10.01.2008

Anti-migrant repression and the John Garcia case

James Turley comments on asbos and the logic of immigration controls

It was one of those occasions where the sheer insanity that capitalism produces in its political culture was laid bare.

On January 7, the 20-year-old, Filipino-born, Anglesey-raised John Garcia was deported to the country of his birth. Garcia has been living on the Welsh island for 16 years. He speaks no Filipino. He does not have any close relatives left in that country either. Altogether, he is no better equipped to adapt to life in the Philippines than any other Welshman.

Garcia has a record of petty crimes, linked by The Independent (January 8) to the death of his Welsh stepfather two years ago. These eventually landed him one of Blair’s infamous anti-social behaviour orders. It is the violation of the terms of his asbo, coupled with his failure ever to apply for British citizenship, that led to the decision to deport him.

If we are feeling charitable, we may call this a ‘legal loophole’. But such a designation ignores its provenance, in the increasingly regimented and authoritarian political culture of neoliberal capitalism, and its key component: chauvinism and xenophobia, embodied in both the increasingly nauseating howls from the Daily Mail (which has so far been silent on Garcia’s case) and the immigration laws which the capitalist parties fall over each other to tighten further.

Migration

For communists, then, there are two factors which conspire to make this story the tragic yet emblematic tale it is: the story of the asbo, and the story of (to put it euphemistically) the ‘immigrant experience’.

Let us look at the second issue first. Capitalism, as is well-known to Marxists, finds itself in the teeth of serious contradiction here. On the one hand, past a certain stage of development (with the emergence of a world market and similar) it leans towards porous borders and absolute, inviolable freedom of movement ... for capital. Thus, there is a tendency towards breaking down the contiguous nation (and multinational, etc) states into which the world’s population is divided.

On the other, capitalism has specific and often idiosyncratic requirements for the working class. Its first move, detailed in the famous chapters of Capital on primitive accumulation, is to ‘free’ the workforce - sever it from any ‘inconvenient’ ties to the land, to the old ruling class, to the means of production. In one motion, the worker is freed from direct, politically institutionalised servitude to feudal masters and also rendered ‘free’ of means of production in the same way that diet lemonade is ‘free’ of sugar.

To an extent, the second sort of ‘freedom’ acts as an efficient guarantee against the workers making much use of the first. But even in ideal conditions it is not long before the capitalist class is forced to wield state power to discipline the working class. In most capitalist countries, the dust is barely settled on the revolutionary upheavals that seal bourgeois power before the police break the first strikes.

Capitalism needs to split the workers, to circumvent their natural unity as effectively as possible. If the workers are divided, their ability to engage in class struggle is weakened; capitalism can continue more easily. There is no greater objective obstacle to working class unity than the parcelling of the world into different states. The recent trend towards ‘outsourcing’ (and its use as a bogeyman by neoliberal ideologues of the traditionally social democratic parties) is only the most obvious example of the use of borders to split the proletariat and force it into a self-destructive ‘race to the bottom’. Thus, the bourgeoisie also has an objective interest in maintaining this system of states - and indeed, in spite of fashionable contemporary theories to the contrary, the system of states has prevailed.

Unfortunately for the bourgeoisie, it is - of course - the very same borders which they try simultaneously to break down and reinforce. The result is the worst of all possible worlds for the vast majority of the people:

1. global disparities in wealth continue;

2. free movement of people - difficult enough even in zones such as the European Union, where formally it is allowed - is restricted;

3. migrants - particularly illegal migrants - begin to form a ‘parallel’ labour force in their new homes, and are exploited to even greater extremes;

4. a virulent rightwing populism, formally associated with Enoch Powell, becomes the hegemonic political agent of the bourgeoisie, using anti-immigrant rhetoric to direct popular dissent away from the system - thus reinforcing points 2 and 3 above.

Apart from this, other aspects of capitalism’s logic - the tendency towards catastrophic armed conflicts and consequent demographic distortions, for example - periodically produce great waves of migration.

At the sharp end of all this are migrants of all types, whose condition is a particularly concentrated form of the predicament of the proletariat as a whole. In Britain, the capitalist press is full of poisonous demands for the deportation of ‘bogus’ asylum-seekers, and - of course - ‘foreign’ criminals, even if they barely fit the definition of ‘foreign’ at all, as in the case of Garcia.

His case is not the first of this kind - in fact, it is eerily similar to that of Learco Chindamo, the man convicted of the fatal schoolyard stabbing of headteacher Philip Lawrence in 1996. He had been born in Italy, but had lived in England since the age of six. An asylum and immigration tribunal ruled last August, to a great hue and cry from the bloodthirsty rightwing press, that deporting Chindamo upon his release would violate ‘human rights’ laws. (This, if nothing else, bodes well for Garcia should he follow through with his promise to appeal the decision.)

Communists are uninterested in technical wrangling over exactly who can and who cannot be deported legitimately. Instead, we call for open borders, and the free movement of people across the world. The attempt to legally differentiate between ‘citizens’ and ‘foreigners’ is what is illegitimate - from the perspective of the internationalism so essential to the socialist project.

We disdain those like the Socialist Workers Party who, in pursuit of cheap demagogic points and short-term electoral success, opportunistically drop the demand for open borders. Quite apart from anything else, this is bad opportunism - immigration, having stewed for years, is finally boiling over into a key site of resistance to global capital. Migrant workers, as the most exploited and oppressed layers of the proletariat, have already launched nationwide protests and movements in the USA, which brought George Bush close to declaring an amnesty for all ‘illegals’. Marxists should be leading the charge against backwardness on this issue, not sheepishly keeping quiet. It is a particularly crippling short-sightedness that does anything else.

Asbos

Just as the global system of states regulates and regiments the organisation of whole populations, so the apparatuses of state repression bear the brunt of doing the same on the national level. As capitalism has become cemented in its neoliberal phase and increasingly exploitative, it has necessarily shifted towards a greater reliance on direct state repression.

In Britain, this trend has become exemplified by the anti-social behaviour order. The asbo was conceived as a specifically repressive way of dealing with what has become derisively known as ‘yob culture’ - that is, the hundreds and thousands of severely disillusioned young people who form their own social culture around petty crime and violent braggadocio. To the extent that this is more of a ‘problem’ than it has been in the past, we can fairly easily lay the blame on the cataclysmic effects of the Thatcherite turn of British capitalism and its attendant mass unemployment and destruction of entire communities (most famously, the coal villages).

Once again, the logic of capitalism drives it into difficulties - once again, the only ‘solution’ is repression.

First introduced by the Blair government in 1998, but considerably strengthened in 2003, asbos can be slapped on anyone proven ‘guilty’ of ill-defined ‘anti-social’ activities; hearsay is admissible as evidence to this end. If this is proven, then the defendant can be banned from any legal activity whatsoever, if such activity is deemed to further the proscribed ‘anti-social’ activity. Thus, asbos have been issued banning their victims from using the word ‘grass’, wearing a single golf glove and visiting geographical areas up to and including the entire city of Birmingham. A teenager was banned from the use of his own front door. Asbos have also been used to stop the organisation of rave parties - it is not too much of a stretch to see them similarly employed against ‘anti-social’ political gatherings.

It is not clear exactly how Garcia breached his asbo, nor precisely how this makes him dangerous to Britons. An attempt to prove that he is less of a threat to Filipinos is, of course, not even suggested.

This is not a minor issue. The idea that a British asbo-breacher is less of a threat than a migrant asbo-breacher is self-evidently preposterous - so why not simply fly British criminals out of the country? The fact is, there is an obvious xenophobic logic to this incident, as well as the general legal-technical distinction between foreigners and native Britons - of a piece with the endless cycle of public figures demanding a return to ‘Britishness’.

Marxists must take up the fight both against reactionary nationalism and the constant reinforcement of the repressive state apparatuses. If it is now too late for John Garcia, it will one day be too late for all of us.