On 28 April, the Nationality and Borders Act passed, taking an axe to Britain’s international legal obligations to refugees. This came just after we marked 10 years of the hostile environment, the set of policies introduced by the then home secretary Theresa May in 2012 – albeit trailed by New Labour minister Liam Byrne in 2007 – that saw immigration checks outsourced to trusted public services, and the creation of a surveillance infrastructure to check people’s entitlements and target migrants for removal. Despite the revelations of the Windrush scandal, the hostile environment endures; in the recent Tory leadership contest, all candidates were unanimous in their support for deporting refugees to Rwanda.
And this hostility isn’t unique to the UK. Day in and day out, we see the global impact of racialised border violence. Scores of migrants found dead in the back of a trailer truck in Texas. People beaten by the authorities and left for dead in the Spanish enclave of Melilla. Rescue ships in the Mediterranean unable to find a safe port. Refugees on the Greek border coerced by police into pushing back their compatriots.
Pushbacks, vigilantism and mass deportations are only the most extreme manifestation of restrictive citizenship and immigration policies designed to police and control national borders.
But even as borders proliferate, resistance to them grows. In recent months, people have come together to prevent immigration raids in Glasgow, Edinburgh and London; others lay down at Colnbrook detention centre to stop the first mass deportation flight to Rwanda.
These movements demand not piecemeal reform or friendlier border guards, but often the abolition of borders altogether. We can do much more than defend an indefensible status quo.
Abolition is a concept we take from movements committed to prison and police abolition. For decades, activists have grappled with some simple truths. Policing and prisons do a lot to punish the poor, little to prevent or reduce violence, and enact much social harm in and of themselves, all at great expense. So they ask: what if rather than locking people up we transformed the original conditions to which policing and prisons are a response? What if people were given the resources they need to live flourishing lives, rather than responding to harm with more harm?
We want to apply this framework to borders. What we call border abolition is most concerned with expanding the freedom to move and to stay. This does not mean advocating for free movement in the world as it is now configured, but rather for transformation of the conditions to which borders are a response. Abolition is concerned with presence: the presence of life-sustaining goods, services and practices of care. And it is concerned with absence: of violent state practices such as detention and deportation. In a world like this, borders would become obsolete.
Even if we don’t know exactly what a borderless world would look like, there is a vast array of changes we can make in the here and now to reduce the reach and harm of immigration controls, opening the way to a borderless world in the future. As prison abolitionist and educator Mariame Kaba tells us, “Hope is a discipline.” We need not look far to see how the fractures in our present might open the way to radically different, flourishing futures.
Rather than simply trying to make more and more people eligible for citizenship, we should recoup the humanity of the non-citizen, and ensure universal access to essential services regardless of immigration status. We should scrap laws that criminalise undocumented migrants for working, renting and driving. We should keep up the fight to end immigration detention, raids and mass deportation flights, which would improve conditions for all non-citizens.
Of course, borders necessarily mediate relationships across countries, not simply within them, and so our agenda must be international too. We should agitate for all of the resources expended on border policing – the drones, surveillance watchtowers, armed guards, biometric recognition systems, data-mining tools – to be redirected in service of human flourishing. We should end the many development and aid programmes that enlist governments in the global south to prevent people from migrating in the first place.
We should defund Frontex, the EU’s coordinated border force, and instead invest in global solidarity funds to enable the people and states in the global south to better mitigate climate catastrophe. We should support ongoing demands for debt cancellation and an end to arms exports. We should encourage the expansion of bilateral or regional free movement agreements.
We do not have to accept the necessity of mass surveillance and mass death in the name of nation and territory. To paraphrase the scholar and activist Mike Davis, we have seen social miracles in our lifetimes, wins that seemed impossible until they weren’t. Many more are possible. Perhaps one of the great rallying cries of May 1968 sets out the task most succinctly: “Let’s be realistic, demand the impossible!”
Gracie Mae Bradley and Luke de Noronha are the authors of Against Borders: The Case for Abolition
