WeeklyWorker

22.02.1996

Asylum bill attacks all workers

This weekend thousands rally in London against the Immigration and Asylum Bill. We need to sweep away not only this measure, but all immigration controls

The new legislation marks just the latest tightening of the state’s control of workers’ rights to free movement. Since the sixties, Immigration Act has followed Immigration Act, as successive governments - Tory and Labour - have clamped down on the entry into Britain of those they consider ‘unwelcome’.

It was a different story in the years of the post-war boom. Poverty stricken workers, particularly from the Caribbean and the Indian sub-continent, were encouraged to settle here in order to meet British capitalism’s shortage of unskilled labour. But as the boom ended and large-scale unemployment became a permanent feature of most western economies, the door was firmly closed.

The need was for workers skilled in new technology. Guidelines for immigration officers instructed them to exclude people who “may become a charge on public funds”. At the same time rich entrepreneurs - black or white - are today welcomed.

So the state’s policy is not based on ‘institutionalised racism’, as many left groups insist, but on attempting to match as closely as it can the needs of capital for labour. At the same time, ‘illegal’ immigrants - those who ‘overstay’ or evade immigration controls - provide a useful pool of cheap, easily intimidated workers. That is why bosses’ organisations such as the CBI expressed their opposition to proposals to make them check the immigration status of their own employees.

While big business uses national borders (now being replaced by those of the European Union) to restrict workers’ movement in order to exploit us more efficiently, our demands should get to the heart of the matter. Workers must be able to travel and live anywhere in the world with equal rights.

For this reason the attempt to focus all opposition to the bill along anti-racist lines is misplaced. It is true, particularly in this pre-election period, that the discredited Tories will appeal to the most backward, reactionary elements by ‘playing the race card’. In this way they will be able to salvage at least a proportion of their lost votes. But they can no longer get away with doing this openly, for ‘respectable’ bourgeois opinion is today most definitely anti-racist. It is national chauvinism which divides workers and tries to make us side with our ‘own’ bourgeoisie.

The Campaign against the Immigration and Asylum Bill, who organised this Saturday’s big demonstration, used the slogans, ‘No new attacks on immigration and asylum’ and ‘No internal controls’ (our emphasis). This is clearly insufficient.

We say:

The new bill means: