Once they were called guest workers, now they are the uninvited. Migrants are ‘naturally’, the most exploited members of the working class. Their civil rights are less than those of indigenous workers; their pay is lower; their housing conditions worse; their promotion prospects weaker; their accident rates higher. Insofar as the native-born working classes have experienced an improvement in their job-prospects, they have done so thanks to the immigrants’ taking the most menial, low-paid and lousy jobs. They are pushed and pulled entirely at the will of business. Capitalists want to see immigrants with second-class status in the country, because they form a layer of the working class that is most easily exploited—they have a much harder time fighting back against rotten conditions and sub-minimal wages. Having such a layer of workers bound to miserable conditions weakens the whole working class, since other workers face the threat of replacement by this underpaid sector of the workforce. Among the key material factors that capitalism needs for its very existence is structural unemployment, creating what Marx called the reserve army of labor, including a vast pool of low-wage labour. The masses of low-wage immigrant workers, largely come from the international reserve army. Native-born workers, too, often have to accept low-wage jobs because the immediate alternative is being unemployed altogether.
Socialists take the view that capitalists and workers belonged to mutually antagonistic classes. In the production process they become aware of their common interests and unite to promote them against the opposing class. Socialists also recognise the competitive element in relations between workers, but believed that it was less important than their identity of interests as wage earners. Racial conflict and colour prejudice are by-products of capitalism, which provoked such antagonisms in order to divide the workers. On the other hand, capitalism created conditions that forced workers to recognise their common interests. The productive system has an inherent tendency to reduce the worker’s living standards to the lowest level at which he or she could produce and reproduce. That tendency was being manifested in the substitution of low paid immigrant labour for more costly local labour. Since it is futile to expect protection from a capitalist government, indigenious workers are obliged in the long run to organise all workers regardless of ethnic origin and combine with them against the capitalist class.
The ideology that indigenous workers are more deserving than others is used to justify the workings of the system. Racism and chauvinism are used to attack the whole working class. The 1905 Aliens Act institutionalised the idea that immigrants alone were responsible for the deteriorating conditions which most workers were suffering. All the subsequent enactments of immigration controls merely served to legitimise the notion that immigrants are to blame in some way for the problems which workers face in capitalist society and far from placating the racists, greater controls simply serve to boost their confidence to call for even more.
Too many trade unions have failed the migrant workers, paying lip service but effectively ignoring their problems. The tabloid press is very fond of scare stories about immigrants ‘fiddling’ the benefits system. The fact that Labour Party and trade union leaders have always supported immigration controls means that racist ideas about immigration can sometimes gain a hearing among workers. Under capitalism workers are forced to compete for the scarce economic resources available to the working class. Racist ideas can get a hearing despite the fact that black or Asian workers in Britain are more likely to be unemployed than white workers, and to live in much poorer housing. Historically, far right organisations have attempted to build support inside the working class by using arguments which seek to blame immigrants for workers’ problems.
One very basic idea, unity of the working class and oppressed people, is critical. In capitalist society, a tiny class of people owns the means of production and profits by exploiting the workers’ labour. United, the overwhelming tendency of the working class would be to fight for a decent life for all, which is incompatible with capitalism. Powerful united struggles of the working class would inevitably demonstrate the need to overthrow capitalism altogether. Since the working class is the only class with the power to overturn capitalism, the capitalists use every possible divide-and-conquer tactic to prevent this development. Racism, bigotry and xenophobia has been the major tool of the ruling class in many countries. But unity is not an automatic process. It depends in large part on convincing fellow workers that the enemy is the bosses and that workers must unite to defeat racism and national chauvinism.
After decades of shedding crocodile tears for the populations of Eastern Europe when it was under the state-capitalist dictatorships with an Iron Curtain curtailing their movement, the ruling classes of Western Europe are now erecting their own walls to keep a potential immigrant population out. Refugees from wars and famines in the Middle East and Africa, in many cases sponsored and fostered by European nations, are denied entry to Fortress Europe. In Australia “Ten-pound Pommies” pull away the rescue ladder to others.
Fighting racism means fighting the system which produces the conditions for it to fester, namely capitalism. Opposition to immigration controls means challenging the very foundations of capitalism itself. Nationalism splits and divides workers and weakens their strength all over the world. Socialists seek a system where people are not forced through economic deprivation to leave the homes and neighbours they know and understand but that their travel and re-location between countries is genuinely free and voluntary. We belong together.
AJJ
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