What does the open-border industrial complex look like?
Here's how I conceptualise what's happening to British society
As my readers will know, over the past few years I have been writing a lot about open-border charities (not least because there’s so much to find!)
By this I mean charities whose cumulative effect is to create de facto open borders in the UK. Their typical activities will be things such as providing legal advice, housing support and/ or language services to asylum seekers in the UK. Given the huge amount of taxpayer funding many of these outfits receive - I have calculated over £240 million going towards 22 asylum and migration charities alone - their impact on the UK has become profound indeed.
But they’re not even the whole story when it comes to open-borders; they are part of a very large system that’s hurting the UK. Today I wanted to try and map out what that actually looks like. To my mind, these are a series of units working in lockstep - many with overlapping funders - to end the nation state (if it even exists any more). Similar to my long-read on the Red-Green alliance, I will now explain what I believe this system roughly looks like.
Grant Givers
Whenever I research open-border charities, I tend to find the same organisations - typically registered charities themselves - giving away masses of grants. You can see these listed on the 360 Giving grant page for the charity Refugee Action, including:
A B Charitable Trust
Barrow Cadbury Trust (a Quaker foundation)
City Bridge Foundation
Comic Relief
Esmee Fairburn Foundation
John Ellerman Foundation
Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust (a Quaker foundation)
Lloyds Bank Foundation
Paul Hamlyn Foundation
The National Lottery Community Fund
Trust for London
The Tudor Trust
Unbound Philanthropy
Some of these charities have also received taxpayer funding, such as The Paul Hamlyn Foundation (£1.4 million between 2020-23) and The Barrow Cadbury Trust (£350,000, 2024-25).
Big Players
The noisiest/ most prominent open-border charities, to my mind, are:
The British Refugee Council, which received £41,588,000 from taxpayers between 2021-25;
Choose Love, which thankfully doesn’t get taxpayer funding
The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants; and
City of Sanctuary UK, which we’ll return to.
Micro Charities
The sector is also full of smaller outfits pushing for open borders. You can get a sense of how many there are by looking at this list of “partners” Choose Love supported in 2020, including Coventry Asylum and Refugee Action Group, Hackney Migrant Centre and Migrant Helpline:
City of Sanctuary UK
As mentioned before, City of Sanctuary UK is a big player in the open-border space. It lobbies councils, schools, universities and theatres to become “places of Sanctuary”, meaning they go out of their way to welcome asylum seekers and migrants (“people seeking sanctuary”).
The charity’s funders, rather predictably, include A B Charitable Trust, The Tudor Trust, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, Lloyds Bank Foundation and Unbound. I can’t emphasise enough how often “the same faces” appear as funders.
Recently the charity said that 34 local authorities had been awarded “Local Authorities of Sanctuary”, including 14/34 London Boroughs. You could think of City of Sanctuary’s scheme rather like the open-border equivalent of Stonewall awards, whereby authorities work towards a nonsense accreditation scheme (whose end goal is open borders).
Opinion Gatekeepers
There are a number of organisations that effectively work as “opinion gatekeepers”, coming down like a ton of bricks on anyone who dares question the open-border worldview.
One is Stop Funding Hate, which attacks businesses that advertise with GB News and The Sun, among other right-wing media. Stop Funding Hate ultimately hates these stations because they draw attention to matters such as the small boats crisis.
Even more vicious than Stop Funding Hate is Hope Not Hate Charitable Trust/ Limited (effectively the same thing), which regularly demonises anyone that criticises our liberal immigration and asylum system.
Another gatekeeper is British Future, a charity that received £750,650 from taxpayers between 2021-2024. It claims to help “immigration and refugee advocates to unlock public support” and “bring about a more positive and informed policy agenda and debate on immigration”. Its funders, past and present, include the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, which explicitly believes in open borders, and the Open Society Foundations run by George Soros.
Propagandists
One of the most prominent advocates of open-borders is Zoe Gardner, who has gone on TV labelled as a “Migration and asylum researcher” and “Migration expert”.
She and her protest group “Stop Trump” are also attending the ghastly “Together” march today:
In reality, Gardner is a Far Left activist and product of The New Economy Organisers Network (NEON), a media school that prepares young people for TV and other speaking gigs via its Spokesperson Network.
The school provides scripts on asylum and migration, including what words to say (“People seeking asylum”) and not to say (“Asylum seekers”, “Refugees”):
Many young people (and MPs!) have passed through NEON’s doors, so you will get a fair few of these talking points on TV and otherwise.
Funders of NEON include Quaker foundations (Barrow Cadbury and the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust), the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and Soros. The usual suspects… again!
So there you have it… A rough guide to the “open-border industrial complex”, as I call it.
This list is by no means exhaustive, but I hope it simplifies how we got here (to de facto open borders).
Much as I deplore these people and their causes, as a classical liberal I can’t object to them pursuing them. As regards their creation of multiple sock puppets, it is pretty pathetic and worthy of derision but we shouldn’t object in a legal sense to them doing it. However……
It is clear that the entire concept of charity has been grossly subverted and needs to be restored to a traditional and narrow view that is pretty much limited to the relief of poverty (defined absolutely, not relatively). Open border campaigning is nakedly political and can’t possibly be seen as charitable. Hobby activities (eg beekeeping - disclosure: I’m a trustee of a beekeeping charity) need to go back to being hobbies, even if they have an aspect that can be seen as worthy. There are tens of thousands of charities which are just campaign groups and leisure activities which should simply become non charitable associations.
No charity, however widely or narrowly defined, should receive any taxpayer support, including by gift aid. The support of charities needs to be something that private individuals do voluntarily and out of their post tax income. We can applaud their endeavours but the activity should be wholly separate from the activities of the State.
Private ‘charitable’ foundations also need a wholesale review. To remain eligible to keep their status, and the tax advantages that go with it, their activities must be restricted to whatever narrow definition of charity is adopted in place of the current free for all. And there should also be an investigation to see whether the grants that have been doled out to date by the likes of the Rowntree and Quaker trusts are in accordance with their own objectives as set out in their constitutions. Where it is found that activist trustees have effectively taken over such bodies to use their endowments for their own political purposes they should be held to account and required, as trust law demands, personally to repay to the trusts the money they have expropriated for their own purposes.
Thanks Charlotte. Your work is vital and very skilled, connecting all the threads.