15.05.1997

Only millionaires need apply

Liberal campaigners for the rights of immigrants, not to mention Guardian journalists, were delighted earlier this week by the decision of home secretary Jack Straw to allow Jay Khadka to remain in Britain.

Khadka was brought to this country from Nepal in 1990 at the age of 14 by eccentric millionaire Richard Morley, who informally adopted him as his son after Khadka’s natural father died. Conservative home secretary Michael Howard had overruled a previous tribunal decision that the youth should be allowed to stay in Britain and ordered his deportation.

Claude Moraes, director of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, said:

“We are delighted. This is an important decision which shows that although Mr Straw is not going to be soft in this area he will take on board the advice of the Immigration Appeals Tribunal, which was effectively sidelined by Mr Howard.”

It is of course a small victory that one individual can live where he chooses and that he will not be separated from his adopted family. But this universal right, so blatantly flouted by the ruling class of every country, is not about to be granted by the new Labour government, as Moraes himself acknowledges. Straw has no intention of being “soft” on hunger-striking detainees or asylum seekers.

The British state policy to “severely restrict” the number of immigrants still holds. If the decision signifies anything, it is simply that perhaps an element of greater bourgeois rationality will now be introduced into immigration policy. In the words of a home office statement, “There is not the slightest danger that Mr Khadka would ever become a burden on public funds.”

The British state aims to control immigration in order to regulate its workforce. At times of high employment a pool of cheap labour is desirable and the immigration of poor workers is actively encouraged. However, when there is already a large pool of unemployed to draw on, an additional supply of cheap labour is not only “a burden on public [read ‘capitalist’] funds”, but a potentially destabilising social factor.

Bourgeois policy has little to do with the colour or race of immigrants. What determines it is their class. Millionaires may come and go as they please - whatever their colour, but workers must be tightly controlled. And The Guardian will not campaign for the rights of those particular ‘outsiders’, no matter what their family connections.

Alan Fox