Free Movement Activism

The idea of free population movement is even older than the idea of free trade. The reality of human movement (though often far from free) is as old as human society. This sense of history and a sense of universalism inspire free movement activists to demand the universal right to move in and out of countries as if there were no borders. Once the Iron Curtain fell, [Page 585]other walls rose, in the Holy Lands and around Fortress Europe. A proposed “tortilla curtain” was to prevent Mexicans from illegally entering U.S. territory. Every day, people suffocate in sealed and frozen containers, drown at sea, die in deserts, and are even shot trying to cross borders. In 2006, following the shooting of a migrant, Guillermo Martinez, the Mexican government under President Fox threatened a tax on petroleum exports and boycotts of U.S. border businesses if the United States continued its repressive policies toward Mexicans seeking work in the United States. Lobbies of migrants inside the United States supported Fox.

The first steps to tighten border controls were taken by Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) states in the 1960s. Obtaining a visa for an OECD country is now almost impossible for people from the “wrong” countries. If you enter, you may be detained, deported, and may not be allowed to work. Anti-migration solutions mesh with the “war on terror” to keep illegals at bay in holding centers off-shore in countries like Indonesia, the Dominican Republic, Ukraine, Libya, and Malta. Here people are incarcerated, away from the view of lawyers and other advocates who might support them. Of course, horrors were committed in the past in the name of free movement, but to move freely within and between countries to make a living and seek protection from danger remains a universal human right according to free movement activists. Their struggle is akin to a global civil rights movement in the context of global apartheid.

Aging populations, a shrinking tax base, and decades of net out-migration in OECD countries have created structural labor shortages; these make child care and long-term care for the elderly, for instance, almost unaffordable, damaging productivity. Employers will bend any number of rules to obtain the cheap labor they need; gang masters can charge contract workers a year's wages or more just for the privilege of fixing them with a job. Most who migrate into OECD states have to do so clandestinely, creating an invisible under-class and a flourishing parallel economy, most notably in the United States where estimates of numbers of illegals vary from 10 to 20 million.

Free movement is also supported by some economists. The pro-migration The Economist echoes the views of Adam Smith and his 20th-century disciple, Milton Friedman, when it suggests free labor movement is the natural counterpart of free trade and capital mobility. No government seems prepared to concede to this principle; instead, as they lose control over economic policy with the march of globalization, their obsession with policing the entry and exit of “unwanted” persons seems to intensify. Free movement proponents see free movement as more realistic than current regimes of stringent controls. The nationalist left and many trade unions disagree, claiming that free movement lowers wages and drains skills from the global South. Free movement activists maintain that human ingenuity can be relied on to solve such problems, and that border controls just get in the way. If working as a taxi driver or farmworker, or in a care home in London or California, is preferable to languishing unemployed in Pakistan or Mexico, who can be surprised? After all, free movement is considered mutually beneficial within the European Union, and between different sectors of the economy, so why not between rich and poor countries? Free movement activists show that illegality just makes honest people more vulnerable to traffickers, criminal gangs, and abusive employers. Tight border controls are preventing the cases of genuine refugees from even being heard. As well as enabling everyone to enter, opening the borders also enables everyone to leave, and return, and leave again, in a cyclical manner. Controls lock people in as well as out; settled migrants fear leaving in case they lose the right of entry and settlement. The result is migrant ghettos, alienation, and despair. Meanwhile detention centers, mostly run by private companies, dot the globe. Women, children, many of them torture victims, are held arbitrarily, for long periods. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty Inernational, among others, routinely document the damage done by detention and deportation. Torture in detention, deaths in detention, deaths and mistreatment during deportation, are all taking place across the world. Free movement activists would insist, along with human rights groups, that all these abuses set dangerous precedents for attacking the basic civil liberties of full citizens.

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