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

INTRODUCTION
Human beings have migrated throughout their history. People and their
rulers have at various times and in different ways tried to exclude others from
their territories, or to expel them once they are there. Most people now
appear to take immigration controls for granted, at least in the rich industrialised
countries of the West. But comprehensive controls to stop
immigration are a recent phenomenon. A hundred years ago they did not
exist; it was the people who advocated them who were condemned as
extremist. Immigration controls are a function of nation states which
themselves have existed for not much longer, and which are now said to be
in decline. Unlike nations, border controls are flourishing, and they are
becoming ever more extensive and oppressive. The state powers to which
the governments of industrialised countries most tenaciously cling are their
powers to keep people out of their territories. Their object, though not always
achieved, is to exclude poor people, and especially black people.
The right of free movement across frontiers is not a right enshrined in any
declaration on human rights. Its denial, on the other hand, gives rise to some
of the worst and most vicious abuses of human rights, and provides perhaps
the most fertile terrain for the agitation of the far right. Governments make
use of whatever measures they choose to deter, punish and eject the people
they do not wish to receive in their territories. Frequently they treat them in
ways in which they would not treat their own citizens, and which undermine
accepted norms of liberal democracy, the rule of law and human rights.
On 10 December 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations
proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 13–1 of the
declaration states that ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and
residence within the borders of each state’, and article 13–2 states that
‘Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to
return to his country.’ This freedom is qualified by ommission. People may
leave their own country, but the declaration is silent on their right to enter
another one. Unless they can prove they are refugees: article 14 states that
‘Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from
persecution.’ These asylum rights were incorporated, and given a restrictive
definition, in the 1951 United Nations Geneva Convention on Refugees and
in its 1967 Protocol. They are in theory still operative. But the governments
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