Imigration controls curb human rights

By Mike Haynes

LONDON: As EU governments try to impose ever more draconian sanctions on those who wittingly and unwittingly assist illegal migrants, the question we should ask is why the freedom to go anywhere we wish is not a basic human right. The official immigration agenda and concern over "criminal" refugee movements suggest it is time to stand up for that most reviled of creatures, "the people smuggler".

Those who gave American slaves or refugees from Nazism the status of human beings by smuggling them out are now justly praised for their actions, whatever their motives for doing so. Yet today, "people smuggling" is condemned, and to question this is to provoke consternation. Decades of panic about migration have so narrowed the debate that it is now an argument over degrees of control rather than whether there should be controls at all.

Yet less than a 100 years ago freedom of movement was taken for granted. Before 1914 there was no international regime of migration controls, no criminalisation of "economic migration". In Europe unknown millions moved between countries and unknown millions more moved uncounted around the Pacific and Indian Ocean states.

Before 1914 the British passport office issued only about 40 passports a day, usually to businessmen who needed identification for their transactions abroad. Only about eight countries demanded passports. Two of these in Europe -- Russia and Turkey -- were deemed uncivilized just because of this.

It was the World War I that made immigration control widespread and since then we have come to take it so much for granted that the human right to migrate has been lost. When the UN drew up a Declaration of Principles after the World War II, it asserted that "everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country" but it asserted no corresponding right of entry to another country, making the principle meaningless.

A minority of white Europeans and Americans have few restrictions on their right to migrate. But try to come to the advanced world from outside, or have the wrong color skin in Europe, and the full weight of suspicion falls upon you.

It is fascinating to watch economists who believe in the free market squirming to find reasons for excluding the freedom of movement for people from their arguments. While a case can be made about the contribution that groups from different backgrounds can bring to one another, these arguments are defensive, relying on the "benefits" migration can bring. There has also to be an argument about rights and the way our leaders try to convince us to give them up.

At the core of Karl Marx's critique of capitalism was the argument that it reduced labor to a commodity. But in a free market with migration controls, labor ranks below the level of a commodity. Governments sign up for the free movement of goods and the World Trade Organization exists to police good conduct in this area. Tins of beans, it seems, can and should go anywhere; there is talk that governments should be prevented from restricting the movement of capital. Yet humans have fewer rights than tins of beans or dollar bills, and no international agency exists or is demanded to police state restrictions on the free movement of people.

So if men and women conspire to help humans assert that right then they deserve our praise. It is those who have taken away from us not only the right to move but also the confidence to argue for that right who are the wrongdoers. And if the people smugglers, whether their motives are mercenary or humanitarian, challenge these governments then perhaps future historians from a freer world will also treat them not as villains but as heroes.

-- Guardian News Service