Thread by @ZoeJardiniere

We are presented with a false dichotomy between borders that kill the desperate & poor, or overwhelmed chaos.

Don’t believe it: we can manage global mobility.

Thank you @NadiaWhittomeMP for being brave enough to imagine with me a world of free movement opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocra…

“Our rich societies would not function without immigration, so we must not see it purely as something that ‘happens to us’, but as a complex and natural process in which we are a disproportionately powerful player and have the levers to manage it in a way that benefits us all.”

These levers are something I discussed as well in my here last week - we pay countries all around the world to violently close their borders, stifling the benefits that mobility would bring to those parts of the world novaramedia.com/2022/01/24/the…

I know that you hate the injustice of a world where the accident of where you were born decides your rights, your chances, sometimes whether your children will even live.

It has become so difficult to believe the world could be different, but we must never accept it as it is

As long as we see ourselves as a trembling fortress out to the West of Europe, facing the forces of the world alone, we’re lost. Free migration is not just about all the world showing up at your front door, think about someone other than yourself & your backyard for once!

The more people can move around to where there’s work or safety without losing all their rights as soon as they step out of one arbitrarily drawn line on the map, the more we strip away the enormous incentive to risk everything, down to your very life, to get further.

We’ll never end global mobility, but we can give people back the right not to move as well, as the evidence shows most people, globally, don’t want to move, or at least not far.
Only if we harness the opportunity that those who do move bring, instead of repressing it.