On distance

A longer version of an article published here.

In the face of increasingly expensive and ineffective attempts to control the borders of Fortress Europe, some are advocating a novel solution to the problem of immigration. Legalise it. All of it.

The Maginot line is crumbling. Last year Spain tightened its defences at Mellila, on Morocco’s Mediterranean coast. In October 2005, six Africans were shot trying to scale the six metre high fence separating them from Europe. Undeterred, the immigrants simply shifted targets - in August 2006 alone, 6,000 people arrived in the Canary Islands. When the European Council meet on December 13 in Brussels, Africa and immigration will undoubtedly be high on the agenda. Earlier in the year, there was a unique conference in Rabat between European and African countries on how to deal with immigration. Europe continued its attempts to construct an iron wall against immigrants - agreeing border controls and readmissions agreements with African countries, and attempting to deal with the problem at its base, promising to give €18 billion in development money.

Yet neither the Rabat conference nor any proposals adopted by the European Council seem likely to stem the tide of immigrants coming to Europe. Development money pales before the amount of money sent home in remittances, which forms (after foreign direct investment but before international aid) the second most important income source for many countries in the south.

Given the continuing massive disparities in wealth between Europe and Africa, immigration is unlikely to stop anytime soon. The creation of a fortress around Europe is also visibly failing; as one can see in the thousands who arrive in the canary islands. In response to these two realities, many have a proposed another way if dealing with immigration.

Legalise it.

Capital times

One of the most prominent lobbies to back the idea of opening up all our frontiers is the free-market right. They note the bitter irony that sees capital moving with ever increasing freedom through our world, while labour is circumscribed and organised through inefficient government quotas.

Free marketeers point out that in 2005 over a third of Europe’s regions were facing a declining labour force. Immigration, they argue, fills this need, and it also fills skills shortages (in both low and high skilled jobs) that will allow our economy to grow. However, while this is correct, it is an argument in favour of immigration, not an open borders policy in particular.

Commentators such as Nigel Harris point out the advantages of a system where people are free to move to wherever they have work. In our rapidly changing labour market, government quotas cannot respond efficiently to the demands of the marketplace. Thus, he proposes allowing companies to hire people without work permit restrictions from where ever they want in the world.

Such proposals may seem like a further extension of the dominion of the market: it would be businesses who effectively control the borders they have long since bypassed. However, in another sense such proposals are essentially a vanguard action; they preserve existing notions of citizenship, and immigration follows the model of the German guest worker, or gastarbeiter.

Such proposals are problematic in the same way as the German program. They priveledge capital’s need for labour and do not address the humanitarian problems of immigration. As Max Frisch noted of the Turkish gastarbeiter: ‘We called for a workforce, but we got humans.’

Labour days

It is not necessarily true that such schemes will stop illegal immigration. Despite the fact companies will go abroad to find workers, that will do nothing to stem the tide of people who wish . Equally problematic are the humanitarian questions associated with such proposals - if workers are here without political rights, what will happen to the children of these workers, and what will happen to those who decide to stay on?

Such free market proposals are criticised by the political left who form the other part of the open borders movement. Raffaele Marchetti argues that we shouldn’t think about open borders in terms of how it can benefit us, but in terms of the universal right to free movement. Why should Europeans be allowed to holiday wherever they want while Africans cannot even come to Europe to work?

Such a proposal has a number of humanitarian advantages. You stop people trafficking and the attendant loss of life and human rights violations, as people would be able to enter the country legitimately. Then there is the massive financial cost of maintaining Fortress Europe which would be saved. A recent report by the International Organisation of Migration shows that five OECD countries spent two-thirds as much on border controls as they did in official development assistance. Removing this boundaries would also mean removing the massive humane cost of people trying to scale the wall and cross the sea to get to Europe.

Europe currently has a terrible system of asylum. In England, the Refugee Council has been tirelessly chronicling the government’s abuses of the system and its violation of its international obligations under the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. If we had open borders then the category asylum seeker, and the accompanying system, would no longer be necessary. Such a scheme would also allow one to eliminate the current dichotomy between political asylum seeker and economic immigrant, a distinction, as Michael Dummett shows, that removes the political dimension from poverty. Someone who has risked their life to cross into Europe because there is no means of sustaining themselves in their home country is not equivalent to a professor moving from France to Germany for greater pay. The poverty of Africa is a political problem.

However, these arguments further dilute the difference between immigrants and asylum seekers, and threaten to remove some of the justification for the rights of refugees . Furthermore, while it is clear that the asylum system is not working, it is faulty logic to suggest that this means we should simply abandon it.

Too much, too soon?

Even the most extreme open border advocates acknowledge that the absolute right to movement has to be balanced with the rights of those in both the destination and original countries. However, how exactly this works in practice remains difficult to determine. Marchetti argues for people moving on demand (as the right does), and being given full social rights in their host country (as the right does not). Yet at the same time she advocates that these people should be forced to return occasionally. This is to avoid the brain drain whereby the most talented members of the Global South take their talents to the North, further impoverishing the poor.

Most open border arguments attempt to answer this problem with some variation of the brain circulation scheme. How successful such schemes would be is not clear. And here we arrive at one of the critical problems of such arguments. Given the length between open borders arguments and Europe’s current political policy, such arguments tend to divert attention away from the main problem - the economic exploitation of African countries. Without changing this, there is little even the most talented circulating brains could change.

There is a wave of elitism present in many open border arguments, indicated by the strange unholy alliance between the free market right and the left that has formed around it. This elitism crops up when you consider how you balance the right of movement with the rights of those in the host countries. In the recent Polish immigration to the UK, it was the poor that suffered from a depression on real wages, while, the argument goes, the rich got cheap workers for their factories and cheap nannies for their children. This critique is in part correct, but stems largely from the fact that governments, influenced by the business lobby, do not implement labour law strictly enough, and allow a black market to blossom.

The idea that open borders would create impossible demands on the welfare state, remains one of the most popular criticisms. The right reply: that is a good argument, but not against open borders, but against the welfare state. This takes us into terrain I do not have space to pursue. However, the argument that mass immigration would destroy the welfare state is economically dubious. Immigrants are of working age, and would pay taxes that would pay benefits they would not necessarily receive (such as pensions).

The truth of such questions, and associated concerns, such as the possibility of a rise in racism, and the idea there is not enough space, is that they point to the fact open borders would fundamentally transform the idea of what it means to be a citizen. Nation States are predicated on an us: them divide. In a world of such increasing movement, such divides are becoming unsustainable. The open borders debate has at least begun the argument over what should replace them.