Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Our Own People

The BBC reports that in Belfast a Nigerian born man moving into a council house was greeted by unwelcoming banners that read ‘local housing for local people’.

The Socialist Party has never been afraid to take a minority position that is correct merely because it is unpopular with the working class at present. It has never pandered to the prejudices or jingoism of the working class. All capitalist politicians have indulged in attacks on immigrants and immigration for years as it is necessary for them to have a scapegoat to blame for the ills of the political system that we live under and the immigrant has always served as such a scapegoat. You will not find a Socialist Party member in that number. Our task is to educate all workers to realise the need to destroy capitalism and build socialism.The polarisation in British society over immigration creates opportunities for the socialist as it does for the right. Under capitalism many workers have a contradictory consciousness. They can move towards the left and the right. When workers shift to the left, ideas and prejudices about other groups of workers are increasingly challenged – but nothing is inevitable about this process. Socialists cannot afford to sit back and wait. Our case for socialism must be a proactive principled stand against racism calling for a strategy that unites all workers in their common interest.

 We know that in capitalist society the numbers of people coming into any country will be regulated by the number of jobs available in that country, and we know that overcrowding in that country – bad housing, hospital conditions, inadequate transport and the like – are caused not by the numbers of workers in that country but by a system of society which plans its priorities and makes its decisions in the interests of profit and a minority who benefit from that profit. So we know that immigration controls cannot possibly assist the workers already in that country. We also know that immigration controls create all kinds of hardship for workers and their families who want to come here.

‘I’m no racist ....but  I’m in favour of some sort of immigration control.’ How often we hear this?

For many and even for some on the Left there is a demand to have tighter border controls –  to prevent ‘British jobs’ being stolen by foreigners at a cost to the disadvantaged unemployed Briton. As soon as a trade unionist says ‘Keep them out’, as soon as he talks about ‘Our own people’ he or she has committed discrimination between one set of workers and another. Our people, therefore, cannot be defined by their place of birth, the place where they live, the language they talk or the colour of their skin. Our people are the plundered and the dispossessed all over the world who speak a multitude of languages and have many different coloured skins. The common factor of their exploitation binds them together far closer than the trivial differences of skin colour or language.

Unemployment occurs because there are too many workers competing for too few jobs. To admit foreign workers, in such a view, doesn’t make sense. Added to this argument, due to the increased supply of labour, wages in unskilled and low-skilled job sectors will fall, hitting the indigenous working class. Then there is the claim that because there are more people in the country it means extra demand for housing forces prices and rents even higher due to a shortage of available property. More pressure on the social and welfare services. We hear it said only too frequently. ‘Why house them  when we haven’t enough houses for our own people?’ ‘Why spend money on schooling for them, when even our own children don’t get enough schooling?’ ‘Why let them use our hospitals when the waiting times are already long enough...’ Capitalist politicians who continually deny the existence of a shortage in housing or schools, suddenly discover that there are not enough houses or schools, and use the statistics of their own shameful record to blame the immigrant. The politicians who blame the immigrants for the shortages in our society are exactly the people who are responsible for those shortages. Yet their arguments touch a sensitive nerve among white workers who are only too aware of the shortages around them. Are they true?

It seems obvious that if there’s a housing shortage, it will be made worse if more people come into the country looking for a place to live. In fact, the housing shortage has nothing to do with immigration. However much immigration there is, it will not make the slightest difference to the housing shortage. The worst-housed cities in the United Kingdom are Glasgow and Belfast. Yet the rate of immigration into both cities is lower than any other city in the United Kingdom. Indeed both cities have lost substantial numbers of their young workers through emigration. Obviously, the reasons for the housing shortage in those two cities have nothing to do with immigration. Who causes a housing shortage, then? The landlords and property developers and speculators who build houses only as long as they can make a healthy profit from them in rent. Immigrants are in no way the cause of the housing shortage. Like other workers, they are the victims of it, and in many cases they are the most cruelly-used victims.

If immigration is so central to the workings of capitalism, what is the logic for an increase in immigration controls? At times of economic boom, there are few or no restrictions on immigration. Indeed, governments actively encourage migration. The problems arise, however, when the economy goes into recession.

  Under capitalism workers are forced to compete for the scarce economic resources available to the working class. Too often, workers fight each other for the  crumbs the rich toss aside.The rich are happiest when the squabbling over the crumbs is the fiercest.

The idea that immigrants can only have a negative effect on wages and living standards is a common one. Nigel Harris in ‘The New Untouchables’ quotes research that argues that ‘modern econometrics cannot find a single shred of evidence that immigrants have an adverse impact on the earnings and job opportunities of natives of the United States’. And he gives the example of the Los Angeles economy which expanded in the 1970s, largely as the result of increased demand caused by legal and illegal immigration. Likewise the increase in immigration in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s did not lead to increased unemployment – rather the massive explosion in unemployment levels in the 1970s and beyond was caused by the boom-bust cycle of the capitalist system itself. Secondly, immigrants and refugees are not a drain on the social security system – in fact, as Harris shows, they contribute far more to the ‘system’ than they receive in return. Whether you look at Caribbean immigrants who came to Britain in the 1960s, few of which drew retirement pensions, or whether you take Mexican migrants to California, where a 1980 study found that less than 5 percent received any assistance from welfare services, and in all sectors, except education, they paid far more than they received – a net balance sheet shows that the ‘host’ nation gains far more than it gives in return. Furthermore, migration has another very favourable benefit for the ruling class in the ‘host’ country – namely that they don’t have to contribute to the cost of raising and educating the immigrant worker.

 It is the system of capitalist production that produces unemployment, homelessness, destitution and crumbling health services,  – not workers, be they ’indigenous’ or foreign. The bosses hope to keep the worst-off sections of workers fighting with each other over shrinking pieces of a small pie instead of uniting to fight for a decent life for all.

The rationale of immigration control is that such chauvinist legislation is founded on the nation state and the feverish competition in which that nation state is engaged. It splits and divides workers from their main objectives, and, in the long run, weakens their strength all over the world. It cannot be contemplated by a world socialist. The only possible attitude of members of the World Socialist Movement is opposition to immigration control. We have to reject all laws that divide the working class into legals and illegals. It is the height of treachery to our class and we would do well to remember that the working class stretches far beyond Britain’s borders. It is blatant racism, and opportunism to opt for a policy of blaming the immigrant for all British workers’ woes, even if this will strike a chord with the basest instincts of many workers.

The Socialist Party re-affirm the principle first put forward by Marx - that workers know no borders. Immigration and immigration controls are both intrinsic parts of the capitalist system. As such, effective opposition to immigration controls ultimately means challenging the very foundations of capitalism itself. We believe that the interests of the working class everywhere are the same and we pay more than mere lip-service to the idea of international brotherhood and solidarity. Working people have only two choices: either let the bosses play us off against each other until we hit bottom, or to unite and fight for decent wages and benefits for all.

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