We Own the Future by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2019-02-10T16:00:00+00:00

On Immigration: A Socialist Case for Open Borders

Michelle Chen

BORDERS—AND THE DEBATES THAT SURROUND THEM—HAVE ALWAYS been about more than walls and papers. As political iconography and military symbol, border zones are the sieve through which whole nations project dominion and power in the public sphere—nowhere more so than in the United States. Under Trump, America’s conscience has been rocked by harrowing images of the inhumanity of our immigration regime, of children ripped crying from their mothers’ arms and dying of neglect in federal custody. But while his administration builds its brand on the spectacle of a nationwide barricade, the concrete political realities behind it long predate Trump’s bravado; from Reagan to Obama, militarizing the border has long been a bipartisan priority, tapping into a deep seam of fear and prejudice at the core of the national psyche.

In the United States and beyond, the tensions reflected along borders speak to underlying social anxieties that have much less to do with who is at the border and why they come than with who we are and what this country fails to offer the people within its own bounds.

Even as borderlines blur, though, calls for “open borders” or even “no borders” (the distinction between which will be explored later) are dismissed as tantamount to chaos; unfettered free movement seems an unthinkable prospect. People’s terror at eliminating national borders reflects a deep-seated fear of instability, economic loss, or cultural alienation—at least when it comes to the unchecked movement of people; quite the opposite for the free flow of commercial capital, of course.

Democratic socialism offers a path toward a system of government that respects human dignity above all—and there is no surer way to uphold human dignity than to elevate human rights above national sovereignty. With far-right parties ascendant at home and abroad, appeals to nationalism and nationhood are firmly the province of the right. Eradicating the kind of restrictionist, zero-sum mentality that colors migration policy around the world means rejecting those allegiances in all forms. Equity can never square with a border or with accompanying laws and institutions that criminalize the right to move. A socialist movement should demand nothing less than a vision of global liberation unbound by borders, where people’s movement across territories should be as frictionless as possible.

It is impossible to plot out exactly what this would look like in every corner of the world. However, we do know that our current bordered world order is increasingly untenable—it is unconscionable on a moral, political, economic, and ecological level. Although not every wall can be demolished at once, resisting them whenever and wherever possible is integral to rebuilding society from the ground up. If the walls fall, so do many if not most of the institutional mechanisms that enforce them: the checkpoints, the papers, the barbed wire and cages, and—most of all—the fear.1

With these principles as a baseline, we can start to sketch out an open-borders-based policy that presumes inclusion, rather than exclusion, as its basic goal.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.