Readers in the UK, whether citizens or residents, legal or illegal will recognise below something very similar and related to what is happening there currently.
In an article on immigration reform legislation in the US William I Robinson of the University of California, Santa Barbara makes the point that,
To understand the immigration reform debate, we need to go beyond the
headlines and see the big picture of the role that immigrants play in
the new global capitalism system. There is more here than meets the eye.
The battle over reform legislation reflects the changing patterns of
domination over the "wretched of the earth," a world increasingly under
the dictatorship of corporate and military power, and the challenges and
pitfalls that popular movements face in their struggles for social
justice.
The larger story behind immigration reform is capitalist
globalization and the worldwide reorganization of the system for
supplying labor to the global economy. Over the past few decades, there
has been an upsurge in transnational migration as every country and
region has become integrated, often violently, into global capitalism
through foreign invasions and occupations, free-trade agreements,
neoliberal social and economic policies, and financial crises. Hundreds
of millions have been displaced from the countryside in the Global South
and turned into internal and transnational migrants, providing a vast
new pool of exploitable labor for the global economy as national labor
markets have increasingly merged into a global labor market.
The creation of immigrant labor pools is a worldwide phenomenon in
which growth poles in the global economy attract immigrant labor from
their peripheries. Thus, to name a few of the major 21st century
transnational labor flows, Turkish and Eastern European workers supply
labor to Western Europe, Central Africans to South Africa, Nicaraguans
to Costa Rica, Sri Lankas and other South Asians to the Middle East oil
producing countries, Asians to Australia, Thais to Japan, Indonesians to
Malaysia, and so on.
These transnational immigrant labor flows are a mechanism that has
replaced colonialism in the mobilization around the world of labor
pools, often drawn from ethnically and racially oppressed groups. States
assume a gatekeeper function to regulate the flow of labor for the
capitalist economy. For example, US immigration enforcement agencies, as
do their counterparts around the world, undertake "revolving-door"
practices - opening and shutting the flow of immigration in accordance
with needs of capital accumulation during distinct periods. Immigrants
are sucked up when their labor is needed and then spit out when they
become superfluous or potentially destabilizing to the system.
As borders have come down for capital and goods, they have been
reinforced for human beings. While global capitalism creates immigrant
workers, these workers do not enjoy citizenship rights in their host
countries. Stripped either de facto or de jure of the political, civic
and labor rights afforded to citizens, immigrant workers are forced into
the underground, made vulnerable to employers, whether large private or
state employers or affluent families, and subject to hostile cultural
and ideological environments.
Immigrant workers are not only flexible, but are disposable through deportation, and therefore, controllable. The condition of deportable must
be created and then reproduced - periodically refreshed with new waves
of "illegal" immigrants - since that condition assures the ability to
super-exploit with impunity and to dispose of without consequence,
should this labor become unruly or unnecessary.
Hence, sustaining a reserve army of immigrant labor involves
reproducing the division of workers into immigrants and citizens, which
requires contradictory practices on the part of states. The state must
lift national borders for capital but must reinforce these same national
boundaries in its immigrant policies, and in its ideological
activities, it must generate a nationalist hysteria by propagating such
images as "out-of-control borders" and "invasions of illegal
immigrants."
In sum, the division of the global working class into citizen and
immigrant is a major new axis of inequality worldwide. Borders and
nationality are used by transnational capital, the powerful and the
privileged, to sustain new methods of control and domination over the
global working class.
more here
As is so clearly argued here this is not a US or UK or other single national phenomenon but an all-encompassing global issue of profound significance, for once having grasped the reasons behind the perceived 'problem', the actual cause, ie global capitalism, then any citizen of any part of the world who cherishes egalitarian ideas and principles can recognise the urgent need for world socialism.
JS
2 comments:
Immigrant workers are more likely to be in work (63%) than UK-born citizens (56.2%) and are more economically active. It says British businesses rely heavily on immigrant workers. Between 2003 and 2013, the number of non-British EU-born citizens employed in the UK went up from 762,000 to 1,647,000. Curbing immigration from other parts of the EU could cost the UK £60bn in lost GDP (2% in real terms) by 2050.
A House of Lords committee whose job is to scrutinise the government's EU policy, has written to the immigration minister, Mark Harper, saying that despite several requests the government has failed to offer anything more than anecdotal claims to back its assertion that "social benefit tourism" is a real problem.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/sep/14/david-cameron-benefits-eu-immigration
Home Office Minister Jeremy Browne said he welcomed the opening of Britain's borders to workers from EU countries such as Poland, and argued it had boosted the UK economy and transformed foreign relations. He also expressed his anger that he and other Lib Dem ministers had not been consulted about a controversial mobile billboard campaign by the Home Office, saying: “Go home or face arrest.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/jeremy-browne-migrants-are-the-same-as-brits-buying-second-homes-abroad-8816744.html
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