere killed when a factory ceiling collapsed. Media reaction focused on the failings of the company and its owners. But this was not simply a case of ‘bad apples’. In a situation of free movement, the dramatically increased bargaining power of workers would raise wages and standards, making such outcomes significantly less likely. However, when labour is immobilised by border controls, workers often have

little option but to provide cheap labour to unscrupulous employers.

In excluding, disempowering and impoverishing millions of people from poor countries, overwhelmingly from formerly colonised countries, today’s border regime effectively maintains a system of global apartheid. The fundamental feature of South African apartheid was to construct a social order based on keeping the black population both separate and unequal. Black workers were compelled to labour under poor conditions and low wages, enriching South Africa’s white elite, and access to the white parts of South Africa was governed by a regime of identity documentation and mobility controls, backed up by militarised authorities. The same basic dynamic operates between the populations of the global south and the global north today. And just as the ending of apartheid was marked by the end of mobility restrictions on the black population, so too is free movement required to end global apartheid today.

The apartheid analogy extends further, in fact. A crucial element of South African apartheid involved granting limited access for black workers to white areas, but ensuring such workers lacked economic and politics rights and were therefore easily exploitable. And of course, South African apartheid rested on deep-rooted racism. Today’s border regime reproduces both of these features of apartheid as well.26

Borders exploit migrant workers

In May 2019, hundreds of people took to the streets of Beirut, Lebanon, to protest the ‘Kafala’ system and demand a change in labour laws. The workers from countries such as Ethiopia, Bangladesh and Kenya marched with the slogans “I am not your property”, “our lives matter” and “include us in the labour law”.27 The Kafala system, present in many high-income Arab countries, ties foreign workers to their employers while denying them the same labour protections as citizens. Workers need the permission of their employers to change employment and even to leave the country and can be deported if they complain about their work conditions.28 Under the Kafala system, employers commonly withhold payment and confiscate identity documents such as passports.29 This policy has therefore given employers absolute power over migrant workers, leading to numerous reports of physical attacks

and torture,30 sexual abuse31 and even murder.32 The system amounts to a form of modern-day slavery with many dying in an attempt to escape their employees. The situation is so intense that Lebanese activists have built an underground railroad, like the ones used to transport slaves in North America to free states, to get people to safety.33

The Kafala system is an extreme manifestation of the third reason to oppose border controls: that they are intimately bound up with the exploitation of workers. By limiting the rights of workers, borders skew the power balance between worker and employer further in the direction of the employer. Millions of migrant workers the world over are tied to their specific employer in the host country and vulnerable to deportation if their employment contract is terminated or changed in significant ways. The sponsorship scheme in the UK is one example of this. Under this system, skilled workers from outside the EU are able to work in the country provided their employer, their sponsor, has been granted a work permit by the Home Office. The employer has the right to withdraw this sponsorship at any time, or refuse to renew the sponsorship, and significant increases in a worker’s salary might also affect the conditions of their sponsorship and result in non-renewal.34 The withdrawal of sponsorship often leads to deportation. Similarly, ‘guest’ worker visa programmes in East Asia allow foreign workers to temporarily fill dirty, dangerous and difficult jobs. Workers can only live in the country for the duration of their employment.35 Visa conditions do not allow guest workers to change employment. This system is similar to many of the guest worker programmes Western European countries instituted after World War II, and, just as with the Kafala system, leads to abuse from both employers and employment agencies.36

In addition to these legal forms of exploitation, border controls create a class of undocumented, ‘illegal’ migrant workers, who lack the most basic rights and are therefore highly vulnerable. Undocumented workers’ lack of legal status undermines their pay – in the US, the ‘wage penalty’ for being undocumented is estimated at between 6% and 20%.37 Minimum wage violations are much more likely for undocumented workers than others; in Italy, undocumented workers in the agricultural sector earn less than half the minimum wage established by collective agreements.38

Undocumented workers are also subject to some of the most dangerous working conditions faced by any workers. In the US, undocumented workers are vital to

the agriculture industry, one of the country’s most dangerous sectors in which hundreds of workers die each year and 100 workers a day lose time at work due to injury. The systemic mistreatment of agricultural workers is enabled by the huge proportion of undocumented workers in the industry. It has been estimated that fully 53% of farmworkers are undocumented, though the true number could be even higher.39 Lacking legal status, undocumented workers have very limited means to challenge workplace violations. And evidence suggests that when immigrant workers, and especially those who are undocumented, die at work, their deaths are less likely to be investigated.40

Given the limited rights and bargaining power of undocumented workers, it is no surprise that it can be highly profitable for businesses to employ them. For example, one 2012 study found that across all firms in the state of Georgia, employing undocumented workers decreased the risk of going out of business by 19%.41 Where businesses do support giving legal status to undocumented workers, what is often proposed is the expansion of ‘guest worker’ programmes, which as we have seen keep migrant workers disempowered and easy to exploit.42 By creating groups of workers who are easier to exploit – whether undocumented, guest worker or other – border controls thus divide workers, making it harder for them to organise to defend their interests. Attitudes towards immigration have long been a contested issue within the labour movement, with support for exclusionary policies by some trade unions all too prominent. Others, however, have recognised that the workers movement cannot succeed without overcoming divisions among workers. 100 years ago, the anarchist North American union the Industrial Workers of the World clearly recognised this, declaring that:

The Industrial Workers of the World is an INTERNATIONAL movement... We realize workers have no country… As long as we quarrel among ourselves over differences of nationality we weaken our cause, we defeat our own purposes… In our organization, the Caucasian, the Malay, the Mongolian and the Negro, are all on the same footing. All are workers and as such their interests are the same. An injury to them is an injury to us.43

As the writer Suzie Lee argues, it is not enough simply for trade unions to advocate for stronger rights for migrant workers in their country of residence. Under a system of border controls, the risk of deportation or detention renders those rights less

enforceable and has a chilling effect on migrant workers’ organising. This in turn weakens the entire workers’ movement, which depends on unifying the largest number of workers possible.44

If we are to overcome worker exploitation, therefore, we need to fight for free movement.45 Free movement liberates migrant workers from the vulnerability and exploitation that comes with the limited rights conferred on them by border controls. And it ends the division of workers into camps with different rights and freedoms, undermining the solidarity needed to rebuild a powerful labour movement.

Borders have racist roots

“It’s not racist to want controls on immigration”. We hear this a lot from everyone from cynical politicians looking to signal their support for an anti-migrant agenda to well-meaning people who perhaps understandably wish to avoid labelling vast swathes of the population as ‘racist’. But whether we like it or not, the evidence suggests that racism is embedded in the very idea of immigration control.

We have already talked about borders as being a ‘global apartheid’ separating people on the basis of the accident of birth. This isn’t just a divide between people holding different documents, or even solely a divide between rich and poor. There is also a racial dimension. While we must be careful to avoid the simplistic categorisation of whole countries or continents along racial lines, the global border regime means that the predominantly black and brown people of the global south are excluded from the wealth of a largely white global north.

The reasons for this go back to before the origins of modern immigration control and reflect the underlying economic reasons why the global north-south divide is also a rich-poor divide. This divide is closely linked to European colonialism and slavery, in which the plunder of the global south formed the basis of the inequality between south and north today.46 This was justified at the time (and by some even today) by ideologies of racial and cultural supremacy.

Modern border controls in the global north, first introduced in the late 19th century, were built on the same racist foundations as colonialism, aiming to exclude populations seen as racially inferior. The first immigration controls in the US included the Asian Exclusion Act of 1875 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which aimed to drastically curtail immigration by Chinese people, while European

migrants continued to travel freely to the country. In the early 20th century British Canada introduced immigration restrictions based on race: Chinese immigrants required $500 before entry was permitted, South Asians $200 and white migrants only $25. In the UK, the Aliens Act of 1905 aimed to restrict Jewish immigration, which was compared by one Conservative MP to the entry of diseased cattle to the country.47 Meanwhile in Australia the ‘White Australia Policy’, introduced in 1905 and remaining in force until after the Second World War, aimed to achieve exactly what its name implied: to prohibit “all alien coloured immigration” and secure a white society.48

The politics of border control have continued to work in racially discriminatory ways since then. The recent wave of nationalist right-wing world leaders has invoked the need for draconian immigration policies on the basis of overt racist rhetoric. Donald Trump notoriously branded Mexicans as “rapists” and “drug dealers” in order to stoke support for an expanded border wall with Mexico.49 Italy’s Matteo Salvini, leader of the far right Lega party, branded migrants as “an army of benefit thieves and criminals” during the country’s 2018 general election campaign,50 before proceeding to prohibit migrant rescue boats from docking at Italian ports when in office.51 In other cases, immigration controls may be justified by less inflammatory and overtly racist rhetoric, but produce racist outcomes nonetheless. The ‘hostile environment’ legislation introduced by Theresa May in 2014, ostensibly to crack down on ‘illegal immigrants’, has had racially discriminatory effects, for example leading landlords to discriminate against tenants (whether migrants or otherwise) on racial grounds.52

The language used by Trump and Salvini points to a key feature of the connection between borders and racism. Racism is often fuelled by notions of the ‘other’ or ‘outsider’ who is dangerous, subversive and threatening. Border controls offer a means of fulfilling the desires of racists to keep ‘disturbing’ groups of people out of one’s own community. This helps explain why immigration control is always a pre-occupation of far right movements and parties, along with deportation of unwanted groups within the nation. And while these fears are most explicitly articulated by the far right, they are nonetheless given oxygen by xenophobic and racist media outlets, such as the Daily Mail’s depiction of migrants as rats53 and the Sun running articles about ”cockroaches” during the surge in Syrian refugees in 2015.54