Why we’re pushing back on all immigration controls

Where we stand for

It is the bosses, not the migrants, who drive down wages and are behind cuts to social services

Socialists want an end to border regimes and immigration controls that kill

It is taken for granted by politicians and the media that we need to control immigration.

Even many of those who oppose the cruelty and hypocrisy of anti-immigrant measures believe it is impossible not to call for some form of controls on immigration.

But immigration controls only exist to control the working class and spread racist divisions. They are a tool of our enemies – the bosses and the state.

Immigration controls also legitimize a very wrong and dangerous idea: that workers must compete with each other for a limited number of resources. The Tories and Labor are happy that ordinary people are taking their anger about the lack of housing, the deterioration of healthcare and prosperity, job insecurity and wages to the attention of immigrants.

It’s a phrase parroted even by those who claim to be on the left. But immigrants are not to blame. The system of raids, detention centers and deportations that hangs over migrants is an attack on all workers, no matter where they come from.

So is Britain at risk of becoming ‘full’? No.

Firstly, there is a golf course for every 37,000 people in Britain, but only less than 1 percent of the population plays golf. The courses take up as much space as all the homes currently occupy. In London, golf courses take up more space than the entire borough of Brent.

And according to the Local Government Association, there are well over a million vacant ‘homes’ in England alone. But this isn’t really about space.

Some of the world’s poorest countries have much lower population densities than Britain, while Monaco, with a much higher population density, is awash with wealthy people.

Second, a focus on numbers is a way to hide the human truths of migration and abuse. Wealth is distributed neither fairly nor rationally.

The level of available public services is also shifting. Do we give money to guns or health care? It is a choice that our ruling class makes. Of course we can’t let everyone in.

But why not? Workers have always moved around the world. As the world becomes more unequal and crisis-ridden, the pace of movement increases. People don’t wander the world on a whim. They don’t uproot all their roots, leave their families behind and travel thousands of miles because Britain is such an amazing place.

They are fleeing persecution or looking for work. Immigration has always ebbed and flowed depending on the availability of work.

The capitalist system covers the entire world. But it has not developed equally in all parts of the world. Sometimes one area is in a boom, while another is in a deep recession.

So workers have always been forced to move to where the demand for their labor was greatest. In the 19th century, immigrants left hardship and famine in Ireland to work on Britain’s booming industries.

Before the First World War there were no passports and virtually anyone could come to Britain. Yet people only moved when work was available.

In the 1930s there was virtually no immigration to Britain, yet there was mass unemployment. In the 1950s and 1960s, British ministers, including racists like Enoch Powell, actively recruited migrants from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent because there was a labor shortage here.

Migrations do not cause economic crises. More often than noticed, the opposite is the case. The bosses can move billions of pounds around the world at the touch of a button, and the poor are expected to stay put. Finally, it suits governments and employers to divide the labor force into ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’.

Despite the importance of immigration, governments everywhere still impose immigration restrictions that encourage racist scapegoating. The motive is divide and conquer.

They hope that playing the race card means that ordinary people will direct their anger and frustration at “foreigners” instead of focusing on the real enemy – the government and big business.

For socialists, the only possible policy is to oppose all laws restricting immigration and asylum.

This is the eleventh part of a series of columns discussing what we stand for, the Socialist Workers Party’s Statement of Principles, published every week in Socialist Worker (see page 12). For the full series go to tinyurl.com/WWSF2024