A thought-provoking book review.
In The Immigrant War by Vittorio Longhi finds that "even when someone does succeed in crossing a border, even when they obtain a permit and find a steady job, they are still faced with this 'implacable war' against migrants." Migrants do the worst jobs at the lowest pay, he says, for which they "face xenophobic propaganda that is so functional to what Michel Foucault would call 'biopower,' or the 'subjugation of bodies and the control of populations.'"
Longhi quotes Foucault because he sees anti-immigrant hysteria as part of a system of control. But what makes Longhi's view more than just one more litany of abuse are two elements. He sees this control - the way migrants are employed - as a system for extracting profits, not just the bad acts of evil people. And he shows that migrants can and do resist. "They change from being passive victims to become new, conscious social agents, capable of fighting for their own rights and contributing to the revival of a wider protest."
In his examination of the Persian Gulf, where the system of social control is the most elaborate and is based on labor contracting through guest worker programs. Undocumented migration exists in the Gulf, but at levels much lower than in the United States or Europe.
Longhi describes a brutal system in which "the social exclusion, terrible living conditions and abuse reserved for migrants are possible thanks to the entry quota mechanism, to the criterion of kafala (sponsorship), which binds the migrant to a short-term contract with a sole employer." As a result, while the average per capita income of a Qatari citizen is $88,000, a contract construction worker from Nepal gets $3,600, and a Filipina domestic worker $2,500.
The point is clear. An elaborate system for contracting labor exists to produce huge wage differentials, and therefore profits for employers. The consequences for workers are disastrous, despite the fact that families and whole towns in countries like the Philippines or Nepal have become dependent on the money sent home out of those low wages.
Longhi also describes a reality even less well known - the rebellions of migrant workers in the Gulf, and the support they've received, not only from European unions, but from the barely-legal unions in those countries themselves. Protests in Bahrain, for instance, were organized with the help of that country's new union federation. Its leaders were among those demonstrating in the Pearl Square protests in Manama, put down by its monarchy with bloody violence. In France, he describes rising labor militancy among immigrants similar to that taking place in the United States. Raymond Chaveau, coordinator for work among "sans papiers" [undocumented] workers for the CGT, the traditional left labor federation, says employers use the lack of legal status to create "reserves of low-cost labor," which he describes in the classical Marxist term as "the industrial reserve army." By organizing, restaurant workers - "this reserve army in the kitchen" - have won increasing numbers of permanent jobs - 6,000 in 2007, 12,000 in 2008, and 13,000 in 2009.
Longhi asks, "What would happen if the 4.5 million immigrants living in Italy decided to down tools for a day?" But he then takes his question an important step further: "And if the millions of Italians who are tired of racism supported their actions?" In fact, these were the elements of a manifesto of Italy's "A Day Without Us" movement of 2010, showing the kind of cross-fertilization that is taking place among migrants and migrant social movements internationally. Longhi's arguments are most convincing when he makes a strong case for the way the activity of migrants themselves, especially when it's supported by unions and progressive social organizations, can win important improvements.
Adapted from here,
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