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

2 Open Borders
of the rich Western countries, more and more, do their utmost to stop
refugees coming to their countries to apply for asylum. They are now talking
of revising the convention to formally curtail those rights. They impose
increasingly harsh suffering on innocent refugees, who have often been
traumatised and tortured, in a partly vain attempt to deter others. In the
process they are flouting other rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration
and in other international agreements on human rights, such as the right
not to be arbitrarily arrested and imprisoned and the right not to be subjected
to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (see Chapter 3).
For the rest of humanity, those who are fleeing poverty rather than
political persecution, or who simply want to migrate to improve their lives,
entry into the rich Western countries to settle and to work has since the
1970s become possible only in exceptional circumstances. If they are highly
qualified, and going to particular jobs, and if they are wealthy, they may be
allowed in. If they belong to the immediate family of people already settled in
these countries they may also be allowed in, providing they can surmount
the often brutal obstacles put in their way. If they are citizens of the European
Union they can go and work in another EU country. Within their own
countries they are actively encouraged to move around in search of work. As
Bob Sutcliffe comments in an article in Index on Censorship:
On your bike, as Margaret Thatcher’s minister Norman Tebbitt said, and you are a
saint shining with neo-liberal virtues. On your ferry, and you are a demon against
whom great European democracies change their constitutions in panic.
People trying to cross frontiers in search of work are branded ‘illegal
immigrants’, persecuted and vilified. Sometimes they are simply called
‘illegals’, as if a human being could be categorised as an illegal human being.
The term of abuse most frequently used against refugees themselves is that
they are in reality ‘economic refugees’ rather than political ones and
therefore ‘bogus’, ‘abusing the system’. There is no such thing as the free
movement of labour internationally.
This lack of freedom of movement may be one of the reasons why vast
international inequalities of wealth persist and are growing. The wealth of
Europe and other industrialised countries was built, from the sixteenth
century onwards, through the exploitation of the natural resources and
peoples of the rest of the world. Europeans used the labour of conquered
peoples to produce raw materials and primary products for consumption in
Europe, and they destroyed the industries of the more advanced civilisations
they encountered in their imperial expansion. They then embarked on their
own industrialisation and they protected their new industries through
quotas, tariffs and prohibitions. Once they had established their dominance,
they advocated free trade. The methods they used, and use, to prise open
markets and secure raw materials throughout the world range from military
force to the more obfuscated pressures of the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund. Since the 1980s the major powers have embarked on