State Borders, Human Mobility and Social Equality: From Blueprints to Pathways
Rethinking Border Control for a Globalising World, Routledge (Rethinking Globalizations Series), 2015
34 Pages Posted: 12 Apr 2014 Last revised: 28 Jun 2017
Date Written: February 1, 2014
Abstract
This paper explores social welfare and the border and seeks to identify some of the steps that must be taken in order to arrive at alternative ways of shaping political and social reality – a reality in which territorial borders no longer give rise to, maintain and simultaneously justify the most glaring examples of entrenched social division and hierarchy, both globally and locally. The paper claims that border controls can be significantly relaxed once global inequalities are drastically reduced. As this would require rich and powerful states to engage seriously with the way in which economic, social and military relations of dependency contribute to structural global inequalities, one could easily discard this scenario as utopian. However, it is argued that the first steps towards precisely such engagement can be wrested from these states by forcing them to justify the exercise of border control in a context of global inequality. This can be achieved by making the power to control the border accountable and measurable through the application of socioeconomic rights to its exercise. If states can no longer play the trump of territorial sovereignty as a ‘black box permitting the pursuit of public interests without the need for justification’, the power to exclude immigrants in order to protect social justice within the state will lose its self evidence, forcing states to engage with issues of global justice in defending and legitimising their border control policies. At the same time, they will have an immediate practical interest in reducing global inequality, because the socioeconomic rights of (would-be) immigrants will block the unfettered exercise of the power of border control, and as a result borders will become porous. Concerns over the implications of immigration for the provision of public goods and welfare within the state will then have to be assuaged in a different way: by addressing the root causes of global inequality.
Keywords: immigration policy, social welfare, socioeconomic rights
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