The idea of freedom of movement as a human right is divisive, to put it diplomatically. In Europe Without Borders, the Washington Post’s Isaac Stanley-Becker examines freedom of movement in the context of 1985’s Schengen Agreement, one of the cornerstones of the European Union. Stanley-Becker has an advantage over the average journalist; a Ph.D. in history from Oxford gives him a deeper grasp of the world on which he reports.
For the authors of the Schengen Agreement, open borders was a humane concept that transcended the market values of the earlier European Common Market, which allowed only the passage of workers filling necessary jobs. However, Schengen placed a potential wall around the EU’s member states, an issue once millions of migrants from Africa and Asia began to seek escape from the poverty, crime and oppression of their collapsing homelands. For them, the European Dream has often been kept out of reach. Stanley-Becker gives only glancing mention to the anti-migrant backlash of recent years.
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