12.02.2004

Respecting immigration

Morecambe Bay: Eddie Ford argues the case for the free movement of peoples and exposes the SWP's crass opportunism

Life is cheap. Or, as the gruesome deaths last week of 19 Chinese cockle-gatherers in Morecambe Bay showed, at least open to negotiation on the basis of a realistic, profit-based assessment. The evening following the tragedy - as the emergency services were still looking for survivors - another wave of immigrant workers arrived at the treacherous Lancashire sands to harvest the highly-prized mollusc.

When the news of the deaths broke, there was an avalanche of high-octane outrage and tortuous hand-wringing. How could this have happened? What is to be done? We were subjected to a well-rehearsed rage over “snakeheads”, “human traffickers”, “gangsters” and all the other sinister forces deemed to be responsible for the Morecambe deaths. Naturally, the media and the establishment are whiter than white - how could you suggest otherwise? - and only want to punish the criminals responsible for this outrage.

So, for instance, home office minister Beverley Hughes proclaimed: “It demonstrates yet again what can happen to people when the highly organised criminal elements that are behind the trafficking in the first place - and here with mostly Chinese people we are talking about the ruthless gangs, the snake-heads and so on who operate globally and transport people for labour exploitation - at what great risk people put themselves.” Such sentiments were amplified in the media, especially the tabloids, which like to do nothing better than feed their readers with lurid stories.

Already there is a private member’s bill going through parliament. Moved by Labour backbencher Jim Sheridan, the Gangmasters Licensing Bill is due for a second reading on February 27 and is ostensibly designed to spearhead a crackdown on ‘the snakeheads’. Law and order will be restored, we are promised.

Of course we have been here before. Almost four years ago we had similar headlines when 58 Chinese illegal migrants dies from suffocation while being transported into Britain from Belgium in a truck which was meant to be delivering tomatoes. The truck was sealed in order to prevent the immigration officials from finding the occupants.

Just like now, there was a torrent of hypocrisy. After all, if any of those 58 Chinese ‘illegals’ had been detected, they would have been arrested, detained for months and then sent back to China - to god knows what fate. No wonder they did not want to be caught - just like many of the survivors on Morecambe Bay, who, having watched so many of their compatriots drown, still tried desperately to avoid the attentions of their ‘rescuers’. Talk about being caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

When we look at Morecambe Bay we are just seeing the tip of a very dirty, nauseating iceberg of illegality and super-exploitation. Every year thousands of ‘illegals’ like the cockle-gatherers are smuggled into Britain and the other developed western countries by unscrupulous profiteers and criminals. The vast majority of these workers are ‘economic refugees’ - a term which, when used by the tabloids and many mainstream politicians, nearly always denotes disapproval, if not explicit hostility. The only ‘crime’ for which these migrant workers are guilty of is the one of trying to escape poverty of their country of origin in the search for a better life - and it has to be pointed out that a significant proportion of Chinese ‘illegals’ come from the Fujian province in south-eastern China, which is scarred by extreme poverty, if not downright squalor.

Yes, Norman Tebbit, where are you now? These enterprising workers did not just get on their bikes. They got on trains, trucks, boats, etc - and paid a fortune for the ‘privilege’.

Given these conditions of illegality and economic desperation, the ‘snakeheads’ can make a killing - just like so many of their drugs-running counterparts. It has been widely reported that the Chinese cocklers had to fork out something in the region of £20,000 to be smuggled into the UK. This is a vast sum and naturally such impoverished migrants cannot stump up the cash up front, so usually the only way to repay their ‘benefactor’ is through a cruel regime of indentured servitude - becoming waiters, dishwashers, laundry workers, cockle-gatherers, etc. Often extortionate rates of interest are levied and added to the original loan - which means that you could end up even worse off than you were in your country of origin. And of course, should you default on your debt, the ‘snakeheads’ always have the option of resorting to blackmail, threats and outright violence - not only against the migrants themselves, but also against the families they have left behind.

On discovering what life was and is like for the immigrant cockle-gatherers, very many people - including Morecambe residents themselves - were genuinely appalled. Descriptions of the chronically overcrowded, Dickensian conditions endured by the immigrants made for particularly grim and depressing reading - dozens stuffed into a single room. However, this is common practice. ‘Snakehead’ properties are often specially adapted, with bunks put in every room and the workers made to sleep in continual, rolling eight-hour shifts. Many of these properties do not have hot water or electricity. For this splendid service, it is not uncommon for the unfortunate residents to be charged between £20-30 a week - or, more likely, just have it added to their already spiralling debt.

But where there’s muck there’s brass, as they say. Cockle-gathering can be a very lucrative business indeed. It is estimated that in total Morecambe generates some £8 million a year in profits from cockle-gathering. It is possible to collect 400 tonnes of cockles in intensive nine-day sessions - the result being that the cockle gangmasters end up pocketing tens of thousands of pounds. No wonder there are fierce and vicious ‘cockle wars’ - as a local journalist reported, a concrete block had been thrown through one of the windows of a ‘snakehead’ house, and on at least two occasions workers’ vans have been set alight by rival gangs.

When times are lean, one cockle gang will launch ‘raids’ on another gang’s patch, making off with as many of their cockle bags as they can manage. You will also not be astonished to learn that many of the processing plant bosses do not care where the cockles they use come from - or how they were obtained.

The Guardian remarked “how discreet this part of the economy has contrived to remain” (February 7). When tragic events like Morecambe happen, a window suddenly opens and we get a glimpse of the so-called ‘hidden economy’. In their ruthless and relentless drive to reduce consumer prices, today’s food, manufacturing and agricultural sectors are heavily dependent on hidden armies of cheap migrant labour - both illegal and legal. Leek and onion-pickers in Worcestershire. Daffodil-cutters in Cornwall. Carrot-packers in Lincolnshire. Factory workers in Devon. Fruit-pickers in Kent. Etc. For the new ‘flexible ordering system’, you need a ‘flexible’ labour force - in extremis. In order to turn labour on and off like a tap, it stands to reason, you must have a surplus. If these workers are routinely exposed to danger, so be it.

It is important to fully understand the scale and extent of this ‘hidden’ work force. It is estimated that more than 60% of workers in London’s catering trade are illegal immigrants, and a government white paper estimated that two years ago, overall, there are “hundreds of thousands” of such workers in Britain as a whole. Naturally, these workers are open to exploitation at below minimum wage rates and employers use ‘illegals’ to undercut the wages and condition of ‘legals’.

The novelist, Margaret Drabble, recently commented: “On a brief sleepless visit to Stanford University, California, recently I couldn’t help but notice that the night-time population servicing the campus was wholly Hispanic, the daytime population of students and academics almost wholly white. When I commented on this, my remarks were met with denial. I can’t get worked up about the wickedness of the gang leaders: there must be something more deeply wrong with societies that live happily with unseen exploitation and poverty until it is put under a spotlight” (letter to The Guardian February 9).

Given all this, it is absolutely shameful that the Socialist Workers Party, backed up by their hangers-on, saw to it that the January 25 conference to launch Respect rejected a call aimed at legalising all migrant workers. In so doing the SWP turned its back on its own history and the People before profit manifesto on which we all stood in the 2001 elections. The SWP took the lead in voting down the amendment to Respect’s founding declaration, moved by the Democracy Platform of the Socialist Alliance, which simply stated: “The unity coalition fights for freedom of movement, open borders and an end to immigration laws.”

The excuse? If the amendment had been passed, “We’ll have to face down arguments from people who don’t understand” (in the now justly notorious words of the SWP’s Elaine Heffernan). This is depressingly reminiscent of the sentiments expressed over the years by comrades from the Militant Tendency and now the Socialist Party in England and Wales - while of course we are for open borders, workers are not so advanced, so best not to mention it at all. Not in front of the children, you see - it might upset them. In other words, such comrades are committed in the abstract to open borders, but in the concrete are unwilling to swim upstream and challenge the bourgeois consensus. Not many votes in it - so they coldly calculate.

It would be nice to think that such opportunism has been shamed and rebuffed - or at least dented - by the images that have come so recently from Morecambe Bay. But it would not be very wise to bet on it. On the other hand, real socialists and communists fight for open borders in the here and now. Why? Because it is necessary.

Capital, money and goods can move freely around the world - yet workers cannot. This is the point that communists hammer home again and again: what gives international capital the right to determine where we can and cannot live? Why should a DVD player or a Microsoft PC have more rights than a worker? The world should belong to humanity as a whole, not to the ruling class of each state. Capital itself switches investment from one country to another, dislocating millions and forcing millions of others out of work.

Yet those cast on the scrap heap as a result of this (legal) activity are expected to stay and rot - whether in miserable Chinese villages or grim eastern European cities or towns. It is they who become illegal if they try and escape their predicament or, as in Lancashire, end up losing their lives so the bosses - national or ‘foreign’, big or small - can increase their profit margins.

When we examine the outpouring of anguish and liberalistic angst provoked by the wretched fate of the 19 Chinese cocklers, it is sometimes difficult - though certainly not impossible - to find the words to describe the despicable hypocrisy of those who, on the one hand, condemn the ‘snakeheads’ for taking advantage of desperate people, while, on the other hand, are quite happy to pitilessly add to their plight by incarcerating them in detention centres and in general spend great time in devising, planning and implementing laws and measures which can only ensure that such tragedies will happen over and over again.

It is not as if charging people for transporting them from one country to another is not under normal circumstances a perfectly lawful activity. As in so many other cases under capitalism (like drugs, for example), the very illegality itself produces ‘criminal’ activity which would not otherwise pose a problem. If the state did not insist on maintaining its inhuman border controls, there would, needless to say, be no illegal trafficking (ditto with drugs).

For communists, immigration is a progressive phenomenon which breaks down national differences and national prejudices. It unites British workers with the world working class. And, unlike the SWP, SPEW and the rest, we are not afraid to tell the working class this essential fact.