Borders

Subject: Borders

Who are these people migrating from poverty or conflict, what brought about their conclusion that they should move to another country where things are better and the opportunities to feed and educate a family so much more secure.

When I was growing up the idea to move away from home to find work, perhaps in the South of England was beginning to take hold amongst some people but even to this day people are reluctant to move away from relatives and family for that better paid job after all for most of us our lives are a mixture of opportunity and  a sense of value for what you have.

Today’s migrants walking hundreds if not thousands of miles in South America, from Nicaragua through Mexico to the USA or across Central Europe to get out of Afghanistan or Syria and head for Germany or the UK have one thing in common, the belief that their lives will be made better by the move.  Again many years ago boarders were sacrosanct a sort of hidden acknowledgement that what was theirs and what was ours was clear cut but not today. With statues laid down in 1951 in the United Nations determining Refugee rights and the subsequent Human Rights legislation, the mythical human village was created where boarders become blurred.

Nationalism, personified by boarders has been the cause of war for centuries and just this week we see the tension building between Belarus and Poland on the boarder and their right of crossing argued. Taiwan and China are another conflict waiting to kick off, long un resolved disputes, simmering when common sense says with so much time having passed and the Chinese civil war over and done why not let the ideological separation have its footing in a small island. Sadly mankind is not very savvy when it comes to boarders, the insistence that ownership can be defined by the border as laid down in the Middle East when the British and French laid down spheres of interest in the Sykes-Picot Act of 1916 which drew arbitrary boarders according to political topography and forgetting the tribalism which lay beneath and the now arbitrary  borders divided.

The economic unity in Europe which became the EU and was a precursor globalisation worked well in opening up Europe and demolishing all borders to allow the free movement of Europeans but with the arrival of a  huge humanity shift, a mixture of refugees and economic migration from the poorer parts of the world to the wealthier, the need for boarders to protect your values is once more critical.

If we are happy to ‘round down’ and let people in, willy nilly in the hope that over time the incomers will absorb your values and equity, I believe it's is pretty fanciful since over time your values will be replace with the others values. That's not to decry those values but values are the result of a slow osmosis not political diktat

There are many parts of the world and often the parts where the bulk of the immigrants come from where during Colonial times  inroads were made to modernise and introduce systems of commerce and commercial law to guide the commerce. These were our impositions and never fully bedded in or accepted with the result that many of these societies have rescinded our way for a return to local nepotism.

Boarders provide a statement, our way or your way, they don’t determine which is the right way or even the best way but they do define a way of interpreting what’s currently acceptable.

 borders