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Spokespeople for the Green Party, including Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay, are sometimes asked by journalists about the statement “The Green Party wants to see a world without borders” at the start of our migration policy (MG100). This is sometimes misinterpreted as suggesting that we advocate immediately removing all border controls.
This is not the case.
The agreed migration policy (MG100) in full actually states:
The Green Party wants to see a world without borders, until this happens the Green Party will implement a fair and humane system of managed immigration where people can move if they wish to do so.
The first part relates to a vision of the future, we look to unions such as the EU Schengen area, the United States and closer to home with the common travel area between the UK and Ireland and concludes that the free movement of people in these areas is desirable, useful and seems a quite normal way of existing for citizens of those countries.
We also understand that borders in the current sense are relatively modern inventions which encourage us to see those wishing to come here as a problem and a threat rather than as regular human beings who just happened to have been born elsewhere.
It is therefore not a big philosophical jump to think that a world without borders would be possible and desirable, as it has been in the past.. however .. it is of course highly impractical for the UK to unilaterally remove our own border controls, and so we have the second part of the policy that we implement a fair and humane system of managed migration, and the rest our policies set out how this would look.
As with most Green Party policies, we are not afraid to turn problems upside down and look at them from a new perspective, imagining a world without borders enables us to ask fundamental questions about what borders are for and why we have them, and why people are prevented from moving freely. This has helped us design a system of managed migration that we hope works for everyone.