Red Pepper » Immigration

Mythbuster: Immigration – the real story

admin — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 10:00:50 +0000

MYTH: The flood of immigrants is unsustainable
The movement of migrants is not just one way. As people arrive, others are leaving. This gives us net migration figures which for most years since 1840 have actually been negative. Geographer Danny Dorling notes that before the economic crash, the number of migrants coming to Britain was roughly balanced with the number leaving. In total, ‘there are 10-14 million people who live here that were not born here – and there are 10-14 million people born here who no longer live here’. So not really a flood at all.
It is also worth viewing Britain’s migration figures in a global context. This shows that our experience of international migration is not at all remarkable, growing in line with world migration. Migrants make up 9 per cent of the population, which is the average for Europe. Britain has a smaller proportion of migrants and lower rates of net immigration than the US, Canada, Australia and several large European countries.
The number of asylum seekers that Britain receives is again average for Europe, ranking 14th out of 27 when looking at asylum seekers per head of population. The UK receives fewer asylum applications than France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and Belgium. As of January 2012, the UN estimated that the number of refugees, pending asylum cases and stateless persons made up just 0.33 per cent of the population. In fact, it is the so-called developing world that receives the majority of refugees, with 80 per cent being hosted there.
The past decade has seen higher net numbers of migrants. However, rather than being ‘unsustainable’, this migration is actually vital for the functioning of our society. Danny Dorling argues that the real problem is actually too little immigration. With a rising elderly population and decreasing fertility rates, we will depend even more than we already do on immigration to provide tax revenues and services.
MYTH: Britain is a soft touch
Successive governments have been making the asylum process increasingly tough for asylum seekers despite their duty under the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees to provide protection to those fleeing persecution. The system is particularly hostile to women as UK Border Agency officials often lack an understanding of gender-based persecution.
A recent report by Oxfam stated that all aspects of the asylum system are flawed and that the entire process should be urgently reviewed. The fast-track system does not give the time needed for asylum seekers to make their case; this and many other issues with the asylum determination process means that often people are wrongly denied asylum. With devastating cuts to legal aid, this situation will only get worse as asylum seekers cannot access the legal advice and support that they need.
When an asylum seeker reaches the UK they are photographed and have their fingerprints taken, they are security checked and issued with an ID card. They are then required to report at regular intervals to immigration reporting centres. They are issued with a letter that informs them that they can be detained at any point during the asylum process.
EU citizens have free movement across Europe under European law – although home secretary Theresa May has been drawing up plans to curb intra-EU migration. But the rules governing the entry of non-EU immigrants are incredibly stringent, with a points-based system that requires people to show documents such as their bank statements and exam results.
It is during detention where, far from being a ‘soft touch’, the reality for immigrants and asylum seekers is often a hard fist. Medical Justice has documented hundreds of cases of abuse of detainees at the hands of security guards during detention and deportation. Each year, 1,000 children are detained with their parents.
MYTH: They come here for our generous welfare system
Research commissioned by the Home Office concluded that there was no evidence to suggest that asylum seekers had detailed knowledge about the UK benefits system. When someone is fleeing from persecution, they often do not know where their end destination will be; some may choose the UK because they have friends and family here.
Asylum seekers anyway do not have access to the mainstream benefit system. Rather, they have a parallel system of welfare support that provides them with £36.62 a week, 52 per cent of Jobseeker’s Allowance. Surviving on £5.23 a day puts asylum seekers well below the UK poverty line. Those who are refused asylum but are too scared to return home find themselves destitute as they cannot access any benefits. Oxfam estimates that there are hundreds of thousands of destitute asylum seekers in the UK.
Asylum seekers do not have access to social or council housing. They are allocated housing on a ‘no choice’ basis in ‘hard to let’ properties. This housing is often of very poor quality. This is likely to get even worse with the privatisation of asylum housing through G4S, Serco and Reliance – all of whom have poor records in managing detention centres and transport and escort services. Indeed, there are already concerns that G4S will repeat its Olympics shambles in asylum seeker housing, leading top officials in the Home Office to monitor the situation closely.
Migrants most often come here to work and they do just that. Many have high skill levels but often find themselves in jobs that do not utilise these skills and are poorly paid. National insurance data shows that foreign nationals are less than half as likely to claim unemployment benefits as UK citizens. Access to benefits for migrants is complex, and as with access to welfare for asylum seekers has become increasingly limited since the mid-1990s.
Research by the Equality and Human Rights Commission dispels the myth that immigrants jump the social housing waiting list. This found that 60 per cent were privately renting, 18 per cent were owner occupiers, and only 11 per cent were allocated social housing. The research found no evidence of abuse of the system nor of ‘queue jumping’.
MYTH: They take our jobs
Asylum seekers are not allowed to work, despite often being highly skilled and keen to use these skills. Once their claim has been decided they may work if they have been given refugee status. However, they face many barriers to entering employment. The government has cut the Refugee Integration and Employment Service, which provided them with support in finding a job. Refugees may also struggle to work in their chosen profession as their qualifications may not be transferable or they may face discrimination by employers.
Migrants generally travel to where there are jobs available, often filling vacancies where there are skill shortages. The UK Border Agency’s points-based system for non-EU immigrants means that they are only permitted to take jobs where there are recognised skill shortages and if they can prove before entering that they have the relevant qualifications. Numerous statistical studies have shown that there is no link between EU immigration and unemployment levels.
MYTH: They are draining public services
It is our duty, not a drain, to protect asylum seekers. As discussed above, the welfare provision that we do provide is woefully inadequate. A number of other European countries provide more generous support than the UK.
The minimal provision the state provides for asylum seekers and refugees is now being decimated by government cuts with devastating consequences. There have been massive cuts to support services for asylum seekers and refugees and cuts to the Home Office housing budget for asylum seekers. The cuts to legal aid will affect asylum seekers’ ability to access justice in a system already stacked against them. Asylum seekers and refugees are being used as an easy target by the government. The Home Office has acknowledged this itself, stating: ‘Because the UKBA is not facing uniform cuts, some areas – including asylum – will be required to bear a greater proportion of the cuts.’
Besides, far from ‘draining’ public services, migrants (including refugees) actually contribute significantly to their funding through their tax and national insurance contributions. They make a net contribution to the UK economy of £3 billion. Because they are often young, healthy, and skilled, their use of public services is actually very limited. Migrants also help deliver many of our public services, working in the National Health Service, education and social care. It is a fact that the NHS could not function without migrant workers.
The myth of immigrants’ dependence has obscured the reality of our own dependence on them.

Common cause in labour

admin — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 14:00:37 +0000

Montage: Louise Thomas
There is no doubt that over recent decades we have witnessed a undeclared ‘war’ against undocumented migrants, as Matthew Carr suggests. And this does not relate only to the migration flow between northern Africa or the Middle East and Europe, but to all the main migration routes: from south east Asia to Australia and to the oil-rich countries of the Persian Gulf; from Central America to the United States; from sub-Saharan Africa to South Africa.
This war does not stop at the borders. It reaches to the heart of social life, permeating economic relations and the political and cultural sphere of the countries of destination. In general, these migrants face the hardest working conditions, legal and illegal forms of exploitation and discrimination, along with xenophobic propaganda and racism.
The assault on labour
Most migrants are first and foremost workers. There are about 105 million regular economic migrants globally, some 3 per cent of the global workforce. UN estimates suggest that the undocumented comprise a further 10 per cent.
When we deal with migration policies, therefore, we should take into account their economic meaning and the strong link with labour policies. Noam Chomsky has argued that the past 40 years has seen ‘an international assault on labour’, a constant process of de‑unionisation, flexibilisation and deregulation of rights at work. The result is a new ‘precarious proletariat’, which includes those traditionally on the margins of the labour market, such as migrants, and does not spare young locals. There is a whole generation living in frustration and uncertainty because of widespread use of casual work, general insecurity and rampant unemployment in the absence of former protection.
To put it in theoretical terms, the situation is functional to the creation of a new, global ‘reserve army of labour’, which helps drive down overall working conditions. We could also say that the aim is to consolidate ‘biopower’, the material control and subjugation of impoverished populations.
We are encouraged to think that migrants and casual young workers are two separate aspects of the labour market, even opposed in some cases. Racism and xenophobia are on the increase, especially in the countries that have been hardest hit by the current economic crisis, and migrants are targeted as potential enemies, including by openly fascist vigilantes.
However, these anti-immigrant vigilantes are not the principal threat, as the philosopher Slavoj Žižek points out.:‘They are merely collateral damage accompanying the true threat – the politics of austerity that has brought the country to such a predicament.’
Reassembling resistance
Migrants and local unemployed or precarious workers are united by the same structural conditions of insecurity and vulnerability and should share the same struggles. The protests that took place in 2011, from the Arab Spring to the indignados and Occupy movements, highlighted the widespread dissatisfaction with the current economic and political system.
For the same reasons, a new consciousness is spreading among migrant workers. Albeit in a spontaneous and uncoordinated way, the potential for migrants to participate in and contest political structures is growing. In various countries they respond to attacks by rebelling against humiliation and segregation, and taking part in demonstrations, protests and strikes. They are using new tools for communication – blogs and online social networks – and, with the support of anti-racist movements, trade unions and NGOs, in many cases they are succeeding in revitalising social and labour protests and winning important battles. Two recent examples in Europe show what can be achieved.
Movement of the sans-papiers
In France, there has been a significant shift in the struggle of the sans-papiers movement recently. These migrants, mainly northern and sub-Saharan Africans, have been at the centre of the productive system but outside the political and social system for decades, as though they lived beside the society to which they contributed.
The majority of first-generation migrants, who arrived in France in the post-colonial period, seemed destined to remain in a position of eternal subordination as immigrants, without any possibility of integrating or improving their status. And for years the issue of the sans‑papiers – those who existed without official documentation or sanction, literally ‘without papers’ – was considered predominantly from a humanitarian point of view. Attention was focused on their right to remain and live in France, not on working conditions.
But over recent years a major campaign has been gathering pace to regularise the status of the many thousands of migrants, who actively contribute to a large part of the national economy but who live in the shadows under conditions of constant insecurity and blackmail. In this, the historic French trade union of the left, the CGT, has been playing an increasing role.
The first exemplary dispute, in which the union sided with workers without documents, dates back to 2006, when 22 sub‑Saharan workers went on strike and occupied the Modeluxe industrial laundries of Chilly-Mazarin. After a week’s strike joined by all workers, the position of the 22 was regularised.
Since then a series of protests and strikes has led to the regularisation of tens of thousands of workers, from construction sites to the most exclusive restaurants of Paris. Beyond the documents, however, the value of these actions lies in the fact that they were started by the immigrants themselves, demonstrating an increasing awareness and militancy among the sans-papiers.
A day without us
‘What would happen if the four-and-a-half million immigrants living in Italy decided to down tools for a day? And if the millions of Italians who are tired of racism supported their action?’
This is the question that launched the First of March, A Day Without Us movement in Italy in 2010. It started two months after the French movement of the same name, and was inspired by the US movement from 2006.
The idea came after a series of episodes of open discrimination and xenophobic violence against immigrants, like the one that occurred in Rosarno, in the far south of Italy. A group of young African farmworkers rioted after three of them were attacked by a criminal gang that runs orange picking in the area. The attack was intended to intimidate and avoid paying them. After the riot people from Rosarno formed patrols and seriously injured several Africans, pursuing them to their homes, which they then set on fire. Media reports highlighted the squalid conditions these young men were forced to live in, and brought new accusations of barbarity and racism raining down on Italy.
The idea of an ‘immigrants’ strike’ gained support from national media and developed very quickly through online social networks. A group of journalists and trade unionists, all women, decided to open a page on Facebook and a blog with migrant friends and Italians with direct experience of immigration. The blog included a guide to setting up local committees bringing migrants and Italians together. The initiative went ahead with the support of numerous human rights organisations, magazines, newspapers and opposition parties.
The main trade union confederations refused to support the protest, claiming that the migrants’ strike would have divided workers on an ethnic basis, instead of uniting them. Some trade unionists, however, endorsed the protest and admitted that there was a problem with migrants being represented within labour organisations.
Reclaiming rights
On 1 March 2010, about 300,000 people took part in demonstrations across Italy, with marches filling many squares, from Milan to Rome, and Naples to Palermo. In areas where there was a high concentration of migrant workers and links to unions, some metalworking, textile, food and chemical factories were closed by the strike. Overall, the result was remarkable considering the speed with which the demonstration had been organised, the complete lack of structure and in general the lack of a strong link with the trade unions.
Since then the movement has focused on some specific objectives. These include securing an undertaking to ‘recognise the right to full citizenship of those born, growing up, living and working on the Italian territory’ – an extension from the principle of jus sanguinis, based on the country of birth, to that of jus soli, based on the blood link. Other objectives include the right for immigrants to vote at local elections, equal opportunity legislation and the rejection of special laws for the undocumented.
Above all, the First of March, A Day Without Us movement helped to create a new awareness among migrants about their social and economic role. It showed that migrants can mobilise and reclaim their rights; they can demand representation and push for participation. In doing so, they are advancing the cause of all workers.

Vittorio Longhi’s ‘The immigrant war: A global movement against discrimination and exploitation’ has just been published by Policy Press. See also facebook.com/TheImmigrantWar

Essay: Europe’s hard borders

admin — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 12:00:20 +0000

In the aftermath of the cold war, the more utopian prophets of globalisation hailed the advent of a new ‘borderless’ world in which national borders would become irrelevant and obsolete. Since then governments across the world have dismantled barriers and tariffs against the free movement of capital and commodities, and entered into regional and transnational agreements that have relinquished traditional tenets of national sovereignty.
Yet the past two decades have also been seen an unprecedented political concern with borders as symbolic markers of national identity, and barriers against the movement of unwanted people. In various countries, from the United States and India to Israel and South Africa, governments have reinforced their borders with new physical barriers, technologies and personnel.
This dual process of softening/hardening borders has been particularly striking in the European Union. On the one hand European governments have achieved something that only a few decades ago would have seemed unimaginable – the reintegration of Eastern and Western Europe, the removal of internal border checks and the creation of a vast ‘space of freedom, security and justice’ in which some 500 million European citizens can live and work freely anywhere on the continent.
At the same time European governments have gone to extraordinary and unprecedented lengths to limit and monitor the entry of people from outside the continent. From Ceuta and Melilla in the south to the 1,800-mile frontier that marks Europe’s eastern frontier with Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova; from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic and the Aegean, European governments have reinforced their borders with police, soldiers, border guards, naval patrols, and an array of physical barriers and surveillance and detection technologies that amount to the most extensive border enforcement effort in history.
The new political prioritisation of borders has been shaped by various factors, from economic insecurity and anxieties about national identity to law enforcement and security concerns. But the overriding priority behind the new border regimes, from the Rio Grande and the Sinai to the Greek-Turkish border, is the prevention of ‘illegal immigration’ – a category that generally refers to undocumented migrants from the global south, whether defined as ‘economic migrants’ or refugees and asylum seekers.
Today Europe’s immigration controls are no longer limited to the continent’s territorial frontiers but extend both inside and outside the continent. They include a sprawling archipelago of detention centres scattered across and beyond the EU; draconian ‘post-entry’ policies which victimise and marginalise asylum seekers in order to transmit a deterrent message; ‘upstream’ immigration controls aimed at detecting and trapping unwanted migrants before they can even reach Europe; and neighbourhood partnerships that seek to involve an ever-widening array of countries in Europe’s ‘externalised’ border controls.
Devastating consequences
This system has had devastating consequences for the people it is designed to exclude. At least 15,000 migrants have died attempting to cross the EU’s maritime and land borders. Men, women and children have drowned in the Mediterranean and the Aegean, frozen to death in the mountains of Slovakia and Poland, or been blown up in minefields along the Greek-Turkish border.
Migrants have also fallen from trucks and trains, or killed themselves to escape detention or deportation or because they were reduced to stateless destitution. Such deaths have since become so routine that even the most spectacular tragedies increasingly attract little more than cursory media attention.
European governments frequently attribute the horrific migrant death toll to the ruthlessness and cynicism of traffickers and people smugglers – and not always without reason. But the death toll on the continent’s borders has become a kind of collateral damage in an undeclared ‘war’ that treats undocumented migrants as criminal and harmful intruders to be kept at bay through a quasi-military enforcement effort.
The moral condemnation of the people-smuggling industry ignores the fact that that migrants make use of such services in order to find a way through the gauntlet of obstacles that have been placed in their path. It also tends to overlook the demand for undocumented migrant labour in key sectors of the European economy – a demand that is often enhanced by the fact that illegal workers have few or no legal protections.
European governments do not want migrants dying on the continent’s borders. But their common determination to prevent or at least slow down the pace of migration has in practice created pockets of impunity, in which the worst things can happen to migrants but no one is ever responsible or accountable for them.
In 2005 at least 13 African migrants were shot or fell to their deaths when Spanish and Moroccan security forces attempted to prevent mass crossings of the border fences in Spain’s Moroccan exclaves at Ceuta and Melilla. To date neither the Moroccan nor Spanish security forces have accepted responsibility for these deaths.
In the Aegean and the Mediterranean, there have been a disturbing number of incidents in which coastguard and naval vessels from various countries are alleged to have rammed migrant boats or refused to rescue their passengers. Such allegations have tended to produce inconclusive investigations, insofar as they have been investigated at all. These incidents cannot be considered the norm. Thousands of migrants have indeed been rescued at sea by European coastguard officers and naval personnel. But the horrendous death toll means that the glass must always be considered half empty, and the proliferation of ‘left-to-die’ episodes is the most extreme manifestation of the repressive model of border enforcement, which generally prefers to ensure that migrant journeys are as hazardous, difficult and harsh as possible – the better to deter others from following their example.
Undermining Europe’s principles
These priorities have remorselessly ground away at the principles that supposedly define the European Union, in ways that are not always visible to the general public. The European Union places human rights at the heart of its political identity. Article 2 of the 2007 Lisbon Treaty states that: ‘The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities.’
This commitment to human rights is further reflected in various treaties and conventions, including the European Convention on Human Rights and the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, in addition to conventions and treaties to which the EU is a signatory, such as the Geneva Convention on the status of refugees, the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the UN Charter.
No European government has explicitly abrogated these agreements, even though some have called for some of them to be revisited. Yet these commitments are routinely violated in practice by the continent’s border enforcement procedures.
The Geneva Convention explicitly mandates its signatories to observe the principle of ‘non-refoulement’, whereby refugees and asylum seekers are not sent back to a country where they may face persecution or harm. But this principle has been regularly evaded or ignored by numerous European governments. In 2009, Italy signed its notorious ‘pushback’ or ‘towback’ agreement with Gaddafi’s Libya, whereby migrants intercepted on the high seas were handed over to the Libyan navy without any asylum screening procedures and sent back to a country with some of the worst immigration detention centres in the world.
Both ‘pushed back’ migrant detainees and migrants entering Libya from the Sahara were subjected to the routine violence, overcrowding, and sexual exploitation that characterised Libya’s detention regime – some of which received funding from the EU itself. Both Italy and the EU were aware of conditions inside these centres, but Gaddafi’s Libya, like Tunisia, was nevertheless allowed to play the role of migrant dumping ground – a role that has continued since his overthrow.
Other countries have also been drawn into the EU’s migration controls in an attempt to deny access to asylum in practice without explicitly refusing it. In Greece, the police and army have conducted secret deportations of migrants across the Greek-Turkish land border, and Turkey’s weak traditions of refugee protection have not prevented the EU from attempting to involve the Turkish government in its ‘externalised’ border controls.
In Slovakia and Ukraine, migrants crossing the border from Ukraine to seek asylum have been handed over to Ukrainian border guards without any assessment of their claims and placed in detention for months or a year in a country where almost no one gets refugee protection.
At the Moroccan-Algerian border, I visited forest camps where migrants, including young children, were living in homemade bivouacs (improvised shelters) at the mercy of the Moroccan police and army, who regularly shunt them across the border, and where female migrants are routinely raped or sexually exploited by bandits, law enforcement officials and other migrants themselves.
Within Europe itself, a number of ‘border countries’ have acted as dumping grounds and migrant traps as a result of the Dublin Convention’s ‘geographical’ clause, which limits asylum applications to a single country. In Greece tens of thousands of migrants have become trapped in a country that accepted few refugees even before the economic crisis erupted. In Malta migrants have sometimes been detained for five years from the moment of their arrival in detention centres that were condemned by all external observers.
Punitive array
Formal detention is only one instrument in an array of punitive measures aimed at isolating migrants from the societies in which they find themselves. Thousands of rejected asylum seekers across the continent are not allowed to work and receive no benefits because they won’t sign an agreement agreeing to return to the countries they came from.
In the Spanish exclave of Melilla in Morocco, some migrants have spent more than five years in the ‘migrant reception centre’ or living in camps on the outskirts of the city, waiting for their asylum applications to be processed. Even when migrants have been registered officially as asylum seekers and theoretically entitled to continue their journeys to the Spanish mainland, they have been turned back on the ferry and forced to remain in a city that effectively acts as an offshore detention centre.
In the Greek ports of Patras and Igoumenitsa, migrants have been harassed by police in an increasingly vicious campaign of persecution in an attempt to make them leave. In Calais, the demolition of the Sangatte ‘jungle’ in 2009 was followed by a relentless war of attrition, in which police have attempted to prevent migrants from using the city as a conduit to the UK.
In the spring of 2010, I personally witnessed police taking away blankets from more than 50 homeless migrants in Calais, in temperatures that were only just above zero, under the supervision of the local authorities. Since then police have raided migrant squats and camps, some of which have been demolished by the municipal authorities.
All these developments have formed part of a punitive response to what the European border agency Frontex once described as a potential ‘human surge’ of immigration that might overwhelm the continent.
In some countries, such as Berlusconi’s Italy, extreme right wing politicians have described undocumented migration as an ‘invasion’ – a fantasy that is sometimes reframed more specifically as an Islamic invasion that threatens to undermine European culture and civilisation. In other countries, even left-of-centre governments have presented ‘immigration management’ as an instrument of ‘social cohesion’ and an essential prophylactic to keep more extreme political forces at bay.
The result is a border enforcement model that is simultaneously ruthless, devious, incoherent, hypocritical and lacking in any moral credibility, and which has proven largely futile and counterproductive. If militarised border controls have sometimes succeeded in reducing the flow of migrants in some countries, these ‘victories’ have generally paved the way for new migratory routes elsewhere.
Europe’s need for migrants
Numerous economists have argued that a ‘greying’ Europe needs migrants to pay the taxes that provide the continent’s pensions and public services and to fill the demand for labour in key economic sectors. In 2011, a strategy paper presented to the European Commission noted that ‘European countries are facing labour market shortages and vacancies that cannot be filled by the domestic workforce in specific sectors’ and that ‘long-term population ageing in Europe is expected to halve the ratio between persons of working age (20-64) and persons aged 65 and above in the next 50 years.’
The paper called for less stringent visa requirements and the development of ‘migration and mobility dialogues’ with neighbouring migrant-producing countries that would attempt to transform migration into a mutually-beneficial process. These recommendations were accompanied by the same emphasis on restrictions, barriers, readmission agreements, and outsourced border controls that have dominated EU policy debates for so many years, and which called into question the paper’s stated aspiration to ‘protect the human rights of all migrants throughout their migration process’.
These contradictory objectives are even more glaring in mainstream political discourse. Too many politicians and policymakers recognise Europe’s need for migrants yet refuse to acknowledge this publicly and prefer instead to celebrate crowd-pleasing deportation statistics as proof of their ‘toughness’ on immigration, and commit themselves to drastic immigrant-reduction targets that cannot be met without replicating the ‘closed’ security-obsessed borders of the 1930s.
In Europe’s age of debt-driven ‘austerity’, it has become even more convenient for governments to prioritise national privilege and depict migrants as parasitical intruders – a tendency reflected in meaningless populist promises of ‘British jobs for British workers’, in unrealisable immigration reduction targets and in the Spanish government’s recent law denying free healthcare to undocumented migrants.
Today the economic crisis has become a further justification for an intensification of border enforcement, at a time when the numbers of migrants coming to Europe are falling across the continent because of the crisis. Not only have migrants in various countries begun to return home because there is no work available for them but European countries that have only recently undergone the transformation from ‘immigrant-producing’ to ‘immigrant-receiving’ countries have once again begun to produce a new generation of migrants.
These developments suggest an inherent rationality to migration that rarely features in media debates about immigration and policy documents pertaining to Europe’s ‘hardened’ borders. Instead of recognising such rationality and developing policies that can harness migration for the benefit of Europe and migrants themselves, too many governments have accepted the exclusionary model without any regard for its human or political consequences.
Contradictory principles and practice
The European Union was not only intended to be a trading bloc and an economic union. The project of European unity was a response to the most catastrophic period in European and world history. Its architects aspired to create a common European space that would reflect the continent’s best political traditions, rather than its worst. These aspirations are at odds with the punitive border enforcement policies that have been put in place over the last two decades – and the attitudes and assumptions that have shaped these policies.
A genuinely inclusive Europe that prioritises human rights and aspires to be a ‘Europe of asylum’ cannot coexist indefinitely with exclusionary policies based on detention centres; with target-driven deportations; with ‘externalised’ border controls that transform ‘offshore’ countries into migrant dumping grounds and prevent potential refugees from even reaching Europe; with border surveillance technologies, fences and barriers; with ‘post-entry’ policies that reduce men and women to homeless pariahs in the heart of some of the richest cities on earth.
Sooner or later the contradictions between principle and practice will become impossible to ignore or smooth over. If European governments are to avoid a dynamic of repression that risks replicating some of the darkest pages in the continent’s history, it is incumbent upon Europeans to develop a more humane and rational approach to immigration, which reflects the continent’s best political and moral traditions, rather than its worst, which places human rights at the heart of migration and does not treat people in search of work or a place of safety as criminals, invaders and threats to its cultural identity.
Thousands of people across the continent have already made this choice. They include NGOs, militant anti-border control activists, church and civil society organisations and individuals from a variety of different backgrounds who have intervened in Europe’s immigration wars to stop the deportations of migrants they have known as friends or colleagues, provided humanitarian assistance to destitute asylum seekers, or engaged in popular mobilisations against detention centres and deportation flights.
In their examples we can glimpse the possibility of another kind of Europe to the ‘fortress’ model that is currently under construction, one that is based on solidarity, inclusivity and common humanity, rather than fear, xenophobia and the demonisation of the alien Other.
The great challenge is how to find governments that not only pay lip service to these principles but are prepared to develop policies that reflect them in practice, and replace the continent’s hardened borders with a more generous and realistic approach to migration than the one that has dominated the past two decades.
Matthew Carr is the author of Fortress Europe: Dispatches from a gated continent. He blogs at www.infernalmachine.co.uk. Illustration by Andrzej Krauze

The people behind the prejudice

admin — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 10:00:45 +0000

Montage: Louise Thomas
UK mainstream politics presents a gruesome prospect for would-be migrants. The driver of immigration policy is not human rights or economic concerns but the desperate need to please the anti-immigration lobby. The coalition government’s approach to immigration can be summed up thus: be tough, be seen to be tough.
Labour’s approach in the current climate is to have no specific policies but attack the government for not being tough enough. The Liberal Democrats have a policy of saying nothing about the laws and rules they are helping to implement under Cameron and Clegg.
This sorry state of affairs has effects on real lives.
Meet Everton. Everton is eight. He’s having a tough time at school at the moment. He comes from the Caribbean but is trying to get a visa to stay in the UK while his mum works here; she has permission to do so until the end of next year. He is distraught as his dad is in the UK’s armed forces, stationed abroad, and he desperately wants to stay with his mum for as long as she is working here. He doesn’t want to live with his elderly grandparents any more, and they are getting to the stage where they are unable to care for him properly.
The good news is that a judge of the first-tier tribunal has ruled that Everton can stay with his mum – for slightly more than a year. The bad news is that the Home Office is appealing against that decision. The expense of appeal, the work involved and the turmoil caused to this little boy has been deemed justifiable by the Home Office, all in the interests of keeping a schoolchild out of the UK for 13 months. The driver is the coalition’s promise to reduce net migration to ‘tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands’.
Another person you should meet is Jemma. Jemma works in a well paid job (she pays a higher rate of tax) and has no financial issues. She wants her elderly father to join her in the UK as he has no other family at home in Australia. She is a British citizen. There’s no likelihood of her father being dependent on benefits if he were to come here; Jemma is even happy to sign a document declaring that she will provide for his every need.
But the new rules brought in by home secretary Theresa May in July insist that if Jemma’s father is capable of dressing himself, washing and cooking, he cannot come to the UK. If he has any other family in Australia he cannot come to the UK. If Jemma can pay for his care in Australia, he cannot come to the UK. In fact, Home Office staff have been unable to outline which, if any, circumstances would fulfil the criteria needed to get a visa for her dad.
Good and bad immigrants
Perhaps the most obvious measure to discourage people from coming to the UK is the attack on the ability of universities to recruit outside the EU, as in the case of London Metropolitan University (see page 22). In this dreadful example of the collective punishment of more than 2,500 students for what is essentially a disagreement between the UK Border Agency and the university administration, those students had their studies, their livelihoods and their prospects thrown into uncertainty.
There is now a clamour from the academic world to discount students and boarding school pupils from the immigration figures. This may seem tempting to the government as it struggles to meet its ‘tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands’ target, but it would also set up a divide between ‘good’ migrants (so good, in fact, that they’re no longer migrants) and others.
Least desirable of all are foreign-national prisoners. It is policy to consider any prisoner serving a term of 12 months or more for deportation after the sentence has been served. But a large number of such offenders were brought up and schooled in the UK and may have spent most of their lives here. How can it be right to doubly punish such people?
While ministers and tabloids like to focus on the spectacular and high profile cases, I’d like to introduce you to WM. WM came here at the age of one to join his father, a refugee, in London. He suffered abuse, got taken into care, and is very much a product of the UK care system. He has learning difficulties.
He’s 24 now. He got caught up in a robbery. Although he wasn’t the one holding the knife he got an 18-month spell inside. He’s now being considered for deportation to the Ivory Coast. He only speaks English and has no relatives or friends there, but Theresa May has a need to be seen to be tough. Labour’s shadow justice secretary, Sadiq Khan, has been saying to anyone who will listen that Labour used to deport more foreign national prisoners and that the current government should raise its game.
These stories, real stories of real lives, are not how the home secretary prefers people to think about immigration. For her it’s a matter of using extreme examples to justify extreme measures in what is primarily a numbers game.
Liberal dressing
Sometimes there is a liberal dressing for some of the measures. The English language requirement for spouses and civil partners, for example, brought in two years ago, is claimed to be in the interests of integration and as a measure against the isolation of, especially, women in family homes.
Ministers are keen to tell you what a low level of English is required to satisfy the requirement. But having had Skype conversations with one of the repeated failures, those with far more than a smattering of English are liable to flunk that test. The UK Border Agency insists that it only wants to test an applicant’s listening and speaking capabilities, but the majority of the tests it recognises to demonstrate these also test reading, writing and computer literacy. Two years after the introduction of the language requirement, it is astounding that the Home Office has not provided one standard test that people can take.
Meanwhile, the UKBA is getting tougher when it comes to raiding workplaces. Its newsfeed provides a constant stream of stories reporting the arrest of irregular migrants. In October six were arrested in Blackpool, nine in Brighton and Hove and two in Sittingbourne. Obviously numbers like these are going to make little difference to an estimated 700,000 irregular migrants currently in the UK, but the consequences for employers are getting more severe with larger fines being handed out to those who employ people without the right documentation. These measures will drive irregular migrants even further underground, into sex work and criminal activity as established employers refuse to employ them.
Human rights
The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants has long been a proponent of a human rights-based approach to policy making. When people are given the facts about the reality of immigration into the UK, and about the proportion of the population made up by migrants, fear and concern are significantly allayed. Such an awareness would provide the space to implement a rights-based approach whereby those coming to the UK would be recognised as real people with real lives and real rights, not a burden to be tolerated by the host population. The contribution of immigrants to the economic and cultural life of the UK is immense. But there are some that would have you believe the opposite is true.
Which brings me to introduce to you one more character. Mark is a government minister and an MP. He represents the Forest of Dean, not an area known for its large numbers of migrants. He got the job of immigration in the last reshuffle. He spins the truth like a seasoned Tory might be expected to: ‘We want to ensure that taxpayers aren’t footing the bill for immigrants who bring their families into the country.’ Mark, a man who lives a different world to the people we’ve met so far in this piece, might do with checking out what the words ‘no recourse to public funds’ actually mean. He might then discover the current reality of immigrants and their relationship to the welfare benefit system.
Guy Taylor is campaigns and communications officer at the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants

Jeremy Hardy thinks… about immigration

admin — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 05:43:42 +0000

David Cameron is keen to place a cap on immigrants. I don’t know whether it will have a big ‘I’ on it and I don’t know if it will be removable or fastened under the chin with an unbreakable tag. I don’t even have the energy to find out if Clegg has announced his conversion to the idea. I expect the position is clearer now he’s seen the books. I don’t mean books written by immigrants, some of which are jolly good, obviously; I mean all those books with numbers in that ministers keep in their desk drawers.

In the pre-election debates, Nick was keen to talk about the system being a mess and not really talk about numbers, save to say that a cap could be a problem because we might reach it and then find we need someone who’s really good at something. He mumbled his way half-heartedly through his sort-of amnesty which he asserted was definitely not the same as an amnesty.

Gordon agreed with David that it would reward criminals. I’ve seen those criminals, bent double over the fields of Kent, up to no good.

Gordon did recognise that we have a skills shortage, but stressed that ‘We’re training up our own chefs’, which means we won’t need any more foreigners coming over here to cook our biryanis. All three men spoke as though immigration is nothing but a problem. None suggested that a human being is worth more than what they can add to GDP, and none mentioned the right to freedom of movement.

But it’s impossible to argue that people should be forced to stay where they were born – certainly not Belgium or Aldershot – so it follows that we’re allowed to move about. Isn’t that really the point?

Get along, move along, shift…

admin — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 22:00:50 +0000

The European Commission has what could be called a ‘Condolence-O-Matic’ machine. Given the occasion of some wretched or not-quite-so-wretched tragedy or anniversary of a commonly agreed (but, crucially, non-controversial) historic injustice, Brussels copies and pastes in press-release form almost identical messages of condolence, regret and remembrance, whether the occasion be the anniversary of Kristallnacht, a Belgian train wreck, floods in Pakistan or the death of Michael Jackson.

But there was no solemn communique of sympathy on this year’s Roma Extermination Remembrance Day on 2 August. The day marks the 66th anniversary of the corralling of 2,897 men, women and children into the Zigeunerfamilienlager, or ‘gypsy family camp’, at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. And this summer it came amid a fresh wave of persecution meted out to Europe’s Roma community and travellers by some of the most powerful member states in the union.

The week before, French president Nicolas Sarkozy announced he was to destroy some 300 Roma encampments and cleanse France of around 700 Roma adults and children, later upped to 850. While human rights groups note a chilling echo of les rafles, the French round-ups of Jews during the second world war, the Elysee Palace claims the repatriations are voluntary, as the government is paying each adult EUR300 (plus EUR100 per child) to return to Romania or Bulgaria.

From September, the government is to store the fingerprints of those who have enjoyed an ‘assisted repatriation’ in a biometric database in order to stop them from receiving any such ‘assistance’ in the future, should they return to France, as by EU law they can do immediately.

Much ink has been spilt over Paris’s anti-ziganist ethnic cleansing, but Germany, Denmark and Sweden have been engaged in much the same behaviour, albeit more quietly and with not with the same law-and-order, vote-seeking pronouncements from their capitals.

That same week, Germany announced that it wants to expel 12,000 gypsies, including 6,000 children and adolescents, back to Kosovo, whence they had fled in the wake of the break-up of Yugoslavia, accused of collaboration with Serbia. Headlines in Sweden revealed how the government was in violation of domestic and EU law for deporting Roma for begging.

Meanwhile, the city of Copenhagen was asking the Danish government for assistance, including the use of force, to expel Roma. And a caravan of 700 travellers was chased out of Flanders to take up temporary residence in Belgium’s French-speaking Walloon region. Local authorities there gave them only days before they had to move on once more.

Beyond the pale

Nomads of any description remain beyond the pale. At the end of July, the UK saw a fresh wave of evictions and court actions against gypsies and Irish travellers as Eric Pickles, communities and local government minister, announced plans to give police new powers to evict and arrest people for trespass on public land.

The latest wave of cleansing comes atop a 2008 state of emergency declared in Italy that continues to this day, whereby thousands of Roma have been evicted. Two years ago the European Commission shot down Italian plans to expel EU citizens facing two-year jail sentences – but it gave the all-clear to a scheme to fingerprint Roma, including children.

Politicians in Italy routinely fulminate against the community. In the same year, interior minister Roberto Maroni of the farright Northern League declared: ‘All Romany camps will have to be dismantled right away, and the inhabitants will be either expelled or incarcerated.’ When a mob attacked a camp in Naples with Molotov cocktails two months later, he responded: ‘That is what happens when gypsies steal babies, or when they commit sexual violence.’

In eastern Europe, from whence so many Roma are fleeing, the situation is dire. The Czech Republic engages in a practice of automatically sending Roma children to ‘special schools’ for the mentally handicapped. One bright spot has been in neighbouring Slovakia, whose new government in August pledged to end the practice – although the ultra-free market ideology of the coalition makes it unlikely that Bratislava will be willing to provide the economic resources so that Roma children can be integrated into mainstream schools.

Bulgarian and Romanian Roma face forced evictions, poverty, high unemployment and low literacy levels. In Hungary, where the openly anti-gypsy, far-right Jobbik party won 17 per cent of the vote in the recent general election, eight Roma have been murdered by individuals thought to be linked to the party’s Magyar Garda paramilitary wing.

In late August, France announced it would hold an informal meeting of interior ministers in September from four of the larger EU member states, Italy, Germany, Spain and the UK, as well as Greece, a major transit point for migrants trying to enter Europe, to discuss ‘migration’. In a highly unusual move, Paris also invited Canada’s conservative immigration minister, Jason Kenney, as Ottawa currently has ongoing arguments with the Czech Republic and Hungary over the number of Roma from the two countries applying for refugee status. Romania and Bulgaria, home to many of Europe’s Roma migrants, were conspicuously absent.

Where is the EU?

Where is the European Commission in all this? The EU has considerable powers to put a stop to these rafles nouvelles, in a way that no actors had during the second world war. Article 7 of the EU Treaty states that in cases of a ‘serious and persistent breach’ of human rights, penalties up to the withdrawal of voting rights in the European Council and even expulsion from the union can be imposed.

Amnesty International believes now is time to act. ‘The EU, under the Lisbon Treaty articles 2, 6 and 7 has the responsibility to address human rights within the 27 member states,’ says Susanna Mehtonen, the group’s executive officer for legal affairs in the EU.

But the European Commission wants to stay as far away as possible from the issue. Pressed by journalists, the spokesman for Viviane Reding, the EU justice commissioner, said: ‘When it comes to Roma and the possibility of expelling them, this is up to the member states to deal with, in this case France, and for them to decide how they are going to implement the law.’

When the Charter of Fundamental Rights came into force with the passage of the Lisbon Treaty last year, the EU heralded the moment as a new dawn for human rights in Europe. Throughout the campaign to convince the Irish to vote in favour of Lisbon, the charter was repeatedly invoked to win over progressives unnerved by the treaty’s pro-market bias.

But the charter, the commission now clarifies, is not a bill of rights for citizens. Rather, it is just an instrument covering two very narrow areas: acts of the EU institutions themselves and EU member states when they implement EU law. The moves of France and other countries in this case thus lie outside its responsibility, the commission insists.

Privately, commission officials are well aware of the fact that the situation is grave, and even, as one official who did not want to be named put it, that France’s policy is entirely a populist response to Sarkozy’s poor support in the polls. But, ‘it is possibly the most sensitive issue there is,’ the official added, so ‘a decision was made to give a very institutional response.’

Towards the end of August, however, Commissioner Reding finally issued a statement saying: ‘I regret that some of the rhetoric that has been used in some member states in the past weeks has been openly discriminatory. Nobody should face expulsion just for being Roma.

‘Europe is not just a common market – it is at the same time a community of values and fundamental rights. The European Commission will watch over this.’

Whether Reding acts on her words or they just come from the same emotionally hollow source that feeds the Condolence-O-Matic remains to be seen.

Leigh Phillips is Red Pepper’s Europe correspondent

Border stories

admin — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:08:12 +0000

In the June/July issue of Red Pepper, Alex Clarke from Bristol No Borders reported on the plight of the migrants living in makeshift settlements around Calais. Since then the threats facing these migrants have escalated, from scabies and malnutrition to the imminent destruction of camps by the French police and an increased risk of arrest and forced deportation to war zones.

By the time you read this, the area of wooded dunes near Calais may have been cleared of the shanties that are home to over a thousand migrants and would-be asylum seekers. They come from countries including Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Eritrea, Somalia and Sudan, all seeking security in the UK.

In July, French immigration minister Eric Besson denied that the bulldozing of the camps was imminent and pledged that humanitarian organisations would be fully involved in any clearance plan. Calais deputy prefect Gerard Gavory immediately contradicted him, emphasising that the operation was to take place soon, that no notice would be given to the organisations providing humanitarian assistance, and that those in the camps would be forcibly deported if necessary.

Both the French and the British authorities want to get rid of the camps, considering them an embarrassing eyesore for tourists, and an emblem of the ‘disorderly’ movement of non-Europeans who insist on ignoring national borders in search of safety. Proposals include setting up a new detention centre for migrants in the British-controlled part of Calais docks to make control and removal easier.

In July, Gordon Brown announced that £15 million would be spent on more detection devices to search lorries leaving French ports for the UK, and in return French premier Nicolas Sarkozy promised to speed up the removal of undocumented migrants. Efforts have also been made to persuade those seeking asylum to claim in France rather than the UK.

The UN High Commission for Refugees full-time representative in Calais, along with NGOs such as France Terre d’Asile, has tried to disabuse the migrants of their hopeful fantasies about life in Britain; and in May the French authorities made it possible to claim asylum in Calais, instead of in Arras, 100 kilometres away. But the presence of relatives and friends, the enduring belief in British fairness and the Dublin Regulation laying down EU member-states’ responsibility for asylum claims all deter claims in France. The last allows removal to the migrants’ point of entry into Europe – generally Greece. Here await inhuman conditions, a refusal rate of 99.9 per cent and deportations to torturing states.

Whether or not the expected bulldozing happens, the migrants have more immediate problems. Apart from the ever-present threat of arrest and deportation, and the reality of frequent police round-ups and attacks with tear gas, they have to contend with living in utter destitution (since if they don’t claim asylum they are ineligible for any welfare benefits). For shelter, most have dwellings of plastic sheeting, cardboard and ply. There is no running water and no sanitation. In June a 32-year-old Eritrean drowned while trying to wash himself in the canal, and recently the insanitary conditions have led to an outbreak of scabies.

Salam, the main voluntary group working with the migrants, distributes food daily at seven coastal sites as well as providing legal advice and help. It has negotiated with the local authority to allow the provision of showers by a Catholic aid organisation, but no one knows when they will start or what conditions will be attached.

Most of the hostility to the encamped migrants comes from this side of the Channel. The Daily Mail, for example, has run scare stories about human chains of asylum seekers across Calais motorways carrying out knifepoint robberies of British tourists. But these stories have no basis in fact. The border police at Coquelles have had no such reports, and the Calais police denied the Mail’s story that they advised holidaymakers to keep car windows and doors closed.

The No Borders camp at Calais in June brought over several hundred protesters. But solidarity with the migrants attracts police harassment. The camp was blockaded and demonstrations in the town were attacked by police, who made more than 20 arrests. Meanwhile, harassment of volunteers distributing humanitarian aid continues, under French laws that criminalise assistance to undocumented migrants.

The immigration minister denies that this law, designed to target traffickers and profiteers, penalises solidarity. He has promised to meet solidarity groups and to extend exemptions for social and medical workers. But Salam notes that the proposed exemptions don’t cover volunteers, and point to the recent prosecution of its vice-president, Jean-Claude Lenoir. Although he was acquitted in July of insulting a police officer, the prosecution has appealed.

No Borders Brighton’s ‘Mailwatch’ is at
http://nobordersbrighton.blogspot.com

Asylum watch: Now what?

admin — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 18:21:14 +0000

At least two new immigration bills are proposed for the 2008-9 session of parliament. They are the citizenship, immigration and borders bill and the immigration simplification bill. Together they cover the full gamut of immigration law, replacing the ten existing pieces of primary legislation. It is nothing short of a complete rewrite of the immigration laws.

The UK Borders Agency (UKBA), established as a sinisterly-described ‘shadow agency’ of the Home Office, is to gain new customs and visa powers, protecting our borders from ‘impermissible’ substances, commodities and people. Its powers will include detention without statutory limit, including detention of children.

Detention, according to the UKBA, is increasingly important in immigration policy. The ‘detention estate’ has grown from 200 places in the mid-1990s to 2,500 places today, with plans for another 1,300 to 1,500 places in the next three years. This has attracted the attention of Europe’s human rights commissioner, who also objects to the failure to set limits on detention.
Entering the country will become harder. The ‘authority to carry’ scheme will require airlines to perform real-time immigration checks on passengers, meaning no one will legally be able to travel to the UK without prior approval. The stated aim is to stop people using fake passports and visas, but the effect will be to condemn those seeking international asylum to illegal and dangerous methods of travel.

There will also be new powers of detention and questioning away from ports. This power is already applied by officials who raid small businesses daily in search of ‘illegal’ workers (always claiming the raids are ‘intelligence-led’, pre-empting accusations of illegality). Officials sometimes carry hand-held fingerprint terminals to check whether those arrested have applied for asylum or otherwise been fingerprinted.

Such technologies are increasingly important. Biometrics are taken from all visa applicants, and by December 2007 more than a million sets of fingerprints had been taken. On 24 November 2008, the first biometric ID cards were ‘rolled out’. Eventually, everyone subject to immigration control will have to carry one, and show it to do everything from opening a bank account to receiving NHS treatment or getting married. All aspects of life will be subject to immigration status.

The integration of visa, port and internal controls, together with the enhanced powers of examination, arrest, detention and powers of data collection, consolidate UKBA’s position as a powerful, autonomous border police. But structures of accountability are absent.

Alongside enhanced powers for the enforcers, the proposals erode migrants’ rights. Under the cover of ‘simplification’, anyone who is not British or a European Economic Area (EEA) national will need ‘immigration permission’ – including Commonwealth citizens who have the right to come and live here. Other ‘simplification’ proposals could replace deportation and administrative removal processes with expulsion and a re-entry ban, applicable with the same force against students who work 22 hours per week instead of 20 hours as it is against murderers.

The much-trumpeted ‘earned citizenship’ provisions reflect the facile and condescending debate over ‘British values’. They require not only testing on language and life in the UK but also longer qualifying periods, with unpaid community work used to shorten the period. Other provisions – from the requirement of bail bonds to powers to charge above the administrative cost for processing applications and to require deportees to pay the costs of their own removal – show that migrants are seen as at best a source of income.
With this inhuman and instrumental approach to migration in the ascendant, human rights and asylum (already dirty words in some quarters) look set to continue their long downward slide.

New immigration minister Phil Woolas sees his task not as educating the country in the social, political and economic benefits of an internationalist outlook, but as showing the right-wing press how tough he is on immigration. ‘It’s been too easy to get into this country in the past and it’s going to get harder,’ he tells the Times. He says employers shouldn’t employ immigrants (‘you should … attempt to fill skills shortages with your indigenous population’) and the NHS shouldn’t treat them (‘it’s not an international health service’). He adds that he has to be tough to pre-empt BNP support: ‘We’ve never had a BNP councillor [in his Oldham constituency] – I hope I’ve had something to do with that.’

But with Labour policies like this, what’s the difference? Opposition to such cynical ministerial soundbites and government policies needs to be loud, determined and principled if universal human rights are not to be undermined by little Englandism.

To view the government’s proposals visit:
http://www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/cm73/7373/7373.pdf

The Citizenship, Immigration and Borders Bill
Immigration Simplification Bill http://www.commonsleader.gov.uk/output/page2668.asp

Unhealthy obsessions

admin — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 20:30:59 +0000

After thirty years of well-earned exile in the moral wilderness, population politics is back. For Sir Andrew Green of Migration Watch, immigration minister Phil Woolas’s headline-grabbing interview with The Times on 18 October 2008 was the turning point: ‘It is the first time that a government minister has actually linked immigration and population.’

Population politics doesn’t only threaten immigrants. It’s an us-and-them game where anybody can be ‘it’. If you become unemployed or a bit too ill, you may cease to be an individual with rights, and become part of a ‘population’ instead, and a suitable case for ‘management’. Nothing could make this plainer than the juxtaposition, in The Sun (8 December 2008), of Woolas’s latest pronouncement that ‘Immigrants will have to earn the right to UK benefits and council housing … [and] wait ten years before they get a penny’, with work and pensions secretary, James Purnell’s equally tough pronouncement that from now on ‘nearly all benefit claimants will be forced to work in exchange for state handouts’.

Population politics implies the ‘legalisation’ of humanity: the right to be treated as if one were human is conferred only by thorough legal process; it cannot be acquired lightly, for example by being born, or conceived, or just turning up on one’s own unauthorised, autonomous initiative.

As the Columbia University historian, Matthew Connelly shows in his new book on the subject (Fatal Misconception: the struggle to control world population; Belknap, 2008), birth-control and immigration control are the two faces of population politics. Some very bizarre and unattractive obsessions lie at its heart, including a sordid preoccupation with other people’s breeding habits – especially of ‘the poor’.

During a BBC Radio 3 discussion of neo-Malthusianism in ‘today’s crowded world’, in March this year, Connelly said:

‘Too often, alas, population projections are psychological projections … not that there are too many people but that there certain kinds of people, with whom we feel uncomfortable, who there are too many of. So when people say the US or the UK for that matter is overpopulated I want to ask them which people in particular they have in mind, who are in and of themselves a problem?

‘If the problem is consumption, then of course it’s the wealthiest people we need fewer of. I mean, Britain would do much better if it had 100 million subsistence farmers, say, than 50 million people who are doctors and lawyers and bankers and so on. It could have much less of a carbon footprint if it imported subsistence farmers from the Sahel, and exported bankers and lawyers to Africa. But nobody is proposing that’

Alas, Woolas isn’t proposing that. Instead, he seems hell-bent on subjecting us all to the same ghastly philosophy of population control and the warped psychology that drives it, that Connelly describes in his book.

Drawing on a previously untouched wealth of primary evidence (including private letters, minutes, and interviews with surviving actors in these dramas), Connelly follows the global population-control epidemic back to its origins in the USA in the El Niño years of the 1870s. Global climate and colonialism induced catastrophes were met head-on by new, toxic orthodoxies. Nascent eugenics, plus the teachings of Thomas Malthus, and ‘political projects to define nationalism and delimit citizenship through both state policies and popular violence’, as well as ‘faceless bureaucracies that were not even accountable to the federal courts’ (p.37).

Sounds familiar? The recent Queen’s speech, with its promise of even greater Home Office powers, should be a wake-up call for anyone who has still not noticed Britain’s expanding, parallel incarceration system, with its own dedicated networks of reporting centres and special, ever less accountable courts. Woolas’s pronouncements, since his arrival in Parliament as a Mandelson protegé a decade ago, have struck echo after echo from that Edwardian past: not just the obsession with human numbers (and the grandiose promise to limit the UK’s population to under 70 million); but also a textbook obsession with his Asian constituents’ breeding habits (his crusade against first-cousin marriages); and constant, gentle appeals to the threat of popular violence (in his case, from the not-very-popular BNP).

Just as in California in the late Nineteenth-century, all of this is done in the name of that most essential McGuffin of population politics: the ‘Indigenous Working Class’. (The only kind of working class population politicians acknowledge.) Woolas gives voice to their anger, when immigrants are (extremely rarely, he affirms, but mentions it anyway) given million pound houses at taxpayers’ expense; and at Muslim women who divide the community by wearing the hijab. These issues are raised as an ‘unfortunate duty’ that falls to him because others lack the guts to do it. He calls them ‘thorny issues’. We are tempted not to notice his failure to raise other thorny issues, such as the extraordinary shortage of decent housing and jobs in the very constituency he represents.

A shameful history

Today’s population controllers are a scary and powerful lot. But they have a great weakness in their own history, inextricably bound up with the massive, ghastly fertility control campaigns Connelly describes; always aimed at the poor, not just in poor countries, but also in the USA, Sweden and all over the world. It was a war (described and conducted as such, often by military men such as the USA’s General William Draper and China’s Xinzhong Qian) that ruined millions upon millions of lives – yet had no particular effect in the end on numbers: growth was already declining. ‘It turns out that about 90 percent of the difference in fertility rates worldwide derived from something very simple and very stubborn: whether women themselves wanted more or fewer children.’ All the evidence so far suggests that attempts to control world migration are equally futile. Will they meet the same fate, and if so, at whose hands?

At the apparent height of its power, the population control bandwagon suddenly collapsed. First, it hit mounting, massive grassroots resistance; then came the global reproductive rights movement, which utterly routed it at the UN’s Population Conference in Cairo in 1994. Population control became a tar baby. Organisations that had backed coercion, transformed themselves into champions of autonomy overnight. Others changed their names. The American Eugenics Society became the Society for the Study of Social Biology; Eugenics Quarterly became Social Biology. In the UK, in 1988, the Eugenics Society renamed itself The Galton Institute (after the founder of Eugenics, Francis Galton).

Will the wheels fall off ‘managed migration’ in similar fashion? This too is being challenged increasingly by the people it oppresses. And the bigger it gets, the harder it becomes to conceal its shameful underpinnings.

Migration Watch craves the spotlight but also fears it. It has fought hard to stop people knowing that its co-founder, Oxford University’s Professor David Coleman, has been a lifelong member of the Eugenics Society, and one of its high officials during the decades when sterilisation campaigns were at their peak. What, if any, part did he play in all that? He is known to have been a government adviser during the 1980s and examined the then fashionable question of state benefits for single, working-class mothers. But when this aspect of his past was brought to public notice by students in early 2007, his response was not to answer their concerns but to pillory them as ‘tyrannical’. The Daily Telegraph gave him a whole page in which to vent his indignation – which he managed to do without mentioning eugenics once, let alone explaining his role in it.

Increasingly people know about this connection and they cannot help joining the increasingly plentiful dots. Migration Watch’s other autumn coup – getting the imprimatur of a cross-party Parliamentary group (albeit an unofficial one) for their Balanced Migration report – came at the price of public association with anti-abortionist, anti-assisted pregnancy obsessive, Frank Field (not to mention the widely abhorred Nicholas Soames).

All the makings are here for the badly needed, total and indeed comical rout of Woolas, Smith, Green, Coleman, Field and all their friends and minions – and their replacement by people with the guts to tackle the real ‘thorny issue’: the rich.

Bob Hughes, No One Is Illegal

Notes:

Fatal Misconception: the struggle to control world population; Matthew Connelly; Belknap/Harvard University Press 2008. Free sample chapter, here

The quotation above was transcribed from BBC Radio 3 Nightwaves, 19 March 2008

On unaccountable bureaucracies, Connelly cites Adam McKeown’s new book \’Melancholy Order: Asian migration and the globalization of borders, 1837-1937\’

The Woolas interview, ‘Phil Woolas: lifelong fight against racism inspired limit on immigration.’ and comment (Times 18/10/2008) are here and here

For many further sources see

Shiar Youssef\’s analysis, on Indymedia (‘Immigration crunch? The Times’ and BBC’s anti-immigration agendas’) with links to his ‘anti-white racism’ and ‘inbred Muslim’ announcements:

David Osler’s blog \’He\’s not racist, but …\’(21/10/2008)

\’Migrants to earn dole and house\’ _ The Sun, 8 Dec 2008

Workers of the world – welcome!

admin — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Some time in the 1990s, Britain ran out of workers. Or, more precisely, the faster the economy grew, the greater became the shortage of workers with the right skills. It seems the problem will get worse – the livelihood of those who live here will increasingly depend on recruiting complementary workers abroad.

Or you could see it in a different way. The British economy has become too big for the resources available on the territory.The UK has become the centre for global networks that operate far beyond the reach, let alone the knowledge, of any British government. Indeed, most of those who work to produce the ‘British’ output don’t work here geographically and know nothing of any connection to Britain.The old national self-sufficiency – in workers, in goods, in capital (if it ever existed) – has trickled away.

The unskilled

Governments talk a great deal about the need to search abroad for skilled workers (doctors, nurses, engineers, among others) to create a ‘high skill economy’. In fact, the skilled have always been allowed to get round immigration controls.

But the skilled are not the problem. Vast armies of low-skilled workers are needed to make possible the work of the skilled. Think of a hospital and all those thousands – porters, drivers, guards, gardeners, cleaners, canteen and laundry workers and many more – needed to make doctoring and nursing possible. The most notorious shortages of workers are here, not among doctors. The scarcities are worst in the building trades, agriculture, hotels and restaurants, cleaning services, shops, the health service, public transport and so on. The problem is at its most extreme in London and the big cities. There are just not enough native-born workers to keep the show on the road. With an increasingly aged population, the numbers of workers needed in the caring professions will make the shortages of workers much worse.

When the Labour government first came to power, it broke with the old Tory policy of not allowing entry to low skilled migrant workers at all. Special schemes allowed entry to selected low skilled workers for given periods.The economy boomed – employment had never reached such high levels and unemployment record lows.

Then, in May 2004, ten new countries joined the European Union.Workers from the new member states had the right to work anywhere in the EU. Most EU governments opted temporarily to suspend this right (something they are allowed to do for a transitional seven year period). Only Britain, Ireland and Sweden did not – and their economies experienced continued rapid growth. In retrospect, they stole a march on the rest of the EU.

The new EU accessions were a godsend for the government since it was able to allow entry to as many low skilled workers as the economy needed without passing new immigration bills. (They also, in effect, gave an amnesty to all those from eastern Europe working here illegally, something the government said it would never do.) Before that, in addition to the special groups of low-skilled workers allowed entry, labour demand continued to draw in workers from abroad illegally, despite their being treated with horrifying brutality on the borders and gross exploitation once here. And the faster the economy grew, the more workers were pulled in illegally.The white economy was shrinking before the government’s eyes.

The new EU member countries won’t save the British again. The east European economies are beginning to grow quickly and wages there are rising fast. They will try to keep their workers at home and get those in Britain to return.

If the rest of western Europe starts growing quickly, there will be a fierce scramble to grab whatever Polish plumbers, Latvian truck drivers or Lithuanian farm workers are available. Then western Europe will need to recruit Bulgarians, Romanians and Turks.And when the same thing happens there – the supply dries up – employers will have to start trawling for workers beyond the EU. Or illegal migration on a massive scale will make up the difference.

Governments can’t carry on living from hand to mouth, changing the rules every other year so that only lawyers – and traffickers – can find their way through the legal jungle and the black economy booms.

Global labour

What is happening here? Why, suddenly, can’t Britain keep going with its own workers?

The short answer is globalisation – the emergence of a set of global markets that are absorbing the national economies of the world in a single economy, so that it is no longer possible to manage one national patch in isolation from the rest of the world. It is as if Britain in the world is becoming like Leeds or Bristol in the UK. In terms of workers, a global labour market is already refashioning Britain on the inside.

As always under capitalism, the process is blind, out of control. Nobody intended it, foresaw it or managed it. Everybody – including the strongest governments and the multinationals – is dragged along, adjusting, willingly or not, at each stage. Being blind, the potential to damage the vulnerable is enormous, especially to undermine the progress of the last centuries in protecting workers.

Governments generally hate the process since they lose their old power to manage their economies without reference to anyone else.They particularly want to keep separate their own captive share of the world’s population, vital in the capacity to fight wars. Migration, they fear, muddles national loyalties and confuses the young men and women that can be summoned when needed to go out and kill foreigners. Xenophobia is not by accident the default setting of every established state. It goes with the attempt to drill us into uniformity to fight (even though the day of mass armies – like Trident submarines – is long since gone).

The fears of the government at the mixing of population has produced a decade of Labour ministers wittering on about the need for ‘integration’ – forcing immigrants to assimilate, to become ‘British’ (whatever that is).

The argument is that if people circulate freely, if they mix, they won’t know who they are and to what state they should be loyal. The power of state violence is undermined.That is the implicit agenda involved in immigration controls – not locking people out but locking them in.

For a couple of centuries, the national state forced the inhabitants and capital into alignment with its own interests. It invented the myth of the nation and pretended it had existed through all the centuries in which king and nobles rode roughshod over the rest.

But the operations of capitalism itself have now undermined this national order. Capital has escaped and gone global.The population is going to follow suit. More and more foreigners will live and work in Britain; more and more Brits will live and work abroad – or, in both cases, circulate (as they do now within Britain).Transnational families, living in many countries, will come to be the norm.And the mixing will undermine the power of the state to make national war.

Note that this is not about the old internationalism of the left, cooperation between nations, but about the abolition of nation states, the melding of us all into one world association of peoples – who don’t have to kill each other just to keep going.

Loosening controls

The loosening up of the migration system is excellent news for those of us who have always opposed immigration controls. But easing controls has exposed some real problems. It has exposed the abominable treatment of many migrant workers, especially those who migrate and work illegally (let alone refugees fleeing terror). This bad treatment, in turn, undermines conditions and pay for nativeborn workers, especially in low-paid jobs. And that contributes to support for the toxic ultra right-wing parties who would pull down the roof on us all.

The fierce competition for skilled workers (especially doctors and nurses) is also stripping the third world of its scarcest skills. Africa, with a quarter of the world’s ailments, has only 3 per cent of the world’s medical care.This competition is now coming to dominate the recruitment of foreign students – make them pay full fees for their education (and so subsidise the native born students) and then, after they’ve paid for their training, nail them down by offering them work and residence permits.

But loosening migration controls has also opened up new opportunities. Because of differences in the cost of living, a low income in Britain is a high income in, say, India – if you can earn here and live there.That explains why a young Warsaw doctor might think about doing a temporary job as a cleaner in London (‘deskilling’). Of course, the opposite applies: if you settle permanently in London, a low income will make sure you are and stay poor – even if you have a medical degree.The best deal for the migrant is temporary circulation so you can earn in one place and spend in another (or work, save and go home).

Remittances – workers sending money home to their families – have become a gigantic flow, the biggest mechanism in the world for the redistribution of income from rich to poor.They are increasing rapidly. This year, it is reckoned, the total will top $300 billion – nearly $200 billion of it to the third world, almost three times the value of official aid. And that is only what is officially recorded – in total it may be $400 billion, and in value terms, very much more (if you allow for those differences in cost of living). So western immigration controls are a most powerful obstacle to the reduction of poverty in the third world.

Migration is good in another way. It is not just that people find jobs, earn money and keep their families going at home. They also often learn new skills (including a foreign language) and gain valuable work experience, along with broader horizons. The professionals get much enriched skills and experience; temporary deskilling for some while they work abroad may go with skill enrichment for many others. If people circulated freely instead of getting stuck in one place or another, the third world could benefit from migration even more than from remittances. And if it were more organised, migration could become a deliberate strategy to raise massively the skills of the third world – and that could do something serious for the reduction of world poverty and the drive to achieve world full employment.

Practical reforms

There have always been people on the left who understood instinctively the reactionary role of immigration controls in enhancing the power of the state. But they have had no way of turning this principle into practical reforms, steps that could culminate in freedom for people to move about the world as they wish. That agenda seems both utopian and plain dotty in present electoral terms. Indeed, the left itself has often been imbued with nationalism, lining up with the state against immigrant workers in defence of jobs for the native born.

But now capitalism itself – those global markets – is beginning to force the freeing of peoples to move, to weaken the barriers between countries. Do we oppose it or welcome it – and bend all efforts to protect those most endangered by the process, migrants and native-born low paid workers?

We are already well into the transition to a single world economy. Over the next 50 years it will be accomplished. But as usual in these things, the old order will fight bitterly to hang on, destroying those who try to anticipate the process, to prepare so that people need not be sacrificed.

In an ideal world, the receiving and sending governments, with trade unions and NGOs, would set up a permanent Worker Recruitment Service to do three things:

Search out workers anywhere in the world willing – and brave enough – to migrate to work abroad, to link them to employers and to protect them (especially against the scourge of debt bondage) from the point of departure, during the time they work abroad and until they return;

Make sure each worker is able, at the same time, to undertake training while they are abroad – they all become students;

Ensure migrants do not undermine the pay and conditions of the native-born, receiving exactly the same deal as everybody else.

Implicitly this assumes temporary circulation – people can get work abroad without going into permanent exile, without being forced either to emigrate or immigrate, much as they can and do inside Britain today.

Guest-worker schemes have a bad name but, in principle, if policed properly, they provide an alternative to the much worse horrors of irregular migration and trafficking. This is not an end to immigration controls, but a halfway reform, a means to facilitate legal circulation on a scale where, at the end, the issue of immigration no longer matters. What about the fears of suburban Britain that once migrants have got in, they will stay put – and ‘live off welfare’? In fact, most people hate exile and can’t wait to get home – with the money for an operation, for school bills, for a house.

What makes migrants stay? Certainly not access to miserable social security payments or the National Health Service. The most important reason is keeping access to work. Once the migrant has got past immigration controls, if they want to keep working, they have to settle. Much evidence shows that as soon as migrants get the right to circulate, to come and go (as the Poles and others from eastern Europe did in 2004), then people come and go. If it was possible to circulate, most people would prefer to stay living at home and go abroad temporarily only to work.

States still react to this new mobility by stirring the auto-destruct instincts of the frightened, attempting to militarise borders and murdering those who try to cross them. But there is hope from another source: the actions of migrant workers. Despite the danger of arrest and expulsion, millions of those working illegally in the United States went on strike on 1 May 2006 to show how mighty America depends on their labour to survive. That is the voice of the new world working class, demanding its place in the new world order, demanding – what shameless impudence! – equality of rights with the native-born population.Nigel Harris is professor emeritus of the economics of the city at University College London