Playing the Race Card

Posted on March 27, 2005

The two main parties are demonstrating, yet again, that immigration controls are explicable only by racism.

The Conservatives say they intend to adopt quotas on immigrants, including asylum seekers. When Blair promised to halve the number of asylum applications, this amounted to much the same thing. The difference is that Labour hopes to deter and physically prevent refugees from travelling to Britain by yet more brutally repressive measures, whereas the Conservatives refer vaguely to ‘24-hour security at ports’, and their quota policies, even supposing they were practical, would mean breaking several international treaties. In both cases, the intended result is that people would have even less hope than they now do, under the arbitrarily unjust refusal system, of finding safety in Britain.

All this is happening when United Nations population projections show that European countries have ageing and/or declining populations, and need more workers. Labour is shamelessly poaching skilled people whose education has been paid for elsewhere, promising to do so even more blatantly in ‘Making migration work for Britain’ (published 7 February 2005). But it has also acknowledged there are labour shortages in ‘unskilled’ sectors. Apart from increasing the age of retirement, and forcing more women and sick people into the labour market, the obvious solution is immigration.

The government talks about ‘managed’ immigration. Some say this does imply an economic rationale for immigration controls. Controls create extreme vulnerability even for immigrants with permission to work (since permission depends on their employers). This can potentially undermine the position of other workers, and so promote the government’s project of ‘flexibilisation’ (or precarisation). But the government also regularly promises to ‘crack down’ on ‘illegal’ workers, the ultimately exploitable workforce. Employers lobby for freer access to cheap labour from abroad.

The real arguments for immigration controls, throughout their short history, have not been economic self-interest, but racism. Their introduction in Britain (in 1905 against ‘aliens’ and in 1962 against Commonwealth citizens) followed agitation from far right and racist organisations. The shameful antics of Labour and the Conservatives are now, they tell us, in response to pressures from the BNP and UKIP. Both appear to believe that votes are to be won from pandering to racism, and thus feeding and nurturing it.

It would be better to tell the truth: that immigrants are good for the British economy, that asylum seekers are mostly highly educated at others’ expense, that there are rather few of them (compared to both the existing population and returning British people and other white immigrants), that immigrants make a large net contribution to public finances, that the financial ‘burden’ of asylum seekers arises solely from the attempt to keep them out, that the vast majority of asylum seekers are from countries where there has been recent military intervention by the West (in particular from Iraq immediately before the invasion), that others are overwhelmingly from countries whose repressive regimes are armed and supported by the West, that people do not uproot themselves from their families and cultures unless they are exceptionally desperate or exceptionally enterprising, that the repression of migrants and refugees threatens the human rights not just of them but of all of us, that British ‘identity’ is impossible to define, and so on.

But the real point is that no amount of economic or other sorts of national self-interest, and none of the rather small reductions in the numbers of immigrants that the parties claim they will achieve, can justify the suffering that is imposed on innocent people in the name of ‘controls’. It is time for the right to free movement, together with equal rights for all residents, and the right for people to decide for themselves where they wish to live and work, to be asserted as basic human rights.

Note: On April 2 2005 there will be a second European day of action on migrants and refugees, whose main slogan will be the right to freedom of movement and settlement (www.barbedwirebritain.org.uk; www.noborder.org).

Teresa Hayter is the author of Open Borders: the Case against Immigration Controls (Pluto Press, 2nd edition 2004), and is one of the authors of the No-one Is Illegal manifesto (www.noii.org.uk).  Published in Red Pepper, March 2005.

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