The War on Migrants

  

The growth in the world’s migrant population is far more rapid than the growth in the total population. Over the same 40-year period to 2005, the world population doubled while the migrant population grew by 3 times. However, cross-border migration captures only a fraction of the world’s total migrant population. From a strict economic perspective there is little difference between cross-border migration and internal migration. This is especially the case when internal or rural-to-urban migration encompasses vast distances and differences of language or dialect. According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics in 2008 there were 285 million internal migrants in China. This is far larger than the world’s total number of cross-border migrants. For the migrants themselves this frequently encompasses far greater geographical distances than is required, say, from Eastern Europe. In India the level of internal migration is over 300 million people according to UNESCO. India’s growth is below that of China, but still growing at a considerable rate The rate of internal migration in both countries has been a necessary accompaniment to high economic growth. Migration is a key part of the division of labour, allowing workers to migrate where production (and wages and jobs) are expanding. Growth attracts immigration but is also increased by it. The proportion of workers leaving a country will increases when there is an economic downturn and the proportion of the workforce arriving from overseas will tend to decrease. Workers follow capital to the most developed areas to meet the demand for wage labour in urban centres of capitalist expansion in an, attempt to escape poverty and unemployment. Likewise the British capitalist class had little use for immigration controls for most of the 19th century. The 'free' approach to immigration flourished as British capitalism expanded. During the boom years of the industrial revolution British capitalism possessed with an insatiable thirst for workers, if only to throw them back into unemployment in times of slump. Britain's employers showed little interest in the national or ethnic 'character' of the labour power which they acquired for the expanding British economy. However, by the turn of the century Britain’s  industry was increasingly undermined by cheaper imports from abroad, suffering deep economic recession. The 1905 Aliens Act institutionalised the idea that immigrants alone were responsible for the rapidly deteriorating conditions which most workers were suffering.

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In reality the present debate on immigration in Britain is not about the economic causes and consequences of immigration at all. The new migrants get jobs, contribute to the economy, pay taxes, don’t use many public services, and don’t take jobs from natives.  What, exactly, is the problem? Only under capitalism can the arrival of young people eager to work, able to produce goods or services far in excess of what they as individuals could consume themselves, and so make a real contribution to raising overall living standards, be seen as a problem. How ridiculous is that?

Free movement of workers was one of the key principles (the “four freedoms”) set out in the 1957 Treaty of Rome So when the UK joined the EU, it was entirely understood that free movement was a fundamental part of the deal. Free movement is an absolute right within the EU, so we couldn’t stop the new citizens coming here; we could only stop them (for a while) working legally. The assumption was that if we did so, they’d still come, and still work, just not legally.  This hardly seemed like an attractive alternative.

Leaving aside the non- negotiability of this fundamental pillar of the EU, both the Conservative and Labour should surely support free movement of workers. Why would anyone from the Labour  Party which claims to represent the interests of workers choose this of the “four freedoms” to seek to undermine; do they really want an EU where goods, capital, and services (the other three) can move freely, but workers can’t? On the Conservative side, it also seems odd that representatives of a pro-employer party which often criticises the EU for imposing unnecessary regulatory restrictions on business should seek to restrict the right of EU businesses to employ whichever EU citizens are best suited for the available jobs.

It is overwhelmingly a ‘debate’ that allows politicians and others to whip up xenophobia and racism, while posing as being concerned about the interests of workers or the poor. The media is very fond of stories about immigrants 'fiddling' the benefits system. The cause of migration is growth, to which migration is a decisive contributor. It is true that the UK has a persistent problem with youth unemployment and inactivity – and that this was true even before the recession. But research suggests that this has little or nothing to do with immigration; it is about educational under-performance among disadvantaged young people while at school, the poor quality of much post-16 education for those who are not going to university, and our neglect of the school-to-work transition.  And it is just as bad (often worse) in areas where there are few immigrants as in areas where there are many. In addition many critics of immigration tend to focus on the supposedly local effects of it, particularly that they drive down wages. These arguments are a rehash of notions which opposed the growth of women in the workforce and even supported restricting their wages relative to men. If only we had stopped those Poles from coming to Britain, our wages would be so much higher and therefore those Bulgarians and Romanians should be turned away, the argument goes. Some on the Left raise this version of opposing immigration: socialists defend workers' wages and conditions, which are under attack because there are too many workers competing for too few jobs. So we should support restrictions on immigrant labour as they keep telling us. The fact that Labour Party and trade union leaders have always supported immigration controls means that such ideas about immigration gain a hearing among workers. They have also given credence and respectability to the racist notion that immigrants come to Britain to 'scrounge' off the welfare state, at the expense of 'British' workers. Jack Straw hit the nail on the head when as far back as 1995 he said that “you couldn't get a cigarette paper between Labour and the Tories over the question of immigration”. The Labour Party  has simply pandered to the  claims about 'bogus' asylum seekers and Eastern European ‘benefit tourists’ desperate to convince any potentially racist voters that Labour, too, will be 'tough' on immigration.

Are immigrants really preventing British workers from getting more pay?

What Marx called the reserve army of labour, a surplus of disposable workers, is intrinsic to capitalism. The reserve army of labour helps capitalists hold down wages because it increases competition for jobs, forcing workers to sell themselves for less and to work harder for fear of being replaced. It is part and parcel of the system, wired into it from its very birth - and not something created by immigration. By its very nature capitalism pits workers against each other, forcing them to compete for jobs and money, rather than cooperating for the common good. If we make the mistake of blaming the reserve army on immigrants, we might as well say that all unemployed people should be made to leave the country - and there are 1.7 million of them, by the way, overwhelmingly British - because they all put pressure on wages, regardless of their nationality. 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.

An obvious example of this was in 1945 when the Australian Labor government announced a programme to import some 50,000 British child migrants and “white alien children” to meet the need for post-war labour. They would be housed in converted military bases and air force camps, then in hostels. The economic and racial objectives underpinning the program were summed up six years earlier by Redmond Prendiville, the Catholic Archbishop of Perth, in a speech to British children arriving on the SS Strathaird: “At a time when empty cradles are contributing woefully to empty spaces, it is necessary to look for external sources of supply. And if we do not supply from our own stock we are leaving ourselves all the more exposed to the menace of the teeming millions of our neighbouring Asiatic races.” A 1953 report by the British government’s Overseas Migration Board criticised local authorities for not sending enough children. In 2009, the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of the time told child migrants, “the laws of our nation failed you.” But the laws of the nation worked then, as now, just as intended: upholding the economic and political power of the ruling class and reserving its greatest repression for the most oppressed and vulnerable sections of the population.

Marx argued that trade unions - not immigration controls - are the means by which workers can fight the adverse consequences of labour market competition. Workers, he said, should "organise a regular co-operation between employed and unemployed in order to destroy or weaken the ruinous effects of this natural law of capitalistic production on their class".

If the reformists within the mainstream parties were true to their own principles what they would be doing to really help workers to raise wages and improve conditions is much stricter enforcement of worker protection and anti-discrimination laws.  Funding used for immigration enforcement and border control could be given instead to the relevant health and safety, minimum wage inspectors  and other labour law enforcement departments.  However, it is the socialists who remind us all that fighting xenophobia and racism means fighting the system which produces the conditions for it to grow, namely capitalism. Immigration and attempts at its control are intrinsic parts of the capitalist system.

In any sane system of running the economy, industry would exist to satisfy human need. But under capitalism humans exist to satisfy the needs of profit. under capitalism there will never be a happy time when workers can start to work less, relax and enjoy the fruits of the extraordinary technological progress that capitalism has produced. We will always face pressures to tighten our belts, raise productivity and look over our shoulders at the other workers with whom we are competing. New technology has opened up the prospect of a life in which machines work for people, not the other way round, and where work is shared so everyone can enjoy fruitful, fulfilling labour and ample leisure.