Migrants and refugees are welcome here (Picture: Guy Smallman)
George Orwell wrote that “political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable”.
The mainstream media, and some “progressive” influencers, have done their best to prove him right.
The death toll of migrants in Sabta, one of the Spanish state’s colonies in Morocco, keeps rising.
The city is a European fortress in Africa. It is fortified with a six metre barbed wire fence, up to 3,000 soldiers with tanks and artillery and over 1,000 thugs from the paramilitary Guardia Civil and police.
This is a front line of “Fortress Europe”, the European Union’s (EU) network of barbed wire, border guards and war planes and ships that have turned the Mediterranean Sea into a mass grave.
The EU—and the Labour-type government of Spain—have handed over 500 million euros to the Moroccan regime to repress migrants.
The EU and Spanish bosses are happy to rely on Moroccan labour in the fields of Andalucia. Moroccan women—underpaid, passports withheld, living in shacks—pick strawberries in Huelva that British supermarkets buy.
In Almería, migrants work in the “sea of plastic”—30,000 square hectares of greenhouses—with little money or rights in a multibillion pound industry.
But Europe’s rulers still want to control who gets in and out—and are willing to see the state murder of migrants in the Mediterranean.
Their approach is rooted in how they manage capitalism’s contradictory relationship with immigration.
On the one hand, bosses rely on migrant labour. At the same time, they rely on racism and division to keep workers fighting among themselves. They seek to resolve that contradiction with false divisions between “good” and “bad”, “legal” and “illegal” or “skilled” and “unskilled” migrants.
The result is a division—and, no sooner do they target one group of migrants, the logic is to spread scapegoating against others.
But that’s not the story we heard—instead, the media and social media feeds were full of talk of an “invasion of Spain”.
Most of the left mounted an uncritical defence of the Spanish government. It did pass a decree to regularise undocumented migrants, after mobilisations by migrants themselves. But it still wants to reinforce Fortress Europe and sent troops to Sabta.
And some on the left argued that the Moroccan state had weaponised the border and therefore didn’t stand with the migrants.
The assault from the far right, and the dismal responses, show why socialists should take a principled stand against immigration controls.
Immigration controls are a way that those at the top of society divide and rule over the rest of us.
The aim is to foster a sense that “British people”, regardless of class, have a shared set of “national interests”.
From their introduction at the turn of the century, the British state’s immigration controls have always been racist.
Britain’s first immigration controls were brought in with the Aliens Act 1905, which targeted Jewish people fleeing pogroms in eastern Europe.
It spoke about how Jewish migrants were “likely to become a charge upon the rates”—in other words, a burden on public money.
Subsequent laws targeted black and brown people. In 1951, a Labour cabinet committee pointed out that immigration controls would “as a general rule, be more or less confined to coloured persons”.
And in 1978 Labour home secretary Merlin Rees said that controls were aimed at blocking “coloured” migrants.
Racial profiling is still tied up with immigration controls. In 2004 the Court of Appeal ruled that it was legal for British border guards at Prague Airport to turn away Roma people more than other Czech nationals.
A quick look at the history of the borders shows how they are tied to ruling classes trying to build up their authority.
Capitalism has always relied on immigration. As the system developed in Europe and North America in the 19th century, it drew mass numbers of people in major centres of profit-making.
During the Industrial Revolution, Britain’s cities relied on migration from the countryside, its Irish colony, Europe and further afield.
The US population was at least 90 percent migrant as it grew into a capitalist powerhouse.
As the ruling class relied on the movement of people, it didn’t push the idea of immigration controls.
But, as capitalism developed, it faced contradictory pressures. First, as Marx wrote, the “accumulation of wealth” under capitalism goes hand in hand with the accumulation of misery”.
The new metropolises had made a small minority rich. But workers were forced to live in a swelter of social problems—from housing shortages to diseases—that fuelled workers’ organising and fears of social rebellion.
What better way to divide workers than pushing the idea that a “dangerous”, “alien”, “other” was behind social problems?
Second, as capitalism developed, it required a more skilled and more educated workforce. This meant the state would have to intervene to provide basic education and social support, but it didn’t want to do so for all workers.
Joseph Chamberlain, a leading Liberal then Tory politician, warned, “We have in our midst a vast population more ignorant than the barbarians whom we affect to despise, more brutal than the savages whom we profess to convert, more miserable than the most wretched in other countries.”
At the same time, Chamberlain whipped up the idea that migrants were the ones harming working class people in Britain. “They come here and change the whole character of a district,” he wrote.
“British workmen have been driven by the fierce competition of famished men from trades which they previously followed.”
The introduction of immigration controls caused fierce debates on the left.
Revolutionary socialists, such as Vladimir Lenin, argued against immigration controls and chauvinism on the left. They understood that, if the workers were divided, they would never win change from below.
In Capitalism and Workers’ Immigration in 1913, he wrote, “There can be no doubt that dire poverty alone compels people to abandon their native land and that the capitalists exploit the immigrant workers in the most shameless manner.”
But Lenin argued that “modern migration of nations” had the potential to build the workers’ movement. He warned that it was the capitalists who “incite the workers of one nation against those of another in the endeavour to keep them disunited”.
The Comintern was a grouping of revolutionary socialist parties set up after the Russian Revolution of 1917. In 1922, it instructed the US, Canadian and Australian parties to wage a “vigorous campaign against laws that restrict immigration and explain to the proletarian masses of these countries that they too will suffer harm because of the race hatred stirred up by these laws”.
That’s the political tradition around immigration that Socialist Worker stands in today.
In 1968, Chris Harman, former editor of Socialist Worker, wrote an appeal for revolutionary socialists in Britain to unite.
It was a year of global revolt by workers, students and national liberation movements that showed the potential to change the world. But there were warning signs on the right too—in Britain, dockers and meat-packers in east London had struck in support of Enoch Powell’s racist Rivers of Blood speech against immigration.
The appeal called for unity around four points—including “uncompromising opposition to all forms of racism and immigration control.
We understood that, if socialists wanted to argue for working class unity, they had to be against immigration controls.
Most anti-racists support some form of immigration controls—and that should not be a barrier to working together in fighting racism and the far right.
But, as we fight alongside one another, we put the argument about opposition to all immigration controls.
This often means patiently taking on common sense arguments. For instance, it is not true that the world’s population would flock to Britain given half a chance, as per far right fantasies. People migrate in order to flee war and climate change but also to make a better life.
Migrants aren’t a drain on resources, but overwhelmingly part of the working class that creates the wealth in society. And there are plenty of resources to go around—just look at the wealth of billionaires!
As capitalism drives war, climate chaos and inequality, the refugee crisis will continue to be a major question.
The left cannot afford to get it wrong. Immigration controls never stop immigration—they only make life harder for migrants and keep our side divided.
The revolutionary socialist Leon Trotsky wrote about the “world of decaying capitalism” and refugees in the 1930s with echoes of today. “The question of admitting a hundred extra refugees becomes a major problem for such a world power as the United States,” he said.
“In an era of aviation, telegraph, telephone, radio, and television, travel from country to country is paralysed by passports and visas.
“Amid the vast expanses of land and the marvels of technology, capitalism has converted our planet into a foul prison.”
We want to break it open—and that requires winning working class unity so we’re strong enough to take on the billionaires and their system.
Dominion Society is building links with Restore Britain
Demos will be held across Britain
