Freedom of the Border

Freedom of the Border
Author: Paul Scheffer
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2021-01-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 150954092X

There are few issues more contentious today than the nature and purpose of borders. Migration flows and the refugee crisis have propelled the issue of borders into the centre of political debate and revealed our moral unease more clearly than ever. Who are we to deny others access to our territory? Is not freedom of movement a basic human right, one that should be defended above all others? In this book Paul Scheffer takes a different view. Rather than thinking of borders as obstacles to freedom, he argues that borders make freedom possible. Democracy and redistributive justice are only possible with the regulation of access to territories and rights. When liberals ignore an open society’s need for borders, people with authoritarian inclinations will begin to erect them. In the context of Europe, the project of removing internal borders can therefore only be successful if Europe accepts responsibility for its external border. This timely and important book challenges conventional ways of thinking and will be of interest to everyone concerned with the great social and political issues of our time.

Freedom on the Border

Freedom on the Border
Author: Kevin Mulroy
Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1993
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780896725164

Under the brilliant leadership of the charismatic John Horse, a band of black runaways, in alliance with Seminole Indians under Wild Cat, migrated from the Indian Territory to northern Mexico in the mid-nineteenth century to escape from slavery. These maroons subsequently provided soldiers for Mexico's frontier defense and later served the United States Army as the renowned Seminole Negro Indian Scouts. This is the story of the maroons' ethnogenesis in Florida, their removal to the West, their role in the Texas Indian Wars, and the fate of their long quest for freedom and self-determination along both sides of the Rio Grande. Their tale is a rich and colorful one, and one of epic proportions, stretching from the swamps of the Southeast to the desert Southwest. The maroons' history of African origins, plantation slavery, European and Indian associations, Florida wars, and forced removal culminated in a Mexican borderlands mosaic incorporating slave hunters, corrupt Indian agents, Texas filibusters, Mexican revolutionaries, French invaders, Apache and Comanche raiders, frontier outlaws and lawmen, and Buffalo Soldiers. What emerges is a saga of enslavement, flight, exile, and ultimately freedom.

Migration Borders Freedom

Migration Borders Freedom
Author: Harald Bauder
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 150
Release: 2016-09-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317270630

International borders have become deadly barriers of a proportion rivaled only by war or natural disaster. Yet despite the damage created by borders, most people can’t – or don’t want to – imagine a world without them. What alternatives do we have to prevent the deadly results of contemporary borders? In today’s world, national citizenship determines a person’s ability to migrate across borders. Migration Borders Freedom questions that premise. Recognizing the magnitude of deaths occurring at contemporary borders worldwide, the book problematizes the concept of the border and develops arguments for open borders and a world without borders. It explores alternative possibilities, ranging from the practical to the utopian, that link migration with ideas of community, citizenship, and belonging. The author calls into question the conventional political imagination that assumes migration and citizenship to be responsibilities of nation states, rather than cities. While the book draws on the theoretical work of thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, David Harvey, and Henry Lefebvre, it also presents international empirical examples of policies and practices on migration and claims of belonging. In this way, the book equips the reader with the practical and conceptual tools for political action, activist practice, and scholarly engagement to achieve greater justice for people who are on the move. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781315638300 has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Immigration and Freedom

Immigration and Freedom
Author: Chandran Kukathas
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2021-03-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0691215383

A compelling account of the threat immigration control poses to the citizens of free societies Immigration is often seen as a danger to western liberal democracies because it threatens to undermine their fundamental values, most notably freedom and national self-determination. In this book, however, Chandran Kukathas argues that the greater threat comes not from immigration but from immigration control. Kukathas shows that immigration control is not merely about preventing outsiders from moving across borders. It is about controlling what outsiders do once in a society: whether they work, reside, study, set up businesses, or share their lives with others. But controlling outsiders—immigrants or would-be immigrants—requires regulating, monitoring, and sanctioning insiders, those citizens and residents who might otherwise hire, trade with, house, teach, or generally associate with outsiders. The more vigorously immigration control is pursued, the more seriously freedom is diminished. The search for control threatens freedom directly and weakens the values upon which it relies, notably equality and the rule of law. Kukathas demonstrates that the imagined gains from efforts to control immigration are illusory, for they do not promote economic prosperity or social solidarity. Nor does immigration control bring self-determination, since the apparatus of control is an international institutional regime that increases the power of states and their agencies at the expense of citizens. That power includes the authority to determine who is and is not an insider: to define identity itself. Looking at past and current practices across the world, Immigration and Freedom presents a critique of immigration control as an institutional reality, as well as an account of what freedom means—and why it matters.

Freedom on the Border

Freedom on the Border
Author: Catherine Fosl
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2009-06-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813139015

Memories fade, witnesses pass away, and the stories of how social change took place are often lost. Many of those stories, however, have been preserved thanks to the dozens of civil rights activists across Kentucky who shared their memories in the wide-ranging oral history project from which this volume arose. Through their collective memories and the efforts of a new generation of historians, the stories behind the marches, vigils, court cases, and other struggles to overcome racial discrimination are finally being brought to light. In Freedom on the Border: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky, Catherine Fosl and Tracy E. K'Meyer gather the voices of more than one hundred courageous crusaders for civil rights, many of whom have never before spoken publicly about their experiences. These activists hail from all over Kentucky, offering a wide representation of the state's geography and culture while explaining the civil rights movement in their respective communities and in their own words. Grounded in oral history, this book offers new insights into the diverse experiences and ground-level perspectives of the activists. This approach often highlights the contradictions between the experiences of individual activists and commonly held beliefs about the larger movement. Interspersed among the chapters are in-depth profiles of activists such as Kentucky general assemblyman Jesse Crenshaw and Helen Fisher Frye, past president of the Danville NAACP. These activists describe the many challenges that Kentuckians faced during the civil rights movement, such as inequality in public accommodations, education, housing, and politics. By placing the narratives in the social context of state, regional, and national trends, Fosl and K'Meyer demonstrate how contemporary race relations in Kentucky are marked by many of the same barriers that African Americans faced before and during the civil rights movement. From city streets to mountain communities, in areas with black populations large and small, Kentucky's civil rights movement was much more than a series of mass demonstrations, campaigns, and elite-level policy decisions. It was also the sum of countless individual struggles, including the mother who sent her child to an all-white school, the veteran who refused to give up when denied a job, and the volunteer election worker who decided to run for office herself. In vivid detail, Freedom on the Border brings this mosaic of experiences to life and presents a new, compelling picture of a vital and little-understood era in the history of Kentucky and the nation.

Against Borders

Against Borders
Author: Alex Sager
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 146
Release: 2020-01-13
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1786606291

This book provides a philosophical defence of open borders. Two policy dogmas are the right of sovereign states to restrict immigration and the infeasibility of opening borders. These dogmas persist in face of the human suffering caused by border controls and in spite of a global economy where the mobility of goods and capital is combined with severe restrictions on the movement of most of the world’s poor. Alex Sager argues that immigration restrictions violate human rights and sustain unjust global inequalities, and that we should reject these dogmas that deprive hundreds of millions of people of opportunities solely because of their place of birth. Opening borders would promote human freedom, foster economic prosperity, and mitigate global inequalities. Sager contends that studies of migration from economics, history, political science, and other disciplines reveal that open borders are a feasible goal for political action, and that citizens around the world have a moral obligation to work toward open borders.

Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire

Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire
Author: Luca Scholz
Publisher:
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2020
Genre: History
ISBN: 0198845677

Borders and Mobility in the Holy Roman Empire tells the history of free movement in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, one of the most fractured landscapes in human history. The boundaries that divided its hundreds of territories make the Old Reich a uniquely valuable site for studying the ordering of movement. The focus is on safe-conduct, an institution that was common throughout the early modern world but became a key framework for negotiating free movement and its restriction in the Old Reich. The study shows that attempts to escort travellers, issue letters of passage, or to criminalize the use of 'forbidden' roads served to transform rights of passage into excludable and fiscally exploitable goods. Mobile populations - from emperors to peasants - defied attempts to govern their mobility with actions ranging from formal protest to bloodshed. Newly designed maps show that restrictions upon moving goods and people were rarely concentrated at borders before the mid-eighteenth century, but unevenly distributed along roads and rivers. Luca Scholz unearths intense intellectual debates around the rulers' right to interfere with freedom of movement. The Empire's political order guaranteed extensive transit rights, but claims of protection could also mask aggressive attempts of territorial expansion. Drawing on sources discovered in more than twenty archives and covering the period between the late sixteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, Borders and Mobility in the Holy Roman Empire offers a new perspective on the unstable relationship of political authority and human mobility in the heartlands of old-regime Europe.

The Border Within

The Border Within
Author: Tara Watson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2022-01-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 022627022X

"Today the United States is home to more unauthorized immigrants than at any time in the country's history. As scrutiny around immigration has intensified, border enforcement has tightened. The result is a population of new Americans who are more entrenched than ever before. Crossing harsher, less porous borders makes entry to the US a permanent, costly enterprise. And the challenges don't end once they're here. In The Border Within, journalist Kalee Thompson and economist Tara Watson examine the costs and ends of America's immigration-enforcement complex, particularly its practices of internal enforcement: the policies and agencies, including ICE, aimed at removing unauthorized immigrants living in the US. Thompson and Watson's economic appraisal of immigration's costs and benefits is interlaid with first-person reporting of families who personify America's policies in a time of scapegoating and fear. The result is at once enlightening and devastating. Thomspon and Watson examine immigration's impact on every aspect of American life, from the labor force to social welfare programs to tax revenue. The results paint an overwhelmingly positive picture of what non-native Americans bring to the country, including immigration's tendency to elevate the wages and skills of those who are native born. Their research also finds a stark gap between the realities of America's immigrant population and the policies meant to uproot them: America's internal enforcements are grounded in shock and awe more than any reality of where and how immigrants live. The objective, it seems, is to deploy "chilling effects" -- performative displays aimed at producing upstream effects on economic behaviors and decision-making among immigrants. The ramifications of these fear-based policies extends beyond immigrants themselves; they have impacts on American citizens living in immigrant families as well as on the broader society"--

Open Borders

Open Borders
Author: Reece Jones
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2019
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0820354279

Border control continues to be a highly contested and politically charged subject around the world. This collection of essays challenges reactionary nationalism by making the positive case for the benefits of free movement for countries on both ends of the exchange. Open Borders counters the knee-jerk reaction to build walls and close borders by arguing that there is not a moral, legal, philosophical, or economic case for limiting the movement of human beings at borders. The volume brings together essays by theorists in anthropology, geography, international relations, and other fields who argue for open borders with writings by activists who are working to make safe passage a reality on the ground. It puts forward a clear, concise, and convincing case for a world without movement restrictions at borders. The essays in the first part of the volume make a theoretical case for free movement by analyzing philosophical, legal, and moral arguments for opening borders. In doing so, they articulate a sustained critique of the dominant idea that states should favor the rights of their own citizens over the rights of all human beings. The second part sketches out the current situation in the European Union, in states that have erected border walls, in states that have adopted a policy of inclusion such as Germany and Uganda, and elsewhere in the world to demonstrate the consequences of the current regime of movement restrictions at borders. The third part creates a dialogue between theorists and activists, examining the work of Calais Migrant Solidarity, No Borders Morocco, activists in sanctuary cities, and others who contest border restrictions on the ground.

Crossing the Border

Crossing the Border
Author: Sharon A. Roger Hepburn
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2007
Genre: African Americans
ISBN: 0252031830

In 1849, the Reverend William King and fifteen of his former slaves founded the Canadian settlement of Buxton on a 9,000-acre block of land in Ontario set aside for sale to blacks. Although initially opposed by some neighbouring whites, their town grew steadily in population and stature with the backing of the Presbyterian Church of Canada and various philanthropics. A developed agricultural community that supported three schools, four churches, a hotel, and a post office, Buxton was home to almost seven hundred residents at its height. The settlement (which still exists today) remained all black until 1860, when its land was opened to purchase by whites. Sharon A. Roger Hepburn's Crossing the Border tells the story of Buxton's settlers, united in their determination to live free from slavery and legal repression. It is the most comprehensive study to address life in a black community in Canada.