ASK Musings

Four Stars

Best for:
Those who have a feeling that there’s something wrong with current systems of immigration and borders but wants to put some facts behind that.

In a nutshell:
Authors Bradley and de Noronha look at all the ways that borders — and the enforcement of immigration associated with them — are a negative for society, and offer some ideas for ways to abolish them.

Worth quoting:
“Borders do not materialize only at the edges of national territory, in airports, or at border walls. In fact, borders are everyday and everywhere, determining how people relate to partners, employers and the police where they live and work, and their access to health care and welfare support.”

“Campaigns for citizenship for particular groups of migrants function to reinforce the notion that you have to be a particular kind of person — a citizen, an insider, someone who belongs — in order to access fundamental rights.”

(I ended up underlining passages on nearly every page of the book.)

Why I chose it:
My partner read it and recommended it to me, as he knows I am highly skeptical of borders.

Review:
I am someone who, as of about six months ago, has held dual citizenship: US and UK. I moved to the UK in 2018 with my partner, who was able to secure a work visa for himself and a dependent visa for me. Because of immigration rules he was limited in the type of work he could do, and when he lost his job nearly two years after we moved here, we were trapped until he could find other work; if we let the country, we’d have to wait a year to reapply. By that point I had a job, but not visa sponsorship, so it didn’t really matter. We spent thousands of pounds on fees and solicitors to get the right to remain and then our citizenship, because we didn’t want to risk having to leave the country we now consider home. But we were super lucky because we had the resources to do all of this, and if it hadn’t worked out, we could have gone back to the US, found jobs, and built a different life there.

But for many people, migration is born out of necessity; they’re leaving challenging social or economic situations in their country of birth, or perhaps they’ve been trafficked, or their parents brought them when they were small children and they don’t have any connection to their ‘home’ country. I find it bizarre and frankly unreasonable to suggest that where people are born should be where they have to remain. I think the authors of this book would agree.

This book spans just eight chapters and looks at the impact of immigration controls as they relate to areas such as race and gender. It explores how capitalism plays into it, and how abolition of borders can learn from police abolition movements. This book was released in 2022, and so the sections on counter-terror, databases, and algorithms are already a bit out of date given the further surge in the horror that is AI (though they do talk about it a bit).

The authors aren’t naive – they don’t suggest we can just stop having border controls tomorrow, because that’s just not going to happen. They talk about non-reform reforms, which as I understand it are the sort of very minor, incremental things one can push for that don’t really help the longer term goal but might help a few people for now, but focus on alternatives that are abolitionist in nature. Things like not requiring the ability to work or to receive health care to be tied to immigration status. But what they think we should all be pushing for is abolition, and they give plenty of concrete examples of what that could look like, and why it’s not enough to just try to expand who counts in the citizenship bucket.

My review is inelegant because I’m still thinking through all of the information. I agree that immigration controls and enforcement should be abolished; the area I’m always a bit fuzzy on is about how one then would have ability to support and keep cultural differences alive in the current era. Nations are not monolith, so maybe that’s my answer, but in a very tiny example: if people in place A want to prioritize funding, say, bike paths, and people in place B want to prioritize funding bus lanes, what form of government would allow for those decisions to be made without any sort of delineation of area? Do all eight billion people vote on everything? Is there a president of the world? How does law governing other things work in this scenario?

I don’t think my questions above negate the benefits of border abolition. I’m just once again finding myself agreeing with the premise of a book, and understanding the evidence, and being on board, but being stuck without answers to some of my basic questions. And that’s what keeps this from being a five-star book for me.

Books CBR17