Why revolutionary socialists argue for open borders

Migrants can get organised to defend their rights (Pic: kurmanstaff on flickr)

Hostility to immigration, once confined to the far right, now dominates political debate. Migrants are banned, detained and deported. Refugees are criminalised.

Many on the left reject racism but wrongly argue for the need for some immigration controls. They are seen as necessary to protect public services and stop the bosses using migrant workers to drive wages down.

In her 2018 article The Left Case Against Open Borders, Angela Nagle argues that socialists must not support immigration. Such demands are “the politics of big business”, Nagle writes.

“By providing inadvertent cover for the ruling elite’s business interests, the left risks a significant existential crisis, as more and more ordinary people defect to far-right parties.”

The idea that socialists must back immigration controls to protect British workers and to undercut the right seems like common sense.

So Jeremy Corbyn supports the “reasonable management” of immigration. But controls don’t just create convenient scapegoats. They frame competition between workers as the cause of low wages—not exploitation by the bosses.

And they legitimise the right of the state to decide which people are useful.

Mass migration is a product of capitalism’s need for labour, war, global inequality and climate crisis.

Yet those responsible, the ruling class, can move themselves and their money freely around the world. Workers should have the same freedom.

Karl Marx rejected the idea that controlling immigration would protect workers’ living standards.

When Irish migrant workers were used to undercut English workers’ wages, Marx opposed those trying to keep Irish workers out. Instead, he wrote that, “if the working class wishes to continue its struggle with some chance of success, the national organisations must become international.”

Marx helped to set up the First International precisely to organise solidarity across national borders. At the end of the 19th century, a new socialist organisation, the Second International, debated immigration controls.

At the 1907 congress, a delegate from the Australian Labour Party argued, “The capitalists endeavour to bring in more Asian workers to depress wages…The Australian Labour Party therefore wishes to keep out certain workers who are not expected to adopt the conditions of whites. This means the Asians.”

These racist ideas were fiercely opposed. Delegates from the American Socialist Labour Party argued that a limit on Chinese and Japanese workers was, “Completely un-socialist”.

“Racial hatred in America blinded the workers and incited them to violence. The Japanese and Chinese could be organised very well”. The congress decided that all immigrations controls were “reactionary by nature”. A few years later in 1913, Vladimir Lenin wrote an article, Capitalism and Worker’s Immigration, in which he argued against all controls.

“There can be no doubt that dire poverty alone compels people to abandon their native land”, Lenin wrote, “and that the capitalists exploit the immigrant workers in the most shameless manner.”

But Lenin argued that the “modern migration of nations” could strengthen, not weaken, the workers’ movement.

The Second International collapsed in 1914 and the revolutionary Third International was set up three years later. It instructed Communist parties in Western Europe and the United States 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.”

The revolutionary socialist tradition opposes all immigration controls.

Immigration controls are profoundly harmful for migrants forced to seek safety or a better life.

But they also do great harm to workers in host countries by creating racist divisions and deflecting anger from the bosses. We all benefit from the free movement of people.