[This Blog Post is copied from Global Justice Now]
This year many of us in the UK have faced more restrictions on our freedom of movement than we ever imagined we would.
It’s been a tiny insight into what it must be like to be permanently separated from your family and friends – not temporarily to try and stop a deadly disease, but continuously, because of the unfairness of our deadly border system. For many, restrictions on movement have long been a fact of life. And it’s getting worse.
Under this government, Priti Patel’s Home Office is doubling down on the ‘hostile environment’. Just this week it has announced plans to refuse asylum applications from refugees who have passed through ‘safe’ third countries, in an apparent breach of international law; a former minister has accused the Home Office of planning to house migrants in camps with no access to electricity or healthcare; and we have discovered that 29 asylum seekers have died in government accommodation this year – five times as many as those who died trying to cross the Channel.
When we bear in mind that many of those seeking a better life are leaving behind poverty and conflict which Britain and other rich countries have fuelled through arms sales, toxic trade deals, dodgy debts, land grabs and climate change, the situation seems even more shameful.
Today, on International Migrants Day today, we want to show that there are alternatives. Our new pamphlet: Freedom of Movement: Why we need open borders, aims to summarise the case for global free movement as a long-term demand in the fight for global justice. You can read the introduction, and download the full pamphlet, here:
We can’t deny that global free movement is a very long-term goal. Nor is it the whole answer – we also need to create a much more equal world, stopping those policies which are fuelling forced migration in the first place. But when you look at the increasing violence caused by ever more brutal borders, the inequalities, exploitation and racism that the global border regime entrenches, we believe it is urgent to look for a radical alternative.
It cannot be right that the place you are born dictates whether you will live a life of poverty or plenty, of freedom or imprisonment. It cannot be right that while the richest, at least in normal times, move around with ease, the poorest are imprisoned in geographical poverty.
In the pamphlet we also look at some of the short-term measures that we can push in order to strengthen migrants’ rights here and now, to take us closer towards the goal of free movement. And we look at past and present regional free movement zones which offer concrete examples of how it could work. Finally, we look at a variety of common fears that we need to understand and respond to as part of making the arguments for free movement.
Freedom of Movement is our small contribution to injecting hope and energy into a debate which often sees those championing migrants rights pushed onto the back foot. After all, really big changes have always come about when those campaigning and organising have been ‘unrealistic’ in what they’re calling for; when we have demanded the impossible.
It is only by starting to free our imaginations that can we begin to really see how things could be otherwise. This year has shown us that more than ever.
In solidarity,
Nick Dearden
Director, Global Justice Now
European Movement Mid Kent 