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

Re-open the Borders 171
public assistance serves to arm the dictators. They say, ‘We gave you x billion in aid’,
without mentioning that those billions were used to arm dictators such as Mobutu
or Habyarimana. ...
We in the French-speaking countries, we can’t even confront our regimes, or rather
our dictators; we can’t even get face to face with regimes that perpetuate oppression,
because the French army is there too. ... Whenever there are public disturbances,
when the people are in the street, the French army is there to restore order. There are
some very recent examples of this: Zaire, and Bangui where the French army took the
liberty of conducting reprisals.
Zaireans opposing Mobutu’s corrupt and right-wing regime have been one
of the largest groups of refugees in Europe. In Angola the imperialist powers,
through their surrogates in South Africa, fomented and financed fighting
against the left-wing liberation movement that ousted the Portuguese colonialists,
and thus created one of the most persistent flows of refugees from
Africa to Europe. All over the world refugees flee wars, repression and torture
which are made possible with weapons and equipment manufactured and
exported by the West. These are often financed by official loans. The
opponents of immigration sometimes talk about the infringements of human
rights in Third World countries creating refugees, and demand measures to
address the problem. But it should be remembered that these opponents’ own
governments themselves bear much responsibility for these infringements,
by supporting right-wing repressive regimes and selling arms to them.
It would clearly be wrong and opportunistic to use the prevention of
migration as an argument for debt cancellation and the ending of the arms
trade, since that would imply endorsement of prejudices against migration.
Nevertheless debt cancellation and the end of the arms trade are goals which
are both desirable in themselves, and likely to go some way towards easing
the conditions that force people to flee. Campaigners for the cancellation of
debt, such as Jubilee 2000, and against the arms trade, such as the Campaign
Against the Arms Trade (CAAT), are natural allies of those who campaign
in support of migrants and refugees. Probably most people who migrate now
do not do so out of choice. A more just world order, politically and economically,
would be one in which no one is forced to migrate by wars, repression
or impoverishment. The ideal is that people should be able to migrate of their
own free will. The compulsion to move should be reduced to a minimum.
But freedom to move should be total.
FREE MOVEMENT
There is now a flagrant contradiction between the current, regressive,
promotion of the ideology of the free market as far as goods and capital are
concerned, and its denial where people are concerned. But too much should
not be made of the analogy. Migrants are human beings, and they should be
treated differently from mere material goods and flows of capital. The current