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

Re-open the Borders 151
comparable to the Dreyfus affair. It’s now or never, for the democratic forces in the
country, to embrace this amazing movement of the most marginalised section of the
working class and of society, the sans-papiers, who have no rights. Let there be some
new Jaurès, some new Zolas, and let there be some trades union and political organisations
in the working class that rise up to form a barrier to this fearsome danger of
regression in society and civilisation.
At the same conference Helmut Dietrich from Berlin said that immigration
policies create a ‘new social layer of “illegals”’ who are ‘super exploited’ and
‘may end up in prison in the next raid. ... Existential fear, systematic
harassment, intimidation and violent expulsion have become the daily lot
of this underclass.’ This treatment, Dietrich said, is being extended to others
besides refugees and migrants, including small-time drug dealers, whose
movements within German cities are being restricted.
One human right which, because it has not been recognised as a right, is
not violated by current attempts to enforce immigration controls is the right
to cross frontiers (from the outside in). The right to leave countries was
proclaimed by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose
authors presumably had the Soviet Union and eastern Europe in mind; but
nothing was said of the right to enter another country. As Moscow News
ironically put it in 1993, ‘Russia and the West have swapped roles. An iron
curtain has been lowered against the majority of those who wish to enter
Europe.’ The Berlin Wall is being replaced by high fences, razor wire and
increasingly sophisticated electronic devices, on the borders between Mexico
and the United States, between the inner and outer countries of Europe, and
around the Spanish enclaves in north Africa; people are killed and wounded
by entry guards rather than by exit guards. The Universal Declaration also
proclaimed people’s rights to move around freely inside their own country.
In the current state of opinion it would be considered unthinkable for people
from Manchester not to be allowed to travel to Oxford unless they were very
rich or skilled, or unless the authorities of Oxford decided that they had been
so severely persecuted by the authorities in Manchester that their lives and
liberty were in danger there. It is true that the rich inhabitants of north
Oxford built a wall across a street to keep out the inhabitants of Cutteslowe
council estate. But this was considered shocking, and did not last. Restrictions
on immigration from the Commonwealth were also considered
unthinkable by most people in the 1950s, and restrictions against aliens
were unthinkable in the late nineteenth century. It is time for the idea of
international migration to be rescued, and enshrined in international declarations
as a normal and natural human right.
It is time also to question the assumption that governments and their
citizens have the right to exercise control in their own interest over particular
bits of land, any more than they have the right to appropriate the air and the
sea. Most of the arguments for and against immigration controls are
expressed in terms of the interests of nations and their current inhabitants,