On 4th February Donald Trump delivered what may be his last State of the Union. He is facing a tough election later in the year and it comes as no surprise that his address was chock full of themes to get his base frothing at the mouth, among which was illegal immigration. The illegal immigrant is one of the favourite hobgoblins of the alt-right mind and it has salience with many otherwise sensible people. The idea of the queue-jumper offends many people’s sense of ‘fair play’, but if fair play is the concern then one has to seriously ask: is the current way in which the world is structured ‘fair’?

We live in a world in which just over a third of the population owns 98% of the wealth. This is not the result of a happy accident. The international system has been designed to advantage the world’s wealthiest people. To be born in the ‘Global North’ is like winning the lottery. You have a golden ticket that gives you far more that an everlasting gobstopper, it gives you secure access to the contents of human rights: education, healthcare, organised labour, the rule of law, democratic rights, a free press, and so on. As William Blake wrote ‘Some are Born to sweet delight/Some are Born to endless night’. So, no, the world is not fair.

As I argue in Global Poverty, Injustice, and Resistance, illegal immigrants escaping severe poverty are doing more than seeking a better life, they are acting on their human right of resistance. Resistance must be a human right if the concept is to have any meaning; without it human rights would be little more than high flying rhetoric and we would be in the unenviable position of having to suffer the most severe injustices. Yet, it might seem to some that illegal immigrants are not ‘resisting’, they are doing something else: acting out of necessity perhaps. Resistance brings to mind the Boston Tea Party, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, or Wounded Knee. Clandestinely making one’s way across the border does not seem to fit with these examples.

But what about fugitive slaves? This is a paradigmatic example of resistance. In the Antebellum United States, slaves would, with some regularity, seek to escape bondage by secretly fleeing to the North or Canada. This may not be an overt and public form of resistance, but as E.P. Thompson and James C. Scott have demonstrated, people with little power often resist in covert ways as they cannot act in the open without suffering unreasonable burdens. Fugitive slaves liberated themselves from intransigent injustice; by doing so they helped to undermine the legitimacy and the stability of slavery as a social institution. The act of escape and the testimony of fugitive slaves like Frederick Douglass shattered the myth that slavery in the South was a benignly paternalistic institution.

Are severely impoverished illegal immigrants any different? In both cases the people in question face an unjust system that they cannot change or overthrow. An armed rebellion by the world’s poor, for example, seems likely to repeat the unhappy fates of numerous slave rebellions from Spartacus’ to Nat Turner’s. Reform movements in the Global North may help in the long run, but that is cold comfort to those living in severe poverty, just as abolitionism was a distant hope for those living in slavery prior to emancipation. Escape remains one of the few viable options to alleviate this sort of injustice. If you think that slaves did nothing wrong by absconding, then you will be hard-pressed to say that those illegally crossing borders to escape from severe poverty are.

Global Poverty, Injustice, and Resistance by Gwilym David Blunt is now available.