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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One way of challenging this sentiment is explaining that the number of non-citizens who are in jail in Europe is a marker of how social marginalisation and illegalisation in turn creates economic marginality, and thus the desperate conditions that lead to crime, while noting that, in terms of raw numbers, many more European citizens reside in European prisons than non-citizens. However, in the face of the zero-sum rights’ game discourse, a different approach is necessary – first of all to undo the detractive logics of rights and, most of all, the principle of economic scarcity. Indeed, the principle of scarcity has notably been mobilized by states for justifying austerity politics and to prevent the coalescing of social mobilizations. Against this background, an abolitionist approach to borders is fruitful, I suggest, for rethinking what a critique of the politics of migration containment should look like and, jointly, for forging a new political imagination geared towards the universal right to move and to stay. The zero-sum rights’ game that emerged in anti-refugee demonstrations in the last years in Greece and that has also been repeatedly mobilised in Italy relies on a detractive logic of rights, reliant on the principle that it is impossible for rights to be equally shared.
If a migrant has a right, this argument holds, someone else loses a right. Going further, this logic holds that the access to rights by individuals labelled as “migrants” is a direct defiance to the rights of citizens. In a time of socio-economic crisis, the discourse goes, if the number of migrants from lesser well-off countries increases, the rights and the wealth of the polity will be undermined. This invokes a principle of scarcity where there is a finite quantity of ‘rights’, and further migration will result in the dilution of those rights. This line of reasoning, as previously mentioned, is currently widespread in Europe, and more insidious than the source of anti-immigration anxiety that stems from the fear of an alleged “migrant invasion”. While the fear of migrant invasion resurges any time a refugee crisis emerges, the detractive logic of rights has seized a constant centre stage in public debates, in particular with the enforcement of austerity policies to address the fallout of the financial crisis. When your only recourse is austerity, anti-migrant rhetoric begins to dominate politics as the only explanation for the nation’s self-inflicted economic wounds.
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Investigating the spread of anti-immigration discourse, two key points emerge. First, the zero-sum rights’ game discourse obscures the reality that, rather than a sharp divide between migrants and citizens, a multiplication of degrees of non-citizenship and of racialised and diminished citizenship instead occurs, as scholar Bridget Anderson has contended – “The legal status of citizenship is not a guarantee of rights or of equality. The poor, even if they possess citizenship, can find themselves treated as migrants”. Second, rights are ultimately perceived as privileges, subjected to the principle of economic scarcity. That subjection to economics is a key hidden element, therefore, of anti-immigration sentiment. The austerity measures enforced by the European Commission and by individual states is seen, by this logic, as a marker of the zero-sum rights’ game and as a confirmation that migrants erode their wealth; and not as home-grown economic measures that exclude wider and wider sectors of the population, citizens and non-citizens, from welfare.
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It entails both dismantling the material conditions that present the prison as a solution to socio-economic problems and envisioning a political imagination that renders the prison system and its punitive rationale obsolete.
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Border abolitionism, although this might sound counter-intuitive, does not have to be limited to claims for abolishing national borders. Indeed, borders for migrants do not end after crossing a frontier; nor do they stop being migrants once they eventually make it to the destination they struggled to reach. Rather, the variety and pervasiveness of borders connect the dots between the apparently separate mechanisms of racialisation and subordination. Therefore, an abolitionist approach starts from the assumption that the undoing of the mechanisms of borders is not limited to acts of tearing down, but also requires building up and creating new institutions that prevent the formation of social and economic inequalities and racialised punishment. In this respect, it is worth recalling how feminist abolitionist scholars understand abolitionism. Indeed, both Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis insist that prison abolitionism is not only about abolishing prisons but, rather, it is much more ambitious: it entails both dismantling the material conditions that present the prison as a solution to socio-economic problems and envisioning a political imagination that renders the prison system and its punitive rationale obsolete. In a UK context, this could be manifested as an anti-austerity push in response to the summer riots, rather than the further empowerment of the prison system that was instead viewed as the default course of action.
Therefore, this form of border abolitionism does not advocate for abolishing borders as such but, rather, for dismantling the material and political conditions under which border mechanisms appear as a condition for people’s safety and economic prosperity. These bordering mechanisms are diverse in character and exceed by far national and geopolitical frontiers: they encompass also internal and urban borders, as well as invisible borders, such as digital frontiers. In other words, border abolitionism might work first and foremost as an antidote to the zero-sum rights’ game insofar as it consists of mobilising efforts against mechanisms that hierarchise access to rights and enforce economic subordination.
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Left-wing parties and movements have not dealt with.
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Anti-immigration riots in the UK and the widespread anti-immigration sentiment across Europe reveal the urgency of coming to grips with the entrenched structural racism as a colonial legacy that, historically, Left-wing parties and movements have not dealt with. If we draw on the argument, pushed forward by legal scholar Tendayi Achiume, that migration is a practice of decolonization, an abolitionist approach to the border regime requires questioning the assumption that migrants’ presence does not trouble the socio-economic order of Global Northern nation-states if migration is understood as a colonial reparation. This entails taking into account that some disruptions, alterations and turmoil are generated as a result of such decolonisation in action. That is, an abolitionist view would interrogate how migrants, through their struggles for moving and staying, push us to envision world-making practices that make obsolete and unacceptable the multifarious bordering mechanisms which multiply hierarchies of lives and access to rights. Undoing the zero-sum rights’ game while being confronted with the need of re-thinking practices of being together, in light of migrants’ incorrigible presence, is what abolitionist as a horizon of struggle, and not as a normative project, longs for.
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