All for All

The UNHCR said at least 348,000 people, including a growing number of asylum seekers, had taken to the seas worldwide since the beginning of the year of which more than 3,400 people have died in the Mediterranean this year trying to reach Europe. At least 207,000 people have made the risky Mediterranean sea crossing since January, almost three times the previous high of 70,000 during the Libyan civil war in 2011.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres warned that many states seem increasingly preoccupied with securing their own borders rather than preventing the loss of life.

"This is a mistake, and precisely the wrong reaction for an era in which record numbers of people are fleeing wars," Guterres said. "Security and immigration management are concerns for any country, but policies must be designed in a way that human lives do not end up becoming collateral damage." Guterres said, "You can't stop a person who is fleeing for their life by deterrence. The real root causes have to be addressed, and this means looking at why people are fleeing, what prevents them from seeking asylum by safer means, and what can be done to crack down on the criminal networks who prosper from this," he said.

Since 2001, the US Customs and Border Protection has become the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country, with 45,000 officers and a $12bn annual budget, according to a 2012 report by the US Government Accountability Office. Throughout his presidency Obama has strongly supported the prevention through deterrence model of immigration policy, deporting 419,384 individuals in 2012, the most in US history, while continuing the collaboration between state and federal agencies, something that has created widespread human rights abuses according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

A study says that half of the 440 U.S. counties that depend on agriculture are located in the Midwest. The region is the country's main producing zone for corn, soybeans, hogs and eggs (all in Iowa); wheat and sorghum (Kansas) and oats and turkeys (Minnesota). The Midwest is also where 55 percent of U.S. pork is produced, along with 39 percent of the country's beef and 35 percent of its milk. Two-thirds of the agricultural labor there comes from Mexico, 6 percent from Central America and the rest from the United States and Puerto Rico. Harsh working conditions make it difficult for Midwestern agricultural producers to attract non-immigrant workers. 57,000 migrants with work visas in agriculture, livestock raising and food processing in the Midwest, and the sector needs another 80,000 workers right away. 9.7 million people over age 16 are still unemployed in the country, an "imported labor force" is necessary because Americans are reluctant to work in the fields, "where salaries are low, conditions are tough and transitory jobs force them to constantly move," Stephanie Mercier, the author of the study entitled "Employing Agriculture: How the Midwest Farm and Food Sector Relies on Immigrant Labor," Mercier, who works as an independent consultant but for 11 years was the main economist for the Democratic caucus in the Senate, says that stagnation in immigration reform would mean less food production, higher food prices, lost jobs and competitiveness. Undocumented labor is high in the agricultural sector, where hundreds of thousands of migrants remain in the country after their seasonal work visas have expired. The study suggests that a new system of renewable, year-round visas would solve this problem.

We recognise that the capitalist class are in favour of the free movement of labour because they want labour, just like every other commodity, to be freely movable and they will always try to pit worker against worker - which is why workers combine together into trade unions to limit competition between us as much as objectively possible, even though it can never be abolished under capitalism. What the capitalists are most decidedly not in favour of, however, is paying for the taxes (the burden of which rests upon them) that enable migrants to get NHS treatment or unemployment benefit. When British workers already face cuts on their living standards and working conditions, the most weakest and vulnerable section of the population is a lot easier to vent your anger and desperation at than the often absentee and remote employing class. Migrants are blamed for low pay, housing shortages, hospital waiting list and benefit fraud. This is all nonsense, as repeated studies have shown. The vast majority come to get a job, not reap the wondrous rewards of housing benefit - it is as simple as that. In fact, on average, migrants claim less state benefits than the indigenous workforce. Pro-capitalist politicians of all the mainstream parties (plus some on the right and left outer fringes) with their lick-spittle media attack-dogs promote the toxic idea that migrants are the problem that needs to be sorted out.

As far as the members of the Socialist Party are concerned, all human beings inhabit the planet Earth and we should all be allowed to live where-ever we like on this globe. But the modern world is divided up into a mosaic of different nations and we have been brought up to believe countries are normal. Socialists try to change this view of the world. Nobody today would object to someone moving from Liverpool to London or vice-versa, so why do some persist in claiming there is a difference if someone relocates from Bucharest to Birmingham.