Not so much "Pro-Open-Borders" as "Pro-Not-Treating-Migrants-Like-Shit"

Why Compassion for Migrants Is Branded Radical While Cruelty Passes for "Common Sense"

Over this weekend I got into a Twitter tiff.

Quelle surprise, I know, though in my defence, I have been a lot better with rising to the bait from bunchanumber accounts.

Anyway.

This man I had never met decided to inform me that I am “pro-open-borders.” This was a comment about a question on conkers, by the way, which was weird to begin with. It piqued my interest though, and hence, I engaged.

It was weird.

Photo by Imre Tomosvari on Unsplash

The rationale behind this person’s assertion is down to the fact that a week or so ago, I donated a few sterlings to “Cities of Sanctuary” after they were the latest charity to become victim of Charlotte Gill’s completely out-of-control paranoia. And that, apparently, was enough. I had crossed the invisible line between “normal citizen” and “radical open-borders activist.”

One minute I’m giving a few pounds to an overstretched charity helping refugees with integration (the thing that most complainants about migrants moan they don’t do), the next I’m apparently George Soros with a dinghy warehouse in Calais. Who knew?

And I found this absolutely fascinating.

Somewhere along the line, the mere idea that you might not want migrants to be treated appallingly - that you might just feel that seeing them demonised daily on GB News, or turned into the bogeyman for every pothole and NHS delay is a bit gross - has become completely indistinguishable from demanding the abolition of borders entirely. It’s as though there’s no such thing as compassion without anarchy.

So if you haven’t picked it up by now, no, I am not pro-open borders. I am pro-borders in the very ordinary, very boring sense of the word. It makes perfect sense in my mind that a functioning state enforces its borders. Of course it decides who comes in and who doesn’t.

It’s not particularly utopian, neither is it particularly radical - god, it’s not even interesting. It’s just governance.

And yet, somehow, saying that while also objecting to treating migrants like the chronic-scapegoat in all aspect of our lives means you are cast as someone who wants the Channel Tunnel turned into a walk-through attraction.

It’s a false binary that works wonders for people whose careers depend on permanent outrage.

Nigel Farage has been dining out on it for years, fag and pint in hand, pretending Dover is about to be swept away by an armada of inflatables. Richard Tice does the same, pacing a stage, shouting about “lawlessness” with the energy of a man who’s never actually been kept awake at night by crime but has read a poll that says shouting about it might win him a seat. Suella Braverman peppers her speeches with words like “invasion” because she knows it turns GB News into a standing ovation factory. And Charlotte Gill - well, her niche is treating any charity that helps migrants as though it’s plotting to abolish Britain itself.

When I say I don’t want migrants treated like dirt, I honestly don’t think I’m being radical. I’m being tedious. Because cruelty doesn’t work. It doesn’t “deter.” It doesn’t stop migration. What it does do though is create headlines, foment resentment, and give cover to the bloke in the pub who wants to say “send them all back” and feel terribly righteous about it. It takes a problem that requires management and turns it into a sideshow act. And yet to point that out is to be tarred as someone who wants chaos at the borders.

This whole argument reminds me of tax, oddly enough.

There are very few people who are actually “pro-tax” - it’s a function of society and of governance. But when you get onto the topic of migration, if you suggest that maybe children shouldn’t be detained in ex-military barracks or left to sleep on barges, you’re instantly and irrevocably cast as wanting to fling open every single airport and ferry port to whoever fancies a trip. Compassion, in this logic, is radical. Cruelty, meanwhile, has morphed into a grim kind of “common sense”.

And of course, the poster child for this logic remains that Brexit-era “Breaking Point” Farage/UKIP poster: a long line of desperate refugees, framed as an invading army. Which was less an argument as it was a Rorschach test designed to collapse nuance into fear. It convinced people that any recognition of humanity was suspicious, that the only safe response to migration was hostility. And here we find ourselves, nearly eleven years on, still locked in that mental frame, nearly a decade later.

And there is cost to this - both personal and practical.

The personal cost should be obvious to anyone paying attention. Brown people get harassed on buses. Asylum seekers get blamed for housing shortages caused by decades of underinvestment. Refugees become a punchline in debates about NHS waiting lists. And it all flows from this idea that there’s only two camps: pro-fortress or pro-chaos. Pick your fighter!

The practical cost is just as bad. Because something we have to admit to ourselves as a country is that migration is not going away. People move, and they have done so for millenia. They move for work, for safety, for family, for survival. They always have, they always will. The only real question is how we manage it.

And the real issue in my mind is that the popular cruelty we see flung around these days doesn’t even make management easier in any way or form. It only makes it harder. Deterrence theatre eats up money and clogs up courts. Hostile environments backfire, driving people underground rather than out. Demonisation stops serious conversations about labour shortages in care, or the role of international law, or how to make the system work better. All that gets shoved aside for another round of “look at the boats.”

Which, of course, suits the likes of Reform UK perfectly.

The moment all the political oxygen is consumed by dinghies (which really feels like the case these days), there’s absolutely no reason for you to explain why your economic programme amounts to “slash taxes for the wealthy and hope something trickles down.” If everyone is talking about our “open borders” (they’re not, we have a fully functional system that controls pretty much 96% of people coming into the country), nobody’s talking about why the trains don’t run, why the NHS is on its knees, or why rents are extortionate. Migrants are the ultimate distraction - human beings turned into human shields against accountability.

So no, I’m not pro-open borders. I am pro-borders. I am also pro-not-treating-migrants-like-shit-because-you’ve-run-out-of-ideas. And no, I don’t think that’s a contradiction. I also don’t think it’s radical, nor do I think it makes me Soros-lite. And I certainly don’t think a small donation to a refugee charity is evidence of a grand plan to abolish the nation-state. What I do think is that we’ve been trained to see compassion as weakness, and hostility as strength, and that inversion is as poisonous as it is lazy.

The truth is this simple being pro-not-treating-migrants-like-shit should not be controversial. It should, in an ideal world, be the baseline, and the fact it isn’t anymore tells you absolutely everything you need to know about the state of our politics, and nothing at all about the real nature of borders.