06.02.1997

Immigration controls criminalise workers

Some 180 people are locked up in Rochester prison, Kent, detained by the Home Office without any trial or judicial process. Seventeen asylum seekers went on hunger strike on January 6, and a couple of them are near to death. Ironically, these people have fled death and torture in their own country, only to be treated like criminals by the British state and they are now facing death again.

The Rochester hunger strikers are from various countries - Nigeria, Russia, Romania, Algeria and Somalia. Some have been detained for up to two years, and their patience finally snapped. In a press statement, the detainees wrote:

“We have clearly noted all previous unsuccessful attempts to resolve our unlawful imprisonment without trial, hearing or process, which should allow us the right to a fair and prompt hearing. Many of us have already served two years or more. We are detained without charge or time limit”.

The vile Ann Widdecombe, recent convert to Catholicism, has maintained that the number of asylum seekers held in detention for any period of time is very limited. But this is not so. At any one time the number of asylum-seekers banged-up in prison is somewhere between 750 to 800 (about 1.5% of all claims). The Refugee Welfare Council estimates that some 6,000 to 10,000 asylum seekers are being detained for varying periods over a full 12 months. A lot of human misery.

Widdecombe has outraged liberal public opinion by insisting that the hunger strikers would not be force-fed and by defending their detention - ‘They’re not all whiter than white’, has been her uncompromising message. She has also refused to give details about most of the hunger strikers, inflaming outrage even more.

However, for communists this liberal outrage is shallow and hypocritical. What we are witnessing in Rochester is the logical consequence of immigration controls, not some dreadful ‘aberration’ or the result of some particularly spiteful vendetta by Widdecombe, nasty though she may be. Claude Moraes of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants is totally mistaken when he angrily stated: “The government is making arbitrary decisions, often at the stroke of the pen of an immigration official who does not like the look of somebody”.

The immigration official mentioned by Moraes is just doing his job - ie, keeping out all those poor non-Brits who would only be a drain on the British tax-payer. The immigration official, as an agent of the British state, “does not like the look” of economically ‘useless’ asylum-seekers and wants to send them back as soon as possible. Perfectly logical.

The Rochester scandal should surely scorch one of the great leftwing myths about immigration controls - that they are ‘racist’ and only directed against black people. Nonsense. If you are poor, a refugee, an asylum-seeker - out you go, regardless of ‘race’; if you are wealthy - ‘Have a nice day and stay for as long as you like’, whoever you are.

Yet Workers Power insists on maintaining this fiction, writing: “Workers and all anti-racists must demand the immediate release of all detainees held under our vicious racist immigration controls” (my emphasis, February). Does Workers Power then classify those asylum-seekers in Rochester who come from Russia, Romania or Algeria, as victims of racist victimisation? The ‘only’ thing the Rochester inmates have in common is the fact that they are not millionaires or financial whizz-kids - it has nothing to do with their ‘race’.

This makes it all regrettable, to put it very mildly, that it is the policy of the Socialist Labour Party to maintain immigration controls, albeit of a ‘non-racist’ nature of course, with Brian Heron arguing that they were necessary to keep out “white South Africans”. Would immigration controls, comrade Heron, also be necessary to keep out ‘white’ Russians or Romanians? Are ‘black’ millionaires OK, seeing how the SLP is committed to anti-racism?

For whatever reason, most of the revolutionary left - and the SLP - want to obscure or mystify the real purpose of immigration controls - ie, to maintain and reinforce national chauvinism and control the flow of cheap labour between separate nation-stares. If you want to prevent future ‘Rochesters’ occurring, fight against all immigration controls, whether they be ‘racist’, non-racist or ‘anti-racist’.

Paul Greenaway