Saturday, October 18, 2008

Freedom

For the last sixty years or so, I have been building up for myself what I used to think was an impossibly extreme or idealistic personal view of human freedom. I would like to see the abolition of all controls on movement, in the sense of travel or migration.

I have never seen this as an irrational objective; on the contrary I believe that it is supported by philosophers (for example Bertrand Russell, citing Hobbes) who have seen freedom of movement as the most basic of freedoms, and who rank it even above freedom of speech. And we are all in favour of freedom, are we not?

Moreover, it is encouraging to realize that nearly everything I oppose has been created by a quite modern tendency, so that it is not inconceivable that the opposite one can get under way and gain momentum. Before 1914, which is less than a hundred years ago, people were far freer to travel than they are now. In fact, I think only the notoriously unfree Ottoman empire really took passports seriously. The present-day world is based on the powerful idea of nationalism, which has produced a huge administrative apparatus to apply legislation about citizenship, immigration, passports, visas and work permits, as well as the taxation of "citizens" and the benefits to which they are entitled. Then guarded frontiers are not only supposed to keep people in their appointed places, but also to be a check on the movement of criminals and the things they carry, such as narcotics, stolen goods, or ill-gotten cash. Sometimes diseases are also to be kept out.

Behind nationalism there is the animal instinct for territory. It is usually the male animals who insist on acquiring it – and on herding their females into it. But it must be a long strange set of links that connects this primitive instinct to the motives of the present inhabitants of the USA, for example, who try to prevent or limit access by people of other "nationalities".

There have always been voices raised in favour of freedom; it is the common theme of Scottish literature. But if you want a really extreme view, think of John Lennon's lyric, Imagine. It would sweep away, not only national sovereignty, but religion too, and leave us with "nothing to die for". Even for me it seems too much to expect (and I ask myself, paradoxically, are we not supposed to be prepared to die for liberty, which we hold dearer than life itself?).

As my life has unfolded, I have acquired a personal stake in all this. I now find that I am aBritish citizen “by birth”, as are my three sons by my British first wife, two of their wives and all of their children. My first daughter-in-law has retained her French nationality, not that it matters much now that they are all in the European Union. My fourth son, by my second, Indonesian, wife is also British by birth. He too has married an Indonesian, and they have one son, who is British – although born in Indonesia. I also have two Indonesian step-children, and I am told that, although in English law a step-child is the same as a "biological" one, these two do not qualify as British citizens, and need visas to enter the country.

Would it not be better if we were all primarily just human beings, global citizens? Then the separate states of the world would have no business deciding where we can live, travel, or work. I want to be a free man, not just a free Brit.

The present state of affairs is quite mad, and it generates still more madness. There are all sorts of lunatic disputes, when common sense goes out of the window. I recall great arguments about the nationality of children whose British parents and grandparents had spent their lives as missionaries in China. Other cases have included the dishonorable repudiation of the British passports that had been given to the "Uganda Asians" and to people in Hong Kong. Or consider the notorious "virginity tests" that the British government used to impose, to distinguish between real and fake immigrant wives. Recent news is of Gurkha soldiers having to fight for the right to enter or reside in Britain, faced with the preposterous argument that they have not had a sufficient connection with the country – the Gurkhas!

A far greater madness, which is going from bad to worse, is that "immigration control" is killing people in large numbers. It is murderous. At one time it was the "boat people" from Vietnam who were in the news, now it is mainly those trying to enter the USA and the EU from the south. Most disturbingly, many otherwise intelligent and humane people seem to be almost unaware of, or unconcerned by, the deaths of thousands of people from sub-Saharan Africa trying to make their way by sea to the Canary Islands, mainland Spain, or Italy. Why are decent people everywhere not simply demanding the abolition of the system that produces such results?

An old-fashioned test of what is good, sound legislation is whether it is enforceable. The main receiving countries admit to having millions of "illegal immigrants", so the current laws are obviously failing this test. Efforts to enforce them are costing huge amounts of money. The fence being built along the southern border of the USA is only one of the more conspicuous examples. Much money is also being wasted by the other side, on the payments made to criminal organizations that promise to help people to circumvent the barriers. This money is in fact not just wasted, but is put to truly criminal purposes by the gangs involved.

On behalf of their citizens, most governments say that they don't want to prevent, but only to control immigration, and even to encourage it, so that it is beneficial to the receiving countries. The question then becomes, what kinds of people are we short of? It is not very difficult to see the other side of this story. If you deplete Africa of its trained doctors and nurses you must do damage far greater than any benefit obtained in Europe or America. Picking and choosing your immigrants in this way is based on very questionable economics. Even counting the exact costs and benefits to the receiving country is not easy. What is more important is that “control” is as much of an affront to the basic principle of freedom as total closure would be. And it still leads the excluded groups, in desperation, to put their lives at risk. The better idea, for all
concerned, was:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses …

which now reads so strangely on the Statue of Liberty!

It is not so very long ago that East Germany, as it then was, was denounced by the “free world” for denying its citizens the right to leave the country, and for shooting those who tried to do so. Apart from the draconian enforcement methods, they had as good a case for wanting to keep their most useful people, as the western governments have had for taking them away from poor countries. But surely the moral is that real freedom for individuals must work in both directions.

For about 450 years Europeans moved freely into all the other continents, stealing land and natural resources, killing people (incidentally or deliberately), slaving, and imposing oppressive "imperial" political and economic regimes. Now they want to stop people – who have no such malevolent intentions – coming in the other direction. Whatever arguments are put forward about the economic, administrative, or “cultural” (often meaning religious) problems of taking in new immigrants, it seems obvious enough that in most cases the real underlying basis of opposition is simply racism, which is mad.

The creation of large regional groupings of countries has complicated matters. This is particularly the case of the European Union. Other groupings have done something to free the movement of goods and money, but very little (or in some cases nothing at all) to free the movement of people. For the EU it is rather as though a new "nationality" is being created. It is, or soon will be possible for people from Bulgaria to travel to, reside, and work in all other parts of the EU. But not people from the Ukraine, for example. The inclusion of Turkey is opposed, especially by the French government, and may never happen. Yet it is Turkey, not the EU, which is alleged to fall short on "human rights". And if their government is not all it should be, it is hard to see why the freedom of individuals should be denied; one might even expect the opposite result.

The existence of the EU shows that answers can be found to the difficulties of taxing a freely mobile population, and providing them equitably with social benefits. Indeed, these problems were foreseen long ago, when federated sovereign states were created, and good enough solutions were found.

Meanwhile there are always calls for the frontiers of the EU as a whole to be made harder to penetrate. It is this last development that leads one to wonder whether the world is moving in the right direction. Are we only creating fewer, bigger, stronger, mutually exclusive units? Or will the EU go on expanding? Can one even dream that some day it might include Russia? Or Egypt? Or Morocco? And eventually, the whole world – at least in its role as the ultimate "Free Trade Area", where there are no more barriers to the free flow of people, as well as of money and goods. Could this at least be adopted as the rational long-term goal, by everyone who
thinks about such things?