Based on a Lived Experience Strategy published in 2024, the Crossborder Forum is sharing an anti-racism statement, published April 2025, with an internal anti-racism and safe-r spaces policy to follow. 

We are committed to building cultures that are actively anti-racist and taking an anti-racist approach to migrant justice.

We recognise that we are currently working within racist cultural and political systems. The three countries we work in, the UK, France and Belgium, have racism systemically embedded, in part due to colonialist histories and neo-colonial presents. This is particularly  evident when working toward migrant justice, as border regimes and successive immigration policies have been, and continue to be, racist by design and disproportionately affect racialised people. 

We acknowledge that simply saying we are organising within spaces that are anti-racist is not sufficient, and we recognise that we must actively organise against racism, including recognising the racism present within our organising spaces and changing that, as well as in the wider cultures we operate within.

This includes challenging ourselves to recognise internalised and structural racism, which may manifest in less obvious forms, such as giving legitimacy to those with educational advantage over lived experience or lack of sensitivity to cultural and linguistic differences.  

Whilst the day-to-day focus of the Crossborder Forum’s work is on a specific border space, where racism manifests in specific ways, we will continue to look transnationally and recognise the power in working across borders.

Within the scope of our work on the border, we will continue to underline the importance of freedom of movement for everyone. We will avoid creating a hierarchy of types of migration and  actively challenge a dangerous rhetoric that seeks to separate ‘deserving’ refugees from ‘undeserving’ illegal immigrants, which is often based on prejudices about nationality and race and misapprehensions about rights and protections. 

Migrant justice movements and solidarity in border spaces must be rooted in anti-racism, and there must be  vigilance and constant re-examination to ensure this is maintained.