Last week, two more children were placed in care while their mothers were handed down prison sentences for travelling with fake documents. Yes, two more children. This is not the first time.  Akif and Sina are not the only children to have been placed in care because the courts decided to punish their parents for travelling with fake documents.

As a result of a shift in the economic model, Malta’s EU accession and other geopolitical and social changes, the borders of Malta have undergone significant transformations over the past 20 years.

As borders have opened for migrants from around the world, including holders of the Maltese golden passport, border regimes (and here I include political rhetoric and the law) have also been used as markers of difference, establishing militarised and securitised spaces marked by violence and punishment.

For 20 years, popular opinion and political discourse focused on the problem of ‘illegal’ migration. But, at closer inspection, and with two decades of hindsight, it must surely be clear to all that, despite all measures – and these continue to include brutal and punishing border practices and human rights violations – the policies have had no impact on the number of arrivals.

Closing borders and the meting out of harsh prison sentences simply serve to make the journeys more violent and oppressive and force people to turn to smugglers and traffickers in order to migrate. So why does it keep happening?

While the reasons for this are complex, and beyond the point of this article, suffice to highlight that borders need to be open in order for the market-driven economy to thrive.

Understood from this perspective, it might also be useful to shift our understanding of the border from a line of demarcation to one of bordering

practices, processes of inclusion and expulsion marked by varying degrees of welcome and violence.

As such, the border is in constant flux and bordering practices are subject to change. An example of this change would be the shift towards the criminalisation of migrants, specifically the judicial, political and institutional processes that render an individual ‘illegalised’ and beyond the protection of the law.

Through process, or what sociologists refer to as “crimmigration”, people are increasingly treated like dangerous criminals in the name of migration and border control.

Earlier this year, the Minister for Home Affairs announced that he was considering expanding the prisons to accommodate the massive increase in persons being jailed for using forged documents. The announcement appears to have been a welcome one, perceived, I must assume, as a common-sense response to an increase in dangerous crime. I mean, what’s the alternative, open borders?

In times gone by, those who enjoyed certain riches and privileges would have been unaware of the suffering of the great unwashed, ignorant of the advantages and freedoms that they themselves enjoyed as an apparent birth right.

Bordering practices sift through those migrants who have resources and those who don’t- Maria Pisani

We like to think that democracy put shot to such grotesque inequalities but not so. Citizenship, and the inheritance, or purchase, of a golden passport, marks the great divide.

The Maltese passport is one of the most powerful passports in the world, which means that those in possession of a golden passport get to enjoy open  borders around the world.

By extension, then, resistance to ‘open borders’ is nothing more than resistance to extending the privileges that ‘we’ enjoy to others, namely, the contemporary, often racialised ‘unwashed’.  

And it is this simple reality that has resulted in our prisons being full of ‘criminals’. Mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, individuals who are loved and love, have been denied a legal document that would allow them to migrate in a safe way and so they have no alternative but to find another way.

Laws change and they most certainly are not beyond reproach. Given that there is nothing intrinsically immoral in migrating (surely we can agree on this?), we must ask why is it that some people are compelled to break the law in order to enjoy the privileges that others inherit or can purchase?

Bordering practices sift through those migrants who have resources and those who don’t. And here’s the cruel irony. Those who are most desperate to migrate, whose lives depend on it, are those who are denied the possibility to travel in a safe and legal way.

By way of example, as soon as war broke out in Syria, it became impossible for Syrians to access visas and, as a result, their passports weren’t worth the paper they were written on. This is a political narrative that keeps repeating itself around the world, as bordering practices shift according to geopolitical and economic change.

In a just world, one would assume that the golden passport would be granted first and foremost to those who need it most, right? This is essentially what the 1951 Geneva Convention, of which Malta is a signatory, set out to do. But no. 

As a dear friend and colleague expressed to me last week, for those not working in the field, it is really difficult to understand how brutally unfair and cruel the immigration system is. Perhaps this might be one reason – because it is so beyond belief – that it continues to happen. I find a certain comfort in believing this to be true. The alternative is that people really don’t care.

Arbitrary and punishing sentences are being imposed on the weakest in order to send out a message that will never be received because the law is out of touch with reality and, perhaps more importantly, is fundamentally unjust and immoral.

Increasing prison space to contain migrants and refugees is not a reflection of success but one of cruelty and failure.

No child should be separated from a parent, no individual should be separated from a loved one and punished because they were denied the possibility of safe and legal passage. 

We are all migrants. Opening borders are simply about extending the privileges and rights that ‘we’ enjoy to others.