Bridget Anderson, Nandita Sharma, and Cynthia Wright

Bridget Anderson is a professor of migration and citizenship and deputy director at the Centre on Migration, Politics and Society at the University of Oxford. She has worked as an adviser and activist, with a range of migrants’ organizations and trade unions. Nandita Sharma is an associate professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies and the Department of Sociology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Her research is shaped by the social movements she is active in, including No Borders movements and those struggling for the commons. Cynthia Wright teaches in the School of Women’s Studies and the Department of Geography at York University, Toronto. She has been part of several research projects on im/migration involving alliances among scholars, scholar/activists, community services, and migrant justice campaigns.

2013

No Borders: Struggling for a Global Commons

By Bridget Anderson, Nandita Sharma, and Cynthia Wright | July 30, 2013

What distinguishes a No Borders politics from other immigrant-rights approaches is their refusal to settle for “fairer” immigration laws (higher numbers, access to legal statuses, and so on). Within a No Borders politics, it is understood that the border-control practices of national states not only reflect people’s unequal rights (e.g., whose movements are deemed to be legitimate and whose are not) but also produce this inequality. Thus, their signal demand is for every person to have the freedom to move and, in this era of massive dispossession and displacement, the concomitant freedom to not be moved (i.e., to stay).