20.06.2002

End all immigration controls

With one eye on the recent electoral success of the BNP in Britain and Le Pen's Front National in France, governments across Europe are looking to impose even tighter restrictions on immigration. Home secretary David Blunkett plans to prevent refugees from remaining in the country while awaiting an appeal after their application for asylum has been turned down. An unashamed attempt at invalidating appeals before they have even been heard. It also plans to discontinue the education of asylum-seekers' children in mainstream schools and educate them instead in the so-called 'accommodation centres'. This of course would prevent them from integrating into the community, not to mention properly learning the language. Do these measures, along with dispersion, top-down assimilation, etc, amount to racism? To argue that is to misunderstand their purpose and, in the last analysis, to hold back the building of a powerful fightback for immigrant rights. Capital's interest in controlling the movement of people has little to do with race or ethnicity, but is dictated by the requirements of the labour market. Business men and women are allowed to travel freely across borders regardless of race. Teachers, doctors and nurses are encouraged to come from across the world to live and work in the UK where there is a shortage of existing British citizens going into these professions. Last week, at the same time as the government was negotiating with the French over the shutting down of the Sangatte refugee camp, it was announcing steps to encourage people to come to Britain and work for the Metropolitan Police in order to meet ethnicity quotas. British capital at present largely needs skilled workers, with a good command of English, not poor, unskilled workers - whether from the Middle East or eastern Europe. However, there are some industries for whom unskilled casual or seasonal workers are always in demand. For these industries - catering, agriculture and some sectors of the building trade, for example - illegal immigrant workers are employed in large numbers. Over 60% of workers in London's hotels and restaurants are thought to be 'illegals'. Employers use their lack of legal status to pay sub-minimum wages and deny basic rights, undercutting legal workers in the process. Thus the government must strike a careful balance. Cracking down too hard would have a detrimental - not to say devastating - effect on the competitiveness of key sectors of the economy. Immigration controls exist in order to further the interests of capital with no concern for humanity. They do not benefit workers in this country or anywhere else in world. But, in order to retain this useful device for controlling the flow of labour and imposing discipline on workers, the ruling class must persuade us that the free movement of people across borders would be a disaster. Thus refugees, asylum-seekers and immigrants in general are blamed for poor housing, the overstretched NHS, unemployment and so on - conveniently diverting attention from years of underfunding, privatisation, public spending cuts and all the other policies that continue to disadvantage the working class. As a result, public attitudes towards immigration are characterised by misconceptions that the media and politicians cynically perpetuate. According to a recent Mori poll, the majority of adults in Britain believe that Britain accommodates a quarter of the world's asylum-seekers (the true figure is less than two percent). Another study found that most people thought that immigrants have "very little" to offer British culture. This was most pronounced among 15 to 18-year-olds. Unfortunately the Socialist Workers Party's favourite slogan, 'Asylum-seekers welcome here', is far from an accurate reflection of reality. Hostility towards immigration amongst workers thrives on poverty and deprivation. This is accentuated by official tick-box anti-racism, where workers are encouraged to categorise themselves according to ethnicity and and often have to barter between themselves for scarce resources. To tell working class families who have to wait years for poor-quality council housing in Britain's inner cities to "welcome" asylum-seekers is inadequate, to say the least. We must place the blame for the appalling state of public services, lack of facilities and unemployment firmly where it lies - on the cost-cutting, neo-liberal, privatising governments from Thatcher to Blair. But we must also expose their false, divisive anti-racism. It is not racism that lies behind the state's clampdown on immigration. Nor is public hostility towards immigrants primarily caused by racial prejudice. The main culprit is the official ideology of national chauvinism which seeks to unite us passively, black and white, behind the 'national interest' in the face of the latest external 'threat'. We cannot defeat this ideology by opposing only 'racist immigration controls' - that merely reinforces nationalism. Communists are internationalists. Capitalism is a global system which exploits workers worldwide. In order to defeat it the working class must unite across borders. We view immigration as progressive, helping to break down the national differences, prejudices and chauvinism which divide our class. We are for open borders, the free movement of people and an end to all immigration controls. If capital is free to move across borders, then so too must be the workers it exploits. We are for the unity of the working class across the world and fight anything which acts to divide our class. Sarah McDonald