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Borders, states, freedom, and justice: what are borders? For many in the movement opposing mandatory detention they are simply expressions of the state. Yet this position cannot give us a coherent and critical politics. Rethinking borders is essential to the project of a genuinely democratic society.

Article Excerpt
The debate about policy on asylum seekers is one that most of those who are opposed to mandatory detention are never going to be comfortable in. It concedes the government's right to decide who is and is not welcome in Australia. It risks conceding that some of those who have arrived on Australia's shores by boat are not 'real refugees' and therefore that all must be treated with suspicion until the 'fakes' are weeded out (and presumably sent home).

The current processes for determining the status of asylum seekers are also woefully unjust, and loaded against them. Even if the government hadn't deliberately engineered the determination process so as to minimise the numbers of applicants who succeed in gaining refugee status, the definition of refugees under the UN convention is itself extremely narrow and provides no recognition of the human rights of those who are forced to flee their homes, not because of a well-founded fear of persecution on the basis of a membership of some social group, but because of war, civil unrest, environmental crisis, or famine. These grounds make just as good a claim upon our obligations to other human beings as persecution by a government. Yet unless those who come to Australia can claim refugee status under the narrow UN definition we will turn them away. There is a real danger that in participating in the current debate on refugee policy our ambitions will be reduced to trying to have those treated fairly who do meet the narrow UN definition but are currently excluded, rather than the equally necessary task of expanding the definition of refugee to include the many others who are just as deserving of our welcome.

In response to these difficulties, a number of refugee activists have put forward the demand for 'open borders' and the free movement of peoples. The call for open borders derives from a proud tradition of socialist internationalism, albeit one that has all too often been honoured largely in the breach by the trade union movement and communist parties. The advantages of an open borders rhetoric are manifold and have been well articulated in the Australian context by a number of writers loosely associated with the activist group No One is Illegal. An open borders policy denies the power of governments to determine who is and is not welcome, and instead affirms our fundamental human duty of solidarity regardless of race or nationality. It utterly rejects racism and nationalist chauvinism. It insists on the priority of ethics above politics when human misery of the magnitude revealed in the plight and stories of asylum seekers is at stake.

Perhaps most importantly, the demand for open borders highlights the class nature of current immigration restrictions. Borders are maintained and enforced selectively, both in relation to who is allowed to cross them, and when, in order to defend privilege.

When people try to move to avoid the harsh economic consequences of years of colonialism, privatisation and structural adjustment, they are met with barbed wire, bureaucracy and border patrols. But these same borders are already open to those who are sufficiently wealthy to buy their way in as 'business migrants'. Nor do concerns about terrorism, disease or alien values prevent the government actively promoting and encouraging the regular passage of wealthy foreign tourists across Australia's borders in numbers far higher than the small number of unauthorised arrivals to this country. Similarly, the rest of the world is expected to give untrammelled passage to Australian tourism and investment. That the world is already effectively without borders for a wealthy minority suggests that borders exist primarily to control the movements of the poor.

The only circumstances in which the poor are allowed to cross borders in any number is when it is in the interests of local business, because they are willing to work for less. In times of labour shortage, conservative concerns about national culture and refugees' supposed failure to assimilate are magically held in abeyance. But even here, while the poor might be allowed to cross borders, they will often not be granted the citizenship that would accord them formal equality in their new environment. Instead, they may be characterised as guest workers, temporary residents or resident aliens, or placed in any of a...

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