Politics worldwide has been turned on its head by populism, with anti-migrant rhetoric a key part of the messaging. But what motivates this anti-migrant thinking? Liberal society is based upon rights. A right to security, liberty, and freedom of speech among many, but implicit within the claims of anti-immigrant parties is that the more migrants we have the more our rights are called into question. Where rights were once universal they are now seen to be a zero-sum game, where the rights of a migrant are seen to take rights away from the rights of citizens. Professor Martina Tazzioli argues this approach to rights only works as long as scarcity and hierarchy are at the centre of the global economy. Tazzioli argues the abolition of borders will one day be necessary to ensure quality of life for all.
From the end of July to the beginning of August, the summer of 2024 saw a wave of anti-immigration riots hit many cities in the UK. Across the country, acts of vandalism, racial violence, and even threats of arson toward migrant-housing facilities were seen. The common thread behind this xenophobic outburst seemed to be a sentiment that migrants – or perhaps more accurately, people racialised as migrants – were essentially ‘freeloading’ off the British social democratic state without paying, in both a literal and cultural sense, back into it, thus negatively impacting the economic and social rights of the rioters’ self-defined idea of the ‘British people’. This is what I call the zero-sum rights’ game in my book, Border abolitionism: Migrants' containment and the genealogies of struggles and rescue.
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This position, distressingly, is no one-off ideological outlier – far from being an isolated wave of events, the riots in the UK have been but one example of the violent manifestation of anti-immigration sentiment in Europe.
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This view holds that migrants’ access to rights, welfare and the job market is at the detriment of citizens. This position, distressingly, is no one-off ideological outlier – far from being an isolated wave of events, the riots in the UK have been but one example of the violent manifestation of anti-immigration sentiment in Europe. An abolitionist approach to migration politics, what I call “border abolitionism”, strives for undermining such zero-sum rights’ game by pointing to the interlocking modes of exploitation, precarity and racialization that bordering mechanisms enforce on both migrants and citizens. Understanding how to unsettle the pernicious anti-migration discourse is key for articulating a grander critique of borders in general, that is not narrowed to claims for dismantling national frontiers nor is it entrapped into demands for “more human” modes of migration confinement and expulsion. When confronted with the depiction of migrants as invaders, it is important to debunk the widespread sectarian discourse on migration that is recursively reproduced across the political spectrum.
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A World Without Borders
With Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Daniel Hannan, Sameer Rahim
28th January 2025
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