All unwelcome

In his mem­oirs, the Cata­lan nov­el­ist, play­wright, poet, jour­nal­ist and trans­la­tor Josep Maria de Sagarra de­scribes how easy it was to travel in Eu­rope when he was a young man, be­fore pass­ports were grad­u­ally in­tro­duced dur­ing World War I and made oblig­a­tory in 1920 by the League of Na­tions. After that, bor­ders were so bun­dled up in red tape that cross­ing them re­quired lengthy visa ap­pli­ca­tions, proof of your rea­son for travel and the ad­dress at which you in­tended to stay; and when you came back, you would more likely than not be asked why you had both­ered to leave in the first place (as late as the 1980s, I was reg­u­larly taken aside by British cus­toms of­fi­cials – when try­ing to enter the coun­try of my birth with a British pass­port – who wanted to know what I’d been up to in Barcelona).

Since the 1990s, the Eu­ro­pean Union made it easy as pie for peo­ple to travel be­tween its mem­ber states. Bor­ders were re­turned to their pre-1920 spongi­ness, as long as you had an EU pass­port or ID card.

On May 8 last, ac­cord­ing to The Guardian, a woman with dual Ital­ian and Brazil­ian na­tion­al­ity and her (Brazil­ian) hus­band were de­tained at Luton air­port in the UK, hand­cuffed, marched through the vestibule, put in a van overnight, and then dri­ven to a de­ten­tion cen­tre where they were held for seven days be­fore being put forcibly on a flight back to Italy. The woman’s sis­ter, who lives in Liv­er­pool, was un­able to con­tact her and was given no in­for­ma­tion as to her where­abouts. The de­tained woman her­self couldn’t con­tact her ei­ther, be­cause her mo­bile phone had been seized. She and her hus­band were also de­nied ac­cess to their reg­u­lar med­ica­tion (in his case, for high blood pres­sure).

Even worse, if any­thing, was what hap­pened last month to a 20 year old Es­ton­ian trav­el­ling alone for the first time: she was ac­cused of want­ing to work as an au pair – ap­par­ently now a major crime in Brexit Britain – and held for 30 hours in Gatwick air­port. She too, was re­fused ac­cess to her med­ica­tion, de­spite suf­fer­ing sev­eral panic at­tacks which in­duced vom­it­ing. In their wis­dom, the aptly named Bor­der Force of­fi­cers didn’t be­lieve that she was in the UK to see fam­ily friends, so she was sent back with­out being able to see them. Mean­while, in Ceuta – a pre­vi­ously Por­tuguese en­clave on the North African coast which has been in Span­ish hands since 1640 – some 8,000 Mo­roc­can mi­grants ei­ther swam in or were let in through the fence by Mo­roc­can bor­der guards act­ing under or­ders from their gov­ern­ment be­cause Spain had al­lowed a leader of the Polis­ario Front – the in­de­pen­dence move­ment of the West­ern Sa­hara, recog­nised by the UN as the le­git­i­mate rep­re­sen­ta­tive of said desert’s in­hab­i­tants, the Sahrawi peo­ple – to be hos­pi­talised in La Rioja after catch­ing Covid. (Aside from Ceuta, Spain has five en­claves and tiny is­lands prised in the past from African hands, all of them sol­diered up to the hilt). As it turned out, this anachronic nit-pick­ing over the sup­posed threats to each coun­try’s sov­er­eignty didn’t re­flect well on ei­ther of the par­ties. The 8,000 mi­grants clearly thought Mo­rocco was a dis­or­gan­ised dump worth leav­ing for good and said as much to local media. As for Spain, it wasn’t just the sight of young Mo­roc­can boys being whacked about as they were forcibly re­turned through the bor­der fence that looked bad, but when the most hu­mane image of the whole sorry af­fair went viral – show­ing a fe­male Red Cross worker em­brac­ing a dev­as­tated Sene­galese mi­grant – she be­came the butt of a tor­rent of on­line abuse, mostly from Vox vot­ers (later counter-acted by mes­sages of sup­port, but only after the far-right had got in there first).

There are over a dozen re­cent and sci­en­tif­i­cally re­li­able books about the cli­mate cri­sis – such as David Wal­lace-Wells’ ’The Un­in­hab­it­able Earth’ (2019) – which have made it crys­tal clear that im­mi­gra­tion is going to in­crease over the com­ing decades to an ex­tent never be­fore seen on the planet. So good luck to the UK Bor­der Force, and the bor­der­line fa­nat­ics in the Span­ish and Mo­roc­can gov­ern­ments. And all those who share their quaint, early 20th cen­tury views on the in­flex­i­bil­ity of bor­ders (both for those for­eign­ers who wish to cross them and those lo­cals who be­lieve it nec­es­sary to mod­ify them). Like the di­nosaurs, such na­tion­al­is­ti­cally scle­rotic ad­min­is­tra­tions and their ser­vants just can­not see what’s com­ing their way.