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It is argued that migrant workers puts downward pressure on wages for the poorest and that multiple studies have shown this. It's not migrants who reduce wages, it's bosses. But the main research used says "each 1 percent increase in the immigrant/native working age population ratio led... to a 0.5% decrease in wages at the 1st decile". But as MigrationObservatory put it "The available research further shows that any adverse wage effects of immigration are likely to be greatest for resident workers who are themselves migrants. This is because the skills of new migrants are likely to be closer substitutes for the skills of migrants already employed in the UK than for those of UK-born workers." So the impact on native born people or who've been here a long time is even less than the 0.5% would imply. Between 2009 and 2012, the UK minimum wage fell in real terms by 5.96%. So to have the same impact as the failure to raise the minimum wage in line with inflation, if you believe the study cited, the migrant workforce ratio would have to have increased by around 12% over the same period. In fact, the percentage of those who are foreign born nationals working in the UK increased from 8.2% to 8.3% over that period, meaning, if the study holds true, at most, migration may have accounted for a 0.05% decease in wages for the bottom decile. Compared to the impact of almost any economic policy, that's nothing.
Incomes of the poorest have fallen in recent years, but it's not because of migration. It's because of a set of policies - austerity, privatisation, financialisation - which have transfered wealth from the poor to the rich. The right-wing media is full of stories of migrants placing pressure on public services, housing, schools, infrastructure, food supplies - and this country is far (and getting further) from being able to feed itself;" Quite the reverse. Migrants contribute more to public coffers than they take back. What's putting pressure on public services is austerity, and allowing the government and UKIP to get away with blaming migrants for their destructive policies is terrible politics. Allowing migration to be used as a scapegoat is economic ignorance at best and facilitating scapegoating at worst.
If we care about people everywhere (and we ought to) then we must also ask about the overall impact on the wages across the world. As long as capital is mobile, the ability of workers to move to where there are better paid jobs is a key weapon in combatting the global race to the bottom.
Migration only has a marginal impact on the wages of people already here - easily counteracted with other policies - but a significant impact on the wages of poorer migrants. The idea that we ought to combat the power of the rich by limiting the freedom to move of the poor is as economically misguided as it sounds. Thatcher said, famously "the method is economics, but the object is to change the soul", and she used economic policy - flexible labour markets, the growth of the private rental sector, the smashing of the unions, to break down social solidarity in the UK. Conservatives then persuaded people that the main cause of this change they had delivered was migration. The solution to this is to build solidarity, and to reshape our economy into one which encourages us to co-operate, and to get to know our neighbours. It's not to blame the mobility of people globally.
The article concludes “ Immigration is the red herring being used to beat ordinary people while the massively rich pickpocket us, doubling their wealth in five years and trashing the planet as they do so. Let's not buy into that propaganda.”
You can read the article in full here
Immigration is used by the capitalist State to put market pressure on the price of labour. If there was no addition to the workforce, the demand for labour power would be greater and the price would go up, just like any other commodity.
ReplyDeleteWhat you do say is true although the blogs implies the actual effect is often exaggerated for political purposes.
ReplyDeleteWorkers compete with other workers, the employed with the unemployed, the skilled against the unskilled , the young against the old, men against women, unionised against unorganised, single against family, rural against urban...foreign-born against native-born is just one aspect of an inherent part of the capitalist system of wage-labour.
There would be other means used to create that down-ward pressure on wages if there was no foreign immigration such as simply out-sourcing production abroad, or making work zero-contract or part-time if work cannot be moved which we already see growing ever more...Surely you don't think the capitalist class would permit workers to gain the upperhand except very temporarily while it makes these adjustments!
Surely you don't accept that a migrant is little better than simply just a scab. I know you don't :-)
But above all, again as the post says, ...we are world socialists and not a parochial party. Our interest is the interests of workers everywhere on the planet because we are a class party not a nationalist party.