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And it wasnt just the mishandling of the migrant crisis, fuelled by EU member states destabilisation of the Middle East and exacerbated by Angela Merkels decision to throw open Germanys borders to refugees, that forced the EUs hand. The detentions, the deportations and the grubby deals with Third World dictators have been going on for years. In August 2010, Muammar Gaddafi met with the EU to strike a deal aimed at avoiding, in his words, a black Europe. The EU offered Libya 50million over three years, to stop Africans and Arabs crossing the Mediterranean. Everyone knew this was going on. In 2014, Amnesty International criticised the EU for outsourcing migration control to Turkey, Morocco and Libya.

Leavers should take no lectures about immigration, openness and egalitarianism from supporters of this brutal institution. The chaos across Europes borders gives the lie to the neat divide between inward-looking Leavers and open-minded Remainers. If these people were so compassionate, so open to outsiders, how can they stomach whats going on? And isnt it suspicious that a political elite that cares little for liberal values, which across Europe bans hate speech, e-cigs and, er, power vacuum cleaners, has suddenly discovered a passion for freedom? Indeed, for the most controversial and potentially disruptive freedom there is: the freedom to move, work, live and flourish in different parts of the world. Clearly, they never gave a damn about it in the first place.

Given their horrendous track record on migration, what are we to make of the EUs and leading Remainers sudden interest in defending migration against what they see as backward Brexiteers? This is where their behaviour becomes deeply cynical. They are interested in free movement now only insofar as it can be used to dilute democracy. Weve glimpsed that in the wake of the Brexit vote: immigration has become the primary means through which Leavers are deligitimised, their 17.4million-strong vote for greater democracy reduced to a nativist howl. But it runs deeper than that. The dissolving of borders between European nations, enshrined in the EUs four freedoms, and its imposition of non-EU-migrant quotas on member states, look more and more like an expression and institutionalisation of disdain for the ideal and practice of national sovereignty. The attack on borders is really an attack on the democracies, and the democratic citizens, contained within them. Migration, scandalously, is now used as a weapon in that attack.

No one benefits from this. Turning migrants into battering rams against any sense of attachment to sovereign principles, against the right of nations to control their borders, is a recipe for conflict. It pits migration against national democracy. For those of us committed to free movement, this weaponisation of immigration is a tragedy. Its clouded the issue. Immigration is no longer a question of freedom but an instrument of elite control, used to burnish politicians moral credibility, fulfil treaties and batter the native demos. Its taken immigration out of the publics hands and in doing so turned it into a symbol of peoples feelings of disorientation and lack of control. The real divide in Britain, and across Europe, is not between open-hearted liberals and fearful nativists its between democratic citizens and the elitists who loathe them. Its only by embracing democracy that we can demystify free movement, and reclaim it from its phoney defenders.

Tom Slater is deputy editor at spiked. Follow him on Twitter: @Tom_Slater_

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How the EU uses migration to batter democracy - Spiked