One planet - One people

The European Court of Justice has said member states are within their rights to refuse to give financial help to unemployed EU citizens who move to that country just to claim benefits. It said the right of EU citizens to live and work in other member states - the principle of freedom of movement - did not stop states passing legislation of their own excluding migrants from some non-contributory benefits open to their citizens. The EU directive thus seeks to prevent economically inactive European Union citizens from using the host member state's welfare system to fund their means of subsistence. The ruling only applies to non-contributory benefits, benefits where the claimant does not make a contribution through the tax system. The UK government has already tightened the rules so EU migrants have to wait three months after arriving in the country before they can claim child benefit and child tax credits. Migrants are also barred from claiming jobseeker's allowance after three months if they are not looking for work. Cameron has said he wants to go further.  The court ruling will have wide-ranging implications for how the UK can tighten its welfare system.  Labour also backed the judgement, saying only people who contribute to the economy should be able to fall back on the welfare state. “The ruling reaffirmed the principle of free movement”, said the German Green party parliamentary leader Anton Hofreiter. “It also reaffirmed that people who are prepared to look for work across Europe have a right to draw social benefits”.

A rally was held recently protesting “scapegoating” of the immigrants. The protesters marched to the door of Harmondsworth Detention Centre, where asylum seekers are detained in facilities equal to a high-security prison. The privately-run detention center is the largest one in Europe. Many of the protesters were immigrants who had spent time in detention centers.

“It’s a very racist policy to blame immigrants for the problems. It’s about divide and rule. But in reality…the real motivation from the government is they don’t have any hope for the future of this country,” explained Antonia Bright of the grassroots campaign group Movement for Justice. “They want to cut everyone and the best way to do it is to push the blame in one direction and blame immigrants”.

The reason why Britain (and much of the rest of the world) has been economically devastated has more to do with the City of London and Wall St than Eastern Europeans sweating in back- breaking work backs in the fields and food factories of East Anglia. But the former have much better PR departments. And better lawyers. And, in the end, politicians don’t argue with big money for long. The poor, the vulnerable and the defenceless  – especially those who do not share the same language or customs or religion – have always been a convenient scapegoat for a society’s various ills. It’s the oldest trick in the book.

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National borders are repeatedly decimated in the name of ‘free market’ capitalism so that corporations can freely move their capital and profits around the globe to take advantage of cheap labour and natural resources, and of course lax tax controls. Productivity is now determined from the global supplier network. Any work and any job can be moved to another country, either for lower cost or weaker government controls. It is global corporations business ethic, and international trade deals are serve that goal. The  system is working exactly the way it was designed. To re-phrase Woody Guthrie “Some people rob you with gun-boat diplomacy, others with a fountain pen and an international trade agreement.” The concept of a "free market" is largely a nonsensical one - in any market transaction, one side usually holds all the chips and the other side must simply submit. The "market" in a person's labour is like this with a vengeance.

A recent study by the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration at University College London indicates that migrants added £20bn to the UK economy in the decade 2001 to 2011 and that migrants from the EU paid significantly more in taxes than they claimed in benefits or transfers for education, health or other expenditures. This is entirely consistent with previous studies, all of which have shown that the benefits of immigration outweigh its costs. There is a growing consensus regarding the economic benefits of immigration. Indeed, there is no reputable evidence for the oft-cited fears that immigrants undermine job prospects or reduce wages, either for the UK or any other major economy. Studies on the short-term impact of immigration on wages tend to show it yields a positive or at worst no statistically significant impact. While higher levels of immigration generate greater collective prosperity, the social and economic impacts of migration can produce short-run and local costs for the particular communities where they may concentrate. The pressure of migration may place on local services and the potential competition for local jobs needs to be recognised and demands for measures to be put in place to ease the burdens. The costs of migration may be immediate and local, while the benefits are often diffuse and are only fully realised in the medium and long term. Simply limiting numbers tends to result in a growing number of undocumented migrants.

The bosses benefit when workers accuse each other of causing low wages. Pinning this on foreigners is simply another way in which the capitalists, helped by their obedient media and a nasty dose of racism, encourage workers to turn against each other rather than against the system that breeds poverty and joblessness. The Bank of England surveyed 200 companies employing 275,000 workers about their use of migrant labour. Less than 2 percent of them said they employed immigrants because they were cheaper, while a 60 percent said they did so because there was a scarcity of local workers. The facts show that simply saying "immigration pushes down wages" is wrong.

The economic impact of immigration to the US has been studied in the greatest depth and shows that the dynamism provided by migrants is vital for growth and competitiveness. The US Federal Reserve Bank found that “immigrants expand the economy’s productive capacity by stimulating investment and promoting specialisation… This produces efficiency gains and boosts income per worker.” This in part is because immigrants tend to be “exceptional people” who strive to overcome adversity. The diversity they bring serves as a catalyst that spurs creativity and performance. This is as true in business as it is in academia, medicine, science, politics, arts, food, culture, entertainment and sports. More than half the Silicon Valley startups and half the patents in the US are accredited to migrants and migrants and refugees are disproportionately represented in the Academy award and Nobel prize winners. Unskilled migrants meanwhile do jobs local workers will not do, such as arduous agricultural labour. By providing affordable child minding they allow a greater share of women to participate in the workforce.

Recently refugees on their way to Australia have been hounded as “illegals” and “queue jumpers”. What has been implicit in these attacks on refugees is the idea that Australia is an overcrowded land and simply can’t support more people. Anti-refugee hysteria comes hand in hand with the idea that there is only so much to go around. The Australian Abbott government has pushed boat refugees away from Australia and cut the formal refugee and humanitarian program from 20,000 (increased by Labor) back down to just 13,750. Suggestions that asylum seekers applying through the “front door,” or the “right way,” will be rewarded with resettlement, are simply untrue for most refugees. As Paul Power from Australia’s Refugee Council noted recently, relatively few of the most desperate people ever apply to Australia for help – and when they do, very few succeed. In the five years to June last year, more than 80 percent of applications for refugee resettlement to Australia were rejected. The rejection rate for Special Humanitarian visas was even higher at 92 percent. The rate went up to 97 percent for In-Country Special Humanitarian applicants, says Power. The Abbott Government’s deterrence policies are not designed to address the problems of refugees fleeing conflict and persecution. Their aim is simply to remove the “problem” from Australia and push it back on to other nations. Its policies forces poorer countries to carry a greater load will inevitably have consequences for Australia. Australia is seen increasingly as “a very wealthy and spoilt nation which wants to share in the benefits of global trade but much prefers to push responsibility for humanitarian crises back on its much poorer neighbors,” he says.

The Socialist Party stands for the abolition of every form of domination and exploitation. The Socialist Party works to build  a world in which everyone will be able to freely move across our shared planet, to visit and to live wherever they choose. The slogan should not be that “the immigrants must go” but that “the capitalists and the plutocrats must go.” We say “Blame the system, not the victims.” Refugees are continually used as scapegoats by Labor and Liberal politicians alike. It is much easer for them to blame refugees and migrants for diminishing employment opportunities and cuts to services, rather than acknowledge the shortcomings of the system they administer.

 Businesses are in competition with one another for market share and profits. If a business can cut its costs by paying lower wages and giving itself a competitive edge, then it will do just that. This forces competing businesses to follow suit. The result is the driving down of wages for all workers, which is not the fault of immigrant workers but caused by the imperatives of the capitalist system itself. When bosses attack hard won wages and conditions, the response of the labour movement needs to be that of collective action and united struggle. Instead of undermining the right of migrant workers to cross borders in search of work, migrant workers need to be unionised, uniting migrant workers alongside local workers in a collective struggle to maintain and improve upon wages and conditions. As long as workers are viewing migrants as the cause of their problems they leave themselves divided and distracted from the real issues they face. The concern of working people over the state of wages, unemployment, welfare and public services is totally legitimate. However, placing the blame on migrants does not address the causes of these problems or advance anything to improve the situation. The problem is the capitalist system itself. The path to beginning to solve these problems is workers’ unity across ethnic, religious and national lines. It is vital that the trade union movement makes the recruitment of migrant labour a top priority.

Humans don’t normally interpret the world through a series of facts and logic. We often understand the world through what we are told, picked up from the world around us.  In a world where people are forever being told that that immigration is responsible for all of the ills of the world, the effect of highlighting immigration is mostly to confirm to people the stories in their head which tell them to blame those of other races than themselves, those less rich than themselves. When life gets tough, people turn on those they define as the other, the outsider.  Maligning migrants, and asylum-seekers becomes fair game, especially for vote-seeking populist politicians.  20 per cent of young white people are unemployed, the figure for black youths is 50 per cent, and that landlords and estate agents now keep out non-white tenants. A survey in May found that more people admit they are racially biased than people did in the 1990s. There is now more tolerance of gay people and liberal lifestyles, but hostility to multiracialism is growing.  Native-born are not being marginalised! The ‘British’ way of life is not being threatened. Those are fear-mongering soundbites without any realistic substance