One World

The movement and migration of people is normal. Free movement is moreover a basic ‘human right’ and some would compare restrictions on migration to apartheid in South Africa with its pass laws. It is an extraordinary notion that members of the human race should be forced to remain on that small section of the earth's surface in which they happened to be born. Members of the capitalist class don't stay put. They travel freely round the world, from London to Paris, from grouse moor to ski slope, from Caribbean island to Mediterranean cruise, from the chateau in Switzerland to the ranch in Arizona. And no-one dreams of telling them that they can't. Like so many laws enacted by the ruling class, restrictions on the crossing of borders really only hit at members of the working class. Those who try to foment ill-feeling towards immigrants, whether they come as political asylum-seekers to escape persecution, or as economic migrants to obtain slightly higher wages, never attack the upper class, who swan about the world as if there were no such thing as state boundaries and as if they own the world (which is probably true in the large part).

People travel to seek a future for their families but we live in a world in which a lot of migration isn't voluntary, but is forced by poverty. A migrant's journey can be expensive and arduous, often indeed fatal while trying to cross frontiers. Migrants are rarely well off in the country they move to, forming an underclass with little if any security of employment or housing. Immigration laws turn these people into criminals. Immigration laws are anti-worker laws. They say that if migrants without papers work here it's a crime. But how can people survive if they don't work? A committee of the British parliament described official attitudes to paying benefits to migrants as ‘a deliberate policy of destitution’, a rare example of straight talking. Immigrants who now try to settle in Britain come at the bottom of the social scale, taking the worst houses, accepting the worst conditions.

It is all too easy to blame immigrants for causing or at least aggravating problems such as unemployment, bad housing or crime. Even workers who do not support such ideas may still blame migrants as convenient scapegoats. With or without immigration there will be unemployment, homelessness, crime.  Rival capitalists take different views on the usefulness or otherwise of immigrants. For no ruling class is ever completely unanimous, no two capitalists have identical interests. The question of immigration causes disputes within the ruling class. Some want to establish the right to bring in workers from any other country and counteract the danger of having to raise wages because a view is taken that some immigrants will be prepared to work for lower pay. Our masters always seek to intensify competition among workers, potentially fermenting xenophobia and racism by pandering to, or stimulating, some of the ugliest of prejudice. Needless to say, when demand for labour slackens off, the capitalists play the infamous 'race card' in order to keep the working class at one anothers throats. Instead of labelling and pointing the finger at, falling for the divide and rule tactics which weaken us all, workers should recognise who their real enemy is and work together to defeat the system that enslaves us all.

Over the centuries a myriad of different peoples have migrated to the British Isles. One would be hard-pressed to find a true pure Englishman and many fail to even appreciate that they themselves are recent arrivals in the British Isles. The mongrel British "nation", arose from the amalgamation of Jutes, Saxons, Romans, Danes and Vikings. Immigration has been a part of British development. In the 12th century came French Jews to London, Lincoln, York and Norwich; in the Elizabethan age Italian musicians, German businessmen and the first African slaves; then Protestants from the Low Countries seeking religious tolerance; Huguenot refugees from France 'en masse' in the 17th century; likewise Greek Christians fleeing from the Turks. In 1768, courtesy of the slave trade, there were 20,000 black Londoners out of a total population of 600,000 and in 1840 400,000 Irish escaping the potato famine came to Manchester, London, Liverpool and Glasgow. By the end of the 19th century 40,000 Italians and 50,000 Germans had settled here plus 150,000 Jewish evacuees from Tsarist pogroms in Russia.etc. It manifests itself in our menus, from fish and chips to curry and pizza.

Immigration should bring people together instead of pitting workers against eachother. People should be at home anywhere on the planet and welcomed by their new neighbours. How much longer are we willing to sit around and let capitalism divide us? Who gave the world's rulers the right to tell us which bit of land we should live on?