13.06.1996

A socialist immigration policy?

The Marxist responds to the Weekly Worker article of May 9 on the SLP conference

Whatever the Socialist Labour Party may stand accused of, it strikes us [The Marxist] that their declared policy of establishing a humane and non-racist immigration system is correct. To describe it as ‘national socialism’, as opposed to the ‘international socialism and revolution’ of those who call for all controls to be scrapped, is puerile.

The campaign against the Immigration and Asylum Bill’s proposals to disentitle refugees to welfare benefits and throw them on the streets is an important one. If we are concerned about the quality of life of working class people we cannot stand by while cost-driven measures are made law, which will leave families destitute, increase crime, wage undercutting and the black economy. The statistic that 96% of appellants for asylum lose their appeals is an argument for speeding up the appeal process, not rendering it illusory.

But the opposition to the bill will never seize the popular imagination while it is used as a vehicle for the liberal slogan, “Smash all immigration controls”. It is liberal because it is aimed at affording individuals an opportunity to escape from poverty, but does nothing at all for the mass of people who remain behind. Most working class people recognise this. Feelings of sympathy and tolerance of newcomers who they see are ‘genuine’ refugees will rapidly vanish if they are arrogantly told that there can be no distinction between genuine refugees fleeing political and religious persecution and those simply seeking to better their lot by migrating to another country.

Any discussion on the left on immigration controls today is likely to be conducted in an atmosphere more suited to a debate on child porn. The revolutionary left voicing its gut reaction will admit only one viewpoint. Anything less than the call for an end to immigration controls is deemed racist and social chauvinist.

The argument goes like this:

• Social problems of poverty, unemployment, poor housing, education and social services are problems caused by capitalism, not immigrants. We cannot allow immigrants to become scapegoats for capitalism’s failings.
• Imperialism has blighted the conditions of life of millions of people in the Third World. We in the imperialist countries have benefited. We have no right to deny others the right to improve their living standards by coming here.
• Immigration controls are mainly directed against black people and their implementation leads to second class citizenship for black people in this country.
• Any discussion of how many immigrants the country can assimilate - ‘playing the numbers game’- gives succour to the racists. Britain is a wealthy state with no shortage of resources.

Unfortunately for the revolutionary left, reality has a habit of intruding into people’s consciousness. Although many working class people are sympathetic to the right of people in the Third World to fight for independence, national sovereignty and self-reliance and can be won to the fight against racial discrimination at home, most for good reason reject the call to “end all immigration controls now” as perverse. In consequence the left continues to alienate itself from the bulk of indigenous working class people of all ethnic backgrounds for the sake of a principle which has nothing to do with socialist politics.

In fact it is liberalism, part of the baggage of New Left and Trotskyist student politics of the 1960s which the left feels - from a sense of guilt about British imperialism - duty bound to lug around as protection against accusations of racism. It can be seen also in the romantic belief that only whites can be guilty of ‘true’ racism.

Most working class people do not share the mea culpa attitude of the left intelligentsia. They have not, by and large, shared the privileges and they do not feel the need to share the burden of purity.

Whatever abstract points may be made about unlimited resources, ordinary people know from their experience of queuing for most things in life that the longer the queue the less chance there is for people waiting in line to be served. Housing is probably the area where the sharpest conflicts arise. It makes no more sense to them to put people from abroad ahead in the housing waiting lists on the basis of relative need than, for example, to give away their wages to others more needy than they are. It offends not only their sense of self-preservation, but of fairness also - a sense which workers develop from common adversity. And the notion that the number of newcomers in the queue is irrelevant is clearly rubbish. Playing the ‘numbers game’ is what working class and unemployed people have to do every day to get by. There will always be racist attacks committed by fascists and the mentally unstable. But the number of immigrants present in a particular area will very often determine the extent to which fascist attacks are tolerated, if not tacitly endorsed.

In London one in four people is homeless or lives in sub-standard accommodation. Many of these are first or second generation immigrants. It is supremely foolish for left activists, who have no control over the size of the housing stock in this country, to prattle on about Britain’s unlimited resources, or even worse, to label everyone who supports the retention of a reasonable proportion of public housing for local families as racist. Is it any wonder that, despite the saturation coverage of the Isle of Dogs at the second council by-election by the left groups who helped to “turn out the Labour vote”, Beackon managed to increase his share of the vote although he lost his seat?

The left has devalued the term ‘racist’ to the extent that more and more people will regard themselves as racists and see it as acceptable. This is what we should fight against. The left needs to lose its idealist notions about immigration if it is to tackle the pernicious effect of racism within the people.

- People migrate for all sorts of reasons, but chief among them is the desire to improve their lot. There is nothing reprehensible about this. It is idealistic to expect everyone to ‘stand and fight’ for better conditions or freedom from political persecution. (Many of the refugees from Eastern Europe after WWII were politically persecuted - for the right reasons.) But large scale permanent movements of people (for this is what ‘no immigration controls’ legitimises) can never solve problems of deprivation in the emigrants’ country (Ireland in the 19th century, Somalia in the 1990s), nor problems of inter-communal strife, whether in Rwanda or what was Yugoslavia.

- The front page of one leftwing paper recently carried the call: “Workers must be able to travel and live anywhere in the world with equal rights.” But who believes this idealistic nonsense? There has never been a universal right to migrate. Immigration policy has always been dictated by the political or economic needs of the ruling class of the ‘host’ country and their ability to regulate the flow of immigrants. The constitutional and legislative finery in which these needs may be expressed - eg, the right of abode in the UK under old UK and Commonwealth citizenship or the “free movement of labour” within the EU - are merely a reflection of bourgeois needs for labour at the cheapest cost, coloured by political propaganda. The speed at which this finery will be dropped, particularly for refugees fleeing to the ‘free world’, was clearly shown by the UK government begging China in 1994 to reinstate its border patrols, or the US abandonment of the Cuban émigrés in the same year, when Castro called their bluff and the number of boat people suddenly swelled.

- In fact, since the ending of the policy of active recruitment of labour overseas in the post-WWII era, the ability to migrate has rarely reached those at the bottom of the social pile, and is increasingly confined to those with the money or social/family connections to set up home elsewhere. This is evident from the Nigerians in Brent and Hackney, Ethiopians in Brent, Somalis in Tower Hamlets - a large number of whom have fled turbulence at home. Or indeed the Pakistanis in Bradford, of whom: “More than 80% of Bradford’s 60,000 Pakistanis come from one town in Mirpur, the Pakistani-controlled part of Kashmir. In some villages in the province, more than half the population has emigrated to Bradford or Birmingham” (The Guardian December 2 1994).

These are important facts which illustrate the naiveté of the SWP line that ‘we’re all part of the international working class’ and immigration controls are the bosses’ method of divide and rule.

- Imperialist oppression of the Third World is best attacked from here by supporting the elements fighting for national independence, sovereignty and self-reliance, and policies which are likely to weaken the stranglehold of the capitalist world market on trading relations. The immense debt interest burden, which results in the average working shift in parts of Africa and Latin America being devoted to just keeping up the interest payments on loans from finance capital from British banks, and the cutbacks in aid are abuses which ordinary people here can grasp as unfair. On aid programmes, Christian Aid has more to say than most left groups. Those who see immigration as a means of alleviating poverty may as well propose to channel aid to pay the fares of those who would like but cannot afford to settle here. Such a policy would at least be based on needs. Obsession with protecting the rights of escapees diverts attention from the real and pressing problem of finding ways and means of assisting people who remain in each country and region to improve their economic and social circumstances by developing their domestic economy in accordance with their own cultural traditions.

- Immigration must be planned. It is no use to say, ‘You are trying to solve capitalism’s problems.’ No society, and certainly not a socialist one, can rationally organise human endeavour or resources on the basis of an unregulated flow of people in or out of it. The existence of ghettos in cities in Europe is a major social problem which will not mysteriously disappear ‘after the revolution’, and if allowed to develop on the North American model will lead to social fragmentation on racial or ethnic lines. For the foreseeable future, immigration policy has to be determined according to the needs of the host country to productively employ people and assimilate them in the community.

- The corollary of this is that immigrants must only be admitted on the basis of full civil rights. There can be no acceptance of guestworker status for some, nor of ‘identity cards’ which inevitably will be used as an oppressive tool against blacks here. It also means that there can be no discrimination in favour of ‘kith and kin’ from South Africa, Hong Kong or elsewhere from which whites may be looking for a bolt-hole. Nor should immigration depend on the depth of one’s wallet, as the Tory legislation now allows. The rich face no restriction on their freedom of movement. They may, like the Fayeds, be denied citizenship. But that is unlikely to impinge upon the quality of life of the owner of Harrods.

These undoubtedly raise difficult issues. But at present the battle being fought by the left is not only on unwinnable ground, but for ‘principles’ which bear no close analysis.