Post
by tr0tsky » Wed Feb 03, 2010 1:39 pm
Sorry for the long post, can't link to it because the article is protected, but:
Dr Teresa Hayter, Oxford University
The last Labour government treated refugees and migrants with even
greater harshness than its predecessors. It more than doubled the
number of asylum seekers locked up in prisons and detention centres
at any one time, and announced its intention to more than double
them again, to 4000 by 2002. It denied welfare benefits to all asylum
seekers, rather than just some of them, as the Tories did, and
introduced the infamous policy of dispersal to one ‘no choice’ offer of
accommmodation, frequently sub-standard and away from friends,
lawyers, even families, and the possibility of employment. It tightened
the measures intended to close off legal means of escape for
refugees, and thus force them into reliance on so-called ‘people
traffickers’. And it engaged in shameful competition with the Tories
to prove who was ‘toughest’ on ‘bogus asylum seekers’ and ‘illegal
immigrants’, and thus stirred up most racism.
The intention of these policies is to stop people coming here to
exercise their right to claim asylum. As the government openly
admits, or in fact claims, its ‘toughness’ is intended to reduce the
numbers of what it, usually falsely, says are unfounded asylum applications.
It is casting around for ever more brutal ways of deterring
political refugees, as well as others who may be seeking work, or
actually making it impossible for them to leave their countries at all.
This implies that it is not much good arguing for better treatment of
refugees unless one also argues that immigration controls are unnecessary,
and should be abolished.
In addition, the escalating repression and abuses of human rights
involved in the attempt to keep people out of Britain have not
prevented a rise in the number of people fleeing wars and persecution
(although the proportions coming to Britain remain very small).
What will the government do next? Will it send the army to Calais,
as one commentator suggested? Will it lock up all asylum seekers
indefinitely? Immigration controls are a twentieth century phenomenon. At Davos, Blair talked about an ‘open world’, by which he
meant an open world for goods and capital but a closed one for people.
Yet the globalisation of the economy creates both opportunities and
needs for people to migrate. The issue is how much more suffering
will be imposed on innocent people before immigration controls are
finally abandoned—as unworkable, too expensive in suffering and
money, too incompatible with the ideals of freedom and justice.
There is also, as it happens, much evidence that free migration is
in the interests of both the working class and employers in the rich
countries, as well as of the migrants themselves and the countries they
come from. Migrants make a small dent in the current extreme
international polarisation of wealth; their remittances (the money they
save and send back) exceed total official foreign aid. Rich countries
benefit from the skills, enterprise and good health of migrants
(provided they are allowed to work). The government’s current plans
to cherry-pick skilled refugees and migrants demonstrate, yet again,
that immigration is in the self-interest of the countries the migrants
go to; and, as economists point out, there are needs for unskilled as
well as skilled workers, in particular as European populations age and
decline. Immigration controls are explicable only by racism, which,
far from alleviating, they legitimate and feed.
I feel ambivalent about arguing that, if immigration controls were
abolished, the number of people migrating would not be huge,
because I don’t wish to imply that people should not migrate if they
wish to. All the same we should recognise that talk of floods and so on
is scaremongering. Most people do not wish to uproot themselves
from their families and friends and cultures. People flee in desperation
from wars and repression or, if they are exceptionally enterprising,
they migrate to work. Most could not do so even if there were fewer
barriers. In the 1950s, when there were no controls on Commonwealth
citizens, immigration correlated with the rise and fall in job
vacancies. If people could come and go freely, they would probably
do so.
But it is also true that many people don’t migrate because they
wish to, but because they are forced to by wars and political
repression. If the governments of the rich countries object to migration,
they ought to recognise their own part in causing it. Most of the
recent increase in asylum applications is the result of the break-up of
Yugoslavia, for which the West bears at least some responsibility. The
West should stop using the World Bank and the IMF to enforce
privatisation and extract payments on an unjust debt. It should stop
propping up right-wing repressive regimes. It should not supply arms
to participants in civil wars, or at all. I would argue for the opposite
of the current situation. The world should be open for people, but
investment should be planned and controlled, to create more justice
and less inequality.
It is doubtless too much to expect that the new Labour government
will take any stand of principle on these issues. Nevertheless
resistance forced the abandonment of apartheid, whose attempt to
preserve white privilege has parallels with immigration controls.
We should campaign for the abandonment of immigration controls as
well.
Babylon Rocket.
