The first freedom

Today, migration is no longer about awe-inspiring journeys of Xuanzang, Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, or James Cook. They ventured across oceans and deserts in expeditions into unknown lands without permits and sometimes even received an audience with curious royalty.

We overlook the migration of the earliest humans, those bold crossings over mountains and plains, rivers and seas, islands and continents, by people who knew no boundaries, only the pull of necessity, survival, and discovery. They exercised the most ancient human freedom: the freedom of movement. 

Now, when we hear the word migration, our minds leap not to the journey but to borders, passports, patrols, visas. We ask whether someone’s movement is ‘legal’ or ‘illegal’, allowed or forbidden. We debate thresholds and quotas, risks and threats. Rarely do we ask the more human question: does a person not have the right to seek safety, pursue happiness, or simply go on an adventure elsewhere?

For most of human history, the idea that one needed permission to move would have been absurd. Questioning human migration was questioning human nature — it still is. For over 90% of our existence as hunter-gatherers, humans were entirely dependent on movement.

Even with the rise of agriculture and the building of cities, migration remained natural to individual and social life. Entire communities shifted with the seasons. Trade and travel routes like the Silk Road, the trans-Saharan highways were arteries of constant movement. Nomadic peoples endured. Even the settled recognised migration as a response to drought, war, or opportunity. One needed no reason, or any reason would suffice.

This right to move is older than nearly all others. It predates the right to property, the most revered right in American political mythology. The right to the ‘pursuit of happiness’, enshrined in the US Declaration of Independence (1776), presupposes freedom of movement. Before there was freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to vote, or the right to due process, there was the right to migrate. 

Often, it was the only freedom you could use to protect other personal rights by going to a new place. As the most respected freedom, it was the guardian of all other rights and freedoms.

Religious traditions elevated migration into a moral duty. The Buddha’s Great Renunciation, the exiles in the Ramayana and Mahabharata, and the Anishinaabe migration were considered sacred journeys shaping both the self and the world.

But the rise of modern nation-states, colonial cartographies, and rigid immigration regimes has replaced this freedom with control. The invention of passports, visa systems, and surveillance bureaucracies has shackled what was once humanity’s most basic instinct. A species that roamed the earth for millennia now finds itself trapped inside boxes, walled by citizenship papers, embassies, fences, and checkpoints.

Ironically, it was the very colonial powers that moved freely across oceans and continents in search of resources and dominion turned around to criminalise movement when it came from the margins.

When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted, freedom of movement was included but subtly severed from the act of migration. The right to leave was affirmed, the right to enter was not. It was a masterstroke of legal illusion, a political magic trick from the Western sleeve that has since cast a spell over global consciousness. A disillusion so complete, we forgot that the right to leave was also a right to arrive. 

They even manufactured some baseless rights like preemptive self-defence, preemptive strikes, trade liberalisation, and economic embargo, but somehow framed the right to migrate as too unrealistic, too disruptive, too dangerous to recognise.

Denying the right to free movement has never been merely a matter of security or order, it reflects much deeper structural concerns. Facilitating and even coercing the flow of capital and resources from the Global South while restricting the movement of people ensures that global inequality remains entrenched, locking entire populations into structural disadvantage.

Today, we speak of migration as a problem. A disruption to be managed. We no longer greet migrants with wonder. We do not ask about their journeys, their struggles, their dreams. We fear them.

Our attention has shifted from people to policies, from humanity to geography. People are trapped in war zones, failing economies, and ecological disasters, not because they cannot escape, but because they are not allowed to. The powerful still glide across borders with ease, the vulnerable are held hostage by the coordinates of their birth.

This system has seeded hatred and xenophobia, nationalism, and exploitation. It has enabled trafficking where safe passage is denied. It has weaponised difference and built moral hierarchies out of geography.

To forget this freedom is not only to forget our past, it is to endanger our future. In boxing humanity into artificial lines, we have betrayed the very idea of freedom. We have turned a natural preservation instinct, a birthright, into a crime. We have silenced the journey. And in doing so, we have not only lost sight of our first freedom, we have lost a piece of what it means to be human.

Bashir Mobasher, PhD, teaches at the American University, New York University and the American University of Afghanistan Departments of Political Science.