05.09.1996

No discrimination, No controls

There is nowhere in the capitalist world where workers’ rights can be guaranteed any more. Everywhere welfare states are being dismantled, job security is under attack and unemployment is rising.

Under these circumstances it has become essential for every bourgeois state to apply ever stricter border controls to prevent immigration in a desperate attempt to maintain some semblance of social stability. In the United States and just about every European Union country detentions and deportations of ‘illegal immigrants’ have become the order of the day.

Last month’s brutal police assault on the Saint-Bernard church in Paris highlighted the international nature of capitalism’s problem. Three hundred African immigrants, some on hunger strike, were callously evicted and many have already been deported to their native Mali or Mauritania. Some were asylum seekers whose application had been refused, while others previously had the right of residence until it was withdrawn in 1994 by retrospective legislation. Amongst the 300 were children born in France who, like their parents, have by a stroke of a pen suddenly become ‘illegal’.

Mass demonstrations and the support of well-known public figures did not deter Prime Minister Alain Juppé from going ahead with the expulsions. An occupation of the offices of Juppé’s party, ‘Rally for the Republic’, was broken up by police.

In Britain asylum seekers’ rights to benefit and council housing have been withdrawn. An attempt by the housing charity, Shelter, and the Refugee Council to prevent these changes being applied retrospectively was defeated in the High Court, although the judge magnanimously ruled that tenants must be given two weeks’ notice of their eviction. Thousands of workers could be made homeless and reduced to absolute poverty - they have committed the ‘crime’ of being in the wrong place.

Of course when it comes to hypocrisy, the bourgeoisie knows no bounds. Last week saw an orgy of agonised hand-wringing, as liberal commentators struggled with the dilemma of what should be done with the Iraqi hijackers of a Sudan Airways plane to Stansted Airport. Evil terrorists? Perhaps. On the other hand, they were “desperate asylum seekers, who faced a fate of certain torture and execution if they returned to Iraq” (The Independent August 28). You see, the hijackers are plucky opponents of public enemy number one, Saddam Hussein, and so surely can be forgiven almost anything.

Martin Woollacott of The Guardian (August 24) tried to get to grips with the “continuing problem of the state versus human rights”. On the one hand citizens must have their rights “properly elevated above those of outsiders” and “control of immigration ought not to be a dirty word”. On the other hand the brutal measures needed to enforce such control troubles his liberal conscience.

He writes:

“Free movement is far from realised even within the national boundaries of democracies, where it is controlled by invisible barriers of property and money. Elsewhere the constraints are even more serious, not so much now to tie people to where they were born, but to force them to move from those places to others where they do not particularly want to go.”

All Woollacott can do is idly hope for a “much, much more equal world”. Under capitalism? Some hope.

Communists aim to destroy capitalism and build a world where all bourgeois limits on our rights will be buried forever. But we are not content with waiting for the day when humanity is free from capitalism’s oppressive restraints. We pose now the necessity to fight for those freedoms today. Reformists, like bourgeois liberals, can only see the problem in terms of capitalist ‘reality’: ‘Unrestricted movements of population will lead to chaos,’ they cry.

But we are not concerned about an ordered capitalist world: we fight for a full and decent life for every individual on the planet. Capitalism certainly cannot provide it, so capitalism must go. Under bourgeois rule the winning of a minimum wage as part of that fight would also lead to ‘chaos’: many firms would go under and thousands would be thrown out of work. Perhaps then we should drop the ‘unrealistic’ demand to smash all immigration controls, as speakers at the Socialist Labour Party founding conference suggested?

Our friends from The Marxist have once more attempted to defend the SLP’s position that some immigration controls are necessary. In a letter published in last week’s Weekly Worker they write: “Providing a haven for those who are fortunate or (relatively) rich enough to escape from poverty does not do one jot against the existing order. Oppressive class rule remains for the people - the vast majority - who have no hope of emigrating to Britain or anywhere else.”

This is rather like denying workers the right to fly abroad on their holidays because most cannot afford to do so. Or perhaps the right to read newspapers should be withheld because it is no good to blind people.

There are signs, however, of The Marxist shifting its ground. Stung by possible accusations of racism and the revelation that Lenin lambasted the Socialist Party of America for calling for immigration restrictions on Chinese and Japanese workers, the comrades reply:

“We see no difficulty here. The call to restrict Third World immigration is not one we have ever supported. Any restrictions have to be non-discriminatory, and the rich immigrant should not be able to buy their way in.”

This is a classic case of facing both ways. Are they saying everybody should be let in or nobody? Everyone knows that it is precisely the citizens of the ‘third world’ - overwhelmingly working class - against whom controls are directed. There is no ‘threat’ from millions of business people or, as Brian Heron ludicrously suggested at the SLP conference, wealthy white South Africans.

In reality, comrades, your call to maintain immigration controls is anti-worker. And our call to scrap the lot - including for white South Africans - really is non-discriminatory.

If the working class is to become a truly international class the SLP’s present policy must be challenged vigorously.

Alan Fox