Migration, Open Borders, No Borders – Reality

Bill Bowring, Birkbeck College
The Migration Conference 2025, University of Greenwich. London
Distinguished Keynote – Plenary Discussion Session

1.         I’m a human rights lawyer. My primary interest since starting in academe has been collective rights, the rights of people, the right of peoples to self-determination. But I don’t believe that law is or can be emancipatory. Let me explain.

2.         Self-determination for me is not the argument, made, for example, by Miller and Walzer, that communities have the exclusionary right to self-determine their identities and membership. The right of peoples to self-determination began in the 19^th century with anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles, Ireland, Poland, India, Algeria…

3.         Over the years I have represented at the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg many Kurds against Turkey, and many Chechens against Russia

4.         The ECHR was the brain-child of Winston Churchill, as the ideological counterpart of NATO in the Cold War, and to prevent any return of socialism in Britain. But there it is, there are useful things a lawyer can do. The result of hundreds of victories against Turkey and Russia is not that Kurds are free, or that Chechens do not suffer under a Putin-financed dictator. But the applicants wanted the undeniable truth of what had befallen them.

5.         And borders are very much in issue. Migration across borders.

6.         So as a matter of curiosity I was drawn to the burgeoning literature on Open Borders – John Reece’s collection in 2019 and John Washington’s manifesto in 2023; and No Borders – especially Bridget Anderson and her colleagues “Why No Borders” in Refuge in 2009.

7.         The geographer Harald Bauder published in 2015 a useful survey.

8.         Open Borders – citing Joseph Carens in 2000, the open borders argument is not really intended as a concrete policy recommendation. “It has rather a heuristic function revealing to us something about the specific character of the moral flaws of the world.”

9.         No Borders – altogether different kind of politics

a. not a utopian image of the future without borders

b. rather a focus on current policies and everyday practices – as in the special edition of Refuge

10.       Time for a reality check! Starting with border walls.

11.        John Washington focuses in particular on the border walls. Writing in 2023 there were 63 border walls, with 2,250 immigration detention centres, and a displaced population of 110 million people.

12.       However, he adds

a.   In the first century of the USA there were no federal migration laws

b.   No fences or walls along the US-Mexico border until the late 1990s

c.   In 1990 there were only 15 international border walls, now in their 80s. Washington fully expects that this number will fall to 15 again and probably zero

13.       But what about the history of borders? In the scholarly literature they are often treated as fixed, even sacrosanct.

14.       However:

a.   The current international borders of Africa are the legacy of colonialism and the Congress of Berlin, in the words of the late Basil Davidson, “the black man’s burden: the curse of the nation state”.

b.   Borders in the Americas reflect European colonialism, and Donald Trump would like to eliminate the border between USA and Canada. In the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) the US acquired vast territories, including present-day California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. Trump’s wall is irrelevant `- in the southern states, the cities of Albuquerque and Phoenix (both nearly 50%), a growing Hispanic/Latino population. Mexico has already reconquered much of the territory lost in the 19^th century.

c.   The British Empire carried out Partition in Ireland, India and Palestine, with lasting bloody consequences. The border between the Republic and the Occupied Six Counties will disappear in my lifetime

d.   The Far East suffers the effects of British, French, Dutch, and US colonialism, with continuing instability and blood shed

e.   Poland was partitioned three times in the 19^th century, was partitioned then occupied by the USSR in the 20^th, and at the end of WWII shunted several hundred kilometres to the west. Lvov became Lviv, Breslau became Wroclaw

f.    During my lifetime the former Yugoslavia, the former Czechoslovakia, the former DDR, and the former USSR, have all vanished. The former UK or FUK, will follow.

15.       Now there are two raging conflicts. Russia believes there is no border with Ukraine; Israel asserts that Palestine, despite partition, does not exist. There are insect-like Arabs to be eliminated form territory extending to Damascus, according the the Messianic Kehanists now in power.

16.       Last but far from least  I mention climate change, especially that Donald Trump is hell bent on destroying all attempts at stopping or slowing catastrophic change. In her 2022 book “Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval”, Gaia Vince concludes that “people will move in their millions”. To say the least. I believe that human beings if forced to be on the move, cannot be stopped.