World without borders

This month's Socialist Standard carries an article on national borders and their increasing fortification. This post provides some additional background material.

Despite unprecedented levels of U.S. government spending on guarding the border with Mexico, unauthorized or illegal immigration into the United States continues. U.S. spending on immigration enforcement increased from $1 billion to $15 billion between 1990 and 2009. During this time the U.S. unauthorized immigrant population increased from 3 million to almost 12 million. Experts recognize that given the pull of higher wages in the United States, it would take unrealistic amounts of personnel and funding– not to mention the use of lethal force–to stop unauthorized immigration through Mexico.

Poverty and hardship are the main drivers pushing Latin Americans to search for better lives in the United States. Most estimates suggest there are between 10.8 million and 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States. The bulk -- 80 percent -- come from Latin America; Mexico alone is the source of at least 60 percent of the United States' unauthorized immigrants. More than half of rural Mexicans live in poverty and 25 percent live in extreme poverty. In Guatemala, another major source of unauthorized immigration, 50 percent of children are malnourished and in Nicaragua 45 percent of the population lives on less than $1 a day. Once in the United States, immigrants typically improve their economic situation, but unauthorized immigrants are effectively barred from career mobility, educational opportunities, and access to public support. U.S. immigration policy does not enable immigrants to break the cycle of poverty by allowing them opportunities to improve their lives and those of their families by advancing professionally, pursuing further education, and fully integrating into their communities.

More than one in five unauthorized immigrant adults (21 percent) lives in poverty. This is more than double the rate for U.S.-born adults (10 percent) and also exceeds that of legal immigrant adults (13 percent). The elevated poverty rate is worse for the U.S.-born children of unauthorized immigrant parents. More than one in three U.S.-born children (34 percent) of unauthorized immigrant adults lives in poverty. This is almost double the 18 percent rate for the children of U.S.-born adults

Unauthorized immigrants are typically clustered in jobs at the bottom of the economic ladder that do not require high levels of formal education or English language skills. Due to their lower education levels and ambiguous legal status, unauthorized immigrants are overrepresented in low-skill jobs in services; construction and extraction; and production, installation, and repair occupations. Two-thirds (66 percent) of unauthorized immigrants work in these professions, compared with 30 percent of U.S.-born workers. Unauthorized immigrants comprise more than 10 percent of the total labor force in farming, maintenance, construction, and food preparation and service. Within these broad occupational categories, unauthorized immigrants are even more concentrated in specific jobs. For example, 40 percent of brick masons, 28 percent of dishwashers, and 27 percent of maids and housekeepers are unauthorized immigrants.

“Somewhere between 50 to 60 percent of the food you eat has been touched by immigrant hands,” U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said recently. “If you didn’t have these folks, you would be spending a lot more—three, four or five times more—for food..."

Unfortunately, a majority of the people who produce America’s food too often suffer from food insecurity, meaning that they don’t have access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food. One study found that 73 percent of surveyed Latino immigrants in North Carolina “worried whether our food would run out before we got money to buy more.” Almost seven of 10 Latino immigrant respondents (69 percent) said they “couldn’t afford to eat balanced meals." In some unauthorized immigrant communities more than half the population is food insecure. Food insecurity tends to be particularly high among rural unauthorized immigrant communities.

There are many arguments in favour of immigration made by supporters of capitalism. Workers are more productive in developed than in so-called developing countries, so migrants can produce more in the US than in (say) Mexico or Indonesia, causing the global economy to expand. It tends to be the younger, brighter, more adventurous who migrate, and they are prepared to do the 3D jobs (dirty, difficult, dangerous) that other workers are reluctant to take on — in transport or the hotel industry, for instance. Migrants send remittances to their families back home, thus boosting the local standard of living, and (unlike much of the official aid) such remittances genuinely go to workers and peasants rather than to bureaucrats or corrupt dictators. Population in the country that migrants go to is kept up by younger migrants, so avoiding the supposed problem of disproportionately many elderly. Allegedly, then, everybody benefits from migration, and free movement is moreover a basic "human right". Migrants provide capitalists with a supply of cheap, flexible labor, which they have not had to pay to educate, into the bargain. Immigrant workers have always been used to correct a disequilibrium in the labor market. One employer who supported some reforms commented that its opponents were "destroying the economy to save the US border". The whole border and migration system is very expensive to maintain, another reason why many capitalists dislike it. The needs of capitalism are always paramount, so, since a skills/labour shortage and an ageing society has emerged the virtues of immigration will be extolled but when demand for labor and/or skills slackens off, the capitalists will play the infamous "race card" against new arrivals.

Socialism will be a world without borders and with no concept of migration, where we will all be at home anywhere. Inside a socialist society there would be no “them and us” attitude. The whole world would be owned by the whole world population. People would be free to travel anyway in the world without needing a passport or visa, whether to live or to work or simply just as a tourist.