Open%20borders%20The%20case%20against%20immigration%20controls%20-%20Teresa%20Hayter

142 Open Borders
States they will consume more (see China Brotsky, ‘A defeat for the greening
of hate’). While green activists are opposed to free trade and the free
movement of capital, in Britain at least both they and Green Party spokespeople
have supported the right of people to migrate freely. For the many who
have anarchist sympathies, while they may advocate relative self-sufficiency
in small communities, controls on free movement are anathema. The official
policy of the Green Party in Oxford is to close detention centres and its
councillors have supported the Campaign to Close Campsfield. Green activists
have been frequent participants in demonstrations and protest camps at
Campsfield. In November 1999 a new group called CAGE, set up to oppose
prison building and privately-run prisons and supported by a variety of
green, anarchist and non-violent direct action groups, mobilised for its first
action for the end-of-the-month demonstration at Campsfield. Group 4 had
spot-welded the bolts on the fence and locked the detainees inside in fear of
what might happen. The police, there in large numbers and with horses,
dragged the protesters from the fence. CAGE will doubtless return.
THE SANS-PAPIERS MOVEMENT
On 18 March 1996 in Paris 324 Africans, including 80 women and 100
children, occupied the church of Saint Ambroise. They thus began what has
become known as the sans-papiers movement, which has grown into a
movement for the legalisation of all so-called ‘illegal immigrants’ and even
for free movement and the opening of frontiers. It is not a campaign to stop
the deportation of particular individuals, but rather is for the ‘regularisation’
of all immigrants who do not have the correct immigration documents.
The sans-papiers, or ‘undocumented people’, live in France but do not have
papers, either because they came illegally, or because their residence permits
have run out and not been renewed, or because they have had their asylum
claims rejected.
The movement is led by the sans-papiers themselves. They have insisted
on their autonomy and have accepted support from white-led organisations
on the basis that it is support, rather than direction. One of their leading
delegates, Madgiguène Cissé, a Senegalese woman, explains in a booklet
published in English translation by Crossroads, The Sans-Papiers: A Woman
Draws the First Lessons, that the struggle ‘taught us first of all to be
autonomous’:
There were organizations which came to support us and which were used to helping
immigrants in struggle. They were also used to acting as the relay between
immigrants in struggle and the authorities, and therefore more or less to manage the
struggle. They would tell us, ‘Right, we the organizations have made an appointment
to explain this or that’; and we had to say, ‘But we can explain it very well ourselves.’
... If we had not taken our autonomy, we would not be here today, because there really