No borders: the case against immigration controls
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73 no borders: the case against
immigration controls Teresa Hayter
abstract This article presents the case against immigration controls. Nation states, which are giving up controls on the movement of goods and capital, nevertheless still try to control the movement of people. Like controls under apartheid, immigration controls will eventually become untenable. They are also a relatively recent phenomenon. The actions of the governments of the rich countries, their international agencies and corporations increase both the opportunities and the need for migration. Together with arms sales and support for right-wing repressive regimes, they bear much responsibility for the wars and persecution from which people are forced to flee. The strongest reason for abolishing immigration controls is the increasingly harsh suffering they impose on refugees and migrants, largely to deter others. In the process, they undermine many human rights, including potentially those of existing residents.
keywords asylum seekers; human rights; freedom of movement; frontiers
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feminist review 73 2003 c 2003 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/03 $15 www.feminist-review.com (6–18)
Migrants and refugees are being made to suffer in unprecedented ways. This is, to a great extent, because of immigration controls. British and other governments’ attempts to keep out refugees and other migrants from poor countries have led to escalating and probably unsustainable levels of repression, as well as harsh suffering for many thousands of innocent people. Approximately half of both refugees and people migrating for work in the world as a whole are women. However, presumably because more money is required to flee to Europe than is required to flee to refugee camps in neighbouring countries (as the great majority of refugees are forced to do), less than a quarter of the few asylum seekers who make it to Britain are women. Human beings have migrated for many thousands of years. The current theory is that humans first appeared in East Africa. Therefore, except perhaps in East Africa, we are, all the racists and the rest of us, either immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. Many people now think of immigration controls as a matter of common sense, an unavoidable reality. However, 100 years ago they did not exist. Until the beginning of the last century, nation states did not attempt to close their borders to immigrants. At most, they expelled people they considered undesirable or subversive: the British state, for example, expelled all Jews in 1290. However, controls on entry were not introduced until 1905. The introduction of immigration controls in Britain followed agitation against Jewish refugees by Tory MPs with links to the far right, including Major EvansGordon MP, one of the founders of the British Brothers League. Like others before and after him, he accused immigrants of importing disease, crime, overcrowding and ‘sweating’ and threatening ‘a storm’ – slurs that have been used against Jews, Flemish, Lombards, Huguenots, Irish, Caribbeans, Asians
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