Open Borders

TERESA HAYTER puts the case for the abolishment of immigration controls

Perhaps it's time to cease to be surprised and shocked at the brutality which human beings, and especially human beings in government, are prepared to inflict on each other. Before the 1997 election, I annoyed my friends by saying that the Labour government was likely to treat refugees and migrants worse than their Tory predecessors. They certainly have. But even I did not quite predict the extent of the suffering that Labour ministers have been willing to impose on innocent people in the cause of, as they tell us, responding to the wishes of the "British public" (not mine, nor many others') for "stronger borders".

Like the Tories before them, Labour ministers apparently believe that people must be deterred from coming to this country, for protection or a better life, and that the way to do that is to make conditions here unbearable for them. More recently, like the Sarkozy government, they have introduced targets for deporting foreign nationals. In pursuit of these goals they have quadrupled the number of "immigration offenders" held without trial and without time limit in removal centres, or concentration camps, such as Campsfield near Oxford.

They have reduced thousands of refugees to destitution, first by making them subsist on food vouchers, then by denying many of them public support altogether, or the right to work or even to receive medical treatment. They have threatened to take their children into care if they refuse to be deported. They have locked up children, babies and pregnant women, and rounded them up in dawn raids (John Reid, then home secretary, boasted that he went on one of these). They have removed, or tried to remove, increasing numbers of people who are torture victims and in great danger, often breaking their bones or otherwise injuring them in the process. As those who still try to come here frequently say, "we are treated like animals".

The government is also trying to deny people the right, supposedly enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to leave their countries. Thus the governments of Britain and other rich countries are entirely responsible for the existence of "trafficking". There is no such thing as a refugee visa, so refugees cannot travel legally and must usually depend on agents for false papers or other more dangerous methods of travel. Many thousands of people have died in the attempt to migrate. Governments are deploying naval forces to stop people escaping. They are putting financial and other pressures on foreign governments to stop emigration, and they are funding countries bordering the EU to lock migrants up in new prisons.

In contravention of article 31 of the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees, Britain has criminalised refugees arriving on false passports, imprisoned them and is now trying to deport them as "serious criminal offenders". And it is promising more: "the biggest shake-up of the immigration system in its history", Liam Byrne, the immigration minister, told us in a press release on 14 January 2008. This follows a succession of new immigration acts, each one promising to solve the problem of immigration, and each one introducing yet more repressive measures. As commentators frequently and correctly state, the system is in chaos; a chaos, moreover, which produces arbitrary and cruel decisions.

Another consequence of ministers' hawkishness is the increasing tendency to round up people who have lived here for many years. Some of these people will have barely visited the countries to which the British government has exiled them; they are often fathers, breadwinners and mortgage holders, whose families then face homelessness and dependence on the public purse. In addition, the existence of immigration controls makes migrants extremely vulnerable to exploitation. Whether they have no legal immigration status, or have merely temporary permission to do a particular job for a particular employer, as nearly all new immigrants now do, they can be threatened with deportation if they attempt to improve their wages and conditions or join a trade union. In her book Enslaved, Rahila Gupta argues that immigration controls are central to the existence of modern forms of slavery in Britain, and that these abuses will only be ended when there are open borders.

My belief is that our rulers have got us wrong, and that the British public is not as bad as they make out. The British public is fed propaganda and lies by the government as well as by the media and pressure groups such as Migration Watch. It was the government that first introduced the phrase "bogus asylum seekers". There nevertheless exists a swathe of goodwill towards foreigners. Most Britons do not know what is being done to asylum seekers and other migrants, and when they find out they are often shocked.

But the problem is that the movement of people cannot be stopped without causing people to suffer, if it can be stopped at all. The many decent people who call for a system that is humane, fair and non-racist, cannot be satisfied unless immigration controls are removed. Immigration controls are inherently racist, or at least xenophobic. They are sometimes said to be necessary to combat racism; in reality they legitimise it, pander to it and feed it.

Controls were first introduced against "aliens" in 1905 and against Commonwealth citizens in 1962, after agitation by right-wing and semi-fascist organisations. In 1962, as official documents reveal, attempts were made to ensure that white Commonwealth citizens could get in and black ones couldn't; the Irish were exempted, since their labour was needed. These days, since demand exceeds supply in many labour markets, the government intends this shortfall to be met chiefly by eastern Europeans.

However diligently the courts try to treat people fairly, mistakes are inevitable. Currently the authorities act as prosecutors, looking for ways to discredit their victims, picking up small discrepancies in their accounts of persecution. The system is cruel and arbitrary, a mockery of justice.

The reason for opposing controls on the movement of people should be that it is immoral, and intolerable, to treat human beings in the way that migrants and refugees are now being treated in this country. I do not agree with arguing for or against immigration on the basis of the self-interest of the existing residents of the rich countries. As it happens, though, immigration currently serves the interests of the Britain: it keeps the health service functioning, it does not threaten jobs and, according to Home Office estimates, contributes a net sum of £2.5 billion to the economy every year.

But even if there were any convincing arguments to say that actual or potential immigration threatened native Britons' welfare, then we would still be in a position to set limits in a more humane and effective way. The countries to which some people try to migrate bear heavy responsibility for creating the conditions from which they are fleeing. These countries could, above all, desist from making wars. The peak in applications for asylum in Britain which occurred in 2002, for example, was almost entirely the result of Iraqis hoping to escape the imminent invasion of Iraq.

A better world would be one in which nobody was forced to migrate, by poverty or war, but everybody had the basic right to choose freely where they wished to live and to work.

Teresa Hayter has been active in the Campaign to Close Campsfield since 1993. She is one of the authors of the No One Is Illegal manifesto. She has written seven books, including Open Borders: The Case Against Immigration Controls (Pluto 2000; second edition 2004).