An Invitation to the Gatwick No Border Camp 2007

From 19th to 24th September 07 we will gather at Gatwick Airport for the first No Border Camp in the UK. This camp will be a chance to work together to try and stop the building of a new detention centre, and to gather ideas for how to build up the fight against the system of migration controls.

Gatwick Aiport - The Border Point

Gatwick is a border in the middle of Britain. People arrive here everyday. People are forcibly deported from here everyday. It is a place where people are imprisoned for unlimited lengths of time without trial, where people are forced to hide underground and be invisible, where people are treated as criminals for the 'crime' of crossing the border.

In Britain, the government has recently announced its intention to build a new detention centre, near Tinsley House, another detention centre at Gatwick airport. This will be another in a long line of barbarous prisons across the world, imprisoning people who migrate. Unless we stop it from being built.

Not far from Gatwick there are other border fortifications: the immigration reporting centre at Croydon, the airline companies who charter deportation flights and the ID Interview centre in Crawley. And a few miles away are the border posts at Dover and Folkstone, where fear of detection by the border police forces people to risk their lives hiding under lorries, or in suffocating containers.

While the physical borders get fortified, governments also tighten up the internal controls: from international databases to video surveillance, biometric ID cards to electronic tagging. Just recently, the UK government has announced the introduction of the Sirene System. This will grant Britain access to the SIS (Schengen Information System), a EU wide police database for refugees and migrants, planned to be extended to keep protesters from moving around.

A Tactics Laboratory

How does daily life, from the need to work for survival to the welfare system, reinforce these borders? How can we fight against the common acceptance of borders, the idea of an inside and outside? How can we claim freedom of movement as a basic right? How do we assert our ability to decide whether to go or stay, according to our needs and desires, not the needs of the state or the economy? How can we escape control, and start building a movement powerful enough to challenge the divisions between people?

We need to share knowledge with those who have broken these borders, the hackers who escape control, those who survive without work and money, those who fight the detention system , those who question identities, those who have learnt to organise themselves without hierarchy or divisions.

Camp(aign)ing Against Borders

This camp is continuing the tradition of the No Border camps across the world since the late 1990s, and like the camps taking place this year in the Ukraine in August and on the US/Mexican border in November. It will be a space to share information, skills, knowledge and experiences. A place to plan actions together against the system of borders which divides us.

We are aware that the struggles for "no borders" reach far beyond "open borders". Without borders the idea of states will become obsolete, without states the national economies will be history. In a world without borders, nobody will ask for papers anymore.

The camp will also be a laboratory of political and practical self-organisation. The camp will consist only of people's contributions to this. We are aware of the borders which divide ourselves from each other, be it sex, class, race, nationality, or whatever. The border camps are experiments in how to overcome these artificial and separating identities.

No Borders

No Borders is a network of groups struggling for the freedom of movement for all and an end to all migration controls. We call for a radical movement against the system of control, dividing us into citizens and non-citizens.

We demand the end of the border regime for everyone, including ourselves, to enable us to live another way, without fear, racism and nationalism.

We move, we meet. We talk, we fight. Come camp with us.