Paper for International Meeting of European Communist Parties 5-6 July 2007
Communist Party of Britain
A policy for the British Labour Movement on migrant labour and immigration
Introduction
Issues of immigration, asylum and migrant labour have deliberately been kept at the centre of political debate by reactionary elements in the media, the main political parties and the state, and by the fascist British National Party. This continual barrage has led to a widespread perception in our society — including in some sections of the working class — that Britain is being 'swamped' by other ethnic groups and nationalities, that immigrants and migrant workers are 'bogus' asylum seekers who receive privileged access to our public and welfare services, and that the so-called 'white British' are the victims of a foreign invasion.
These arguments are nothing new in themselves — they are rooted in the fear that the bourgeois classes essentially hold of the very poor or the 'great unwashed'. In Victorian Britain, faced with the prospect of reckless breeding by the idle poor and 'criminal classes', the forced sterilisation of sections of the working class was discussed in polite and ruling circles. In the 1950s, during the first wave of mass black immigration to Britain, reactionary politicians and pundits claimed that the country was being 'swamped' with violent and shiftless 'colonials' — propaganda which helped to revive the fascist right in Britain. Only a short time before, the Nazis had portrayed the Jews as 'rats' who were breeding like vermin and polluting German society. In the 1980s and 1990s, Thatcherite politiciand and the press were obsessed with the idea of an 'underclass' with its 'culture of dependency' on state benefits, of the feckless poor breeding indiscriminately at the expense of everyone else.
Such one-sided and xenophobic attitudes help conceal the role playing by the capitalist state and by capital itself in creating the economic and social problems afflicting working people and their families. The acceptance of reactionary, anti-immigrant sentiments by sections of the white working class in Britain is one of the biggest obstacles to the development of basic working class and political consciousness. As the Marxist party of the labour movement, therefore, the Communist Party has a particular responsibility to develop and present an analysis of these issues, one which serves the interests of the working class rather than those of monopoly capital, the right and the fascists.
1. IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM — THE FACTS
Immigration Firstly, we should disentangle facts from fiction. The scale and character of immigration needs to be put into perspective.
Every year, around 12 million people enter Britain. Most of these are short-term visitors, passengers in transit or British citizens returning from short trips abroad.
In 2005 (the latest year for which detailed figures are available), the number of people officially classified as immigrants ie. people who arrived here to live, work or study for at least one year, totalled 565,000. About one-quarter of these were foreign students, one quarter employees, and another one-fifth were people accompanying them or joining family already here. Most foreign immigrants to Britain intend to return home after a year or more here, half of them within two years.
TABLE 1: Immigration (thousands) by last country of residence [1]
Old ('white') Asian sub-
Total EU C'wealth continent Net inflow
1997 326 100 53 30 47
2002 513 89 88 46 153
2003 513 101 96 58 151
2004 582 139 100 89 223
2005 565 180 93 86 185
Official figures show that:
• immigration has been rising steadily since 1981, but now shows signs of levelling off
• about one in six immigrants is a British citizen, usually returning from Europe, north America or the Old Commonwealth to live or work here
• one-quarter of immigrants are students arriving for formal study
• more immigrants into Britain come from the Old ('white') Commonwealth of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa than from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanks.
• asylum seekers make up just 5 per cent of immigrants to Britain each year
• because British citizens enjoy widespread rights to settle in other countries, they make up more than half of the emigrants from Britain each year
• the average net inflow of people into Britain is around 200,000 a year - about 0.3 per cent of the home population.
However, official figures do not provide the full statistical picture, because some immigrants enter Britain illegally while others 'disappear' having failed to comply with the terms of their entry as visitors, employees or asylum applicants.
A Home Office report estimated between 310,000 and 570,000 illegal immigrants in Britain in 2001. After a vigorous but selective — and in many instances callous — policy of deportation since, the figure is unlikely to be higher today. The central estimate of 430,000 represents about 0.7 per cent of the British population, compared with a proportion of 2.5 per cent in the United States. [2]
Although many of those targeted for deportation are African or Asian, the bulk of illegal 'overstayers' working here are white north Americans, South Africans, Australians and New Zealanders. They pass through immigration control largely unchecked and then promptly disappear to work illegally in the pubs and clubs of London or further afield, in education or in the voluntary sector. The lack of prominence given to this fact is mostly due to them looking and at least to some extent sounding like white British. It therefore has to be recognised that racism and xenophobia — a loathing of foreigners — is central to the whole debate around immigration and migrant workers.
According to the Institute for Public Policy Research, tracking down and deporting all or even most illegal migrants in Britain would cost nearly £5 billion. Granting them an amnesty, on the other hand, thereby turning 'strangers into citizens', would enable the Treasury to collect at least £1 billion a year in tax and national insurance payments. [3]
Unfortunately, discussing this and other policy issues in a clear and rational way has been made very difficult because of the efforts of right-wing politicians (including New Labour ministers) and the monopoly mass media to whip up public fears for political gain. Reactionary groups such as Migration Watch and the Freedom Association specialise in challenging and manipulating immigration statistics in order to promote a racist or xenophobic agenda.
They are fully aware that 'playing the numbers game' helps divert attention from the real-life human experience and suffering which stands behind every statistic. It is important to have figures which help to establish facts, but the labour movement approach should never allow them to obliterate the realities of human exploitation and oppression.
The right-wing approach to immigration becomes even more dangerous when politicians and pundits deliberately stir other inflammatory issues such as crime and terrorism into the mix.
Thus, for example, Rear Admiral Chris Parry warned the Royal United Services Institute last year that Britain and Western civilisation face waves of 'reverse colonisation' from Third World and Muslim immigrants ('like the 5th century Roman empire facing the Goths and the Vandals'). These apparently include thousands of Islamic jihadists ('holy warriors') who would not assimilate because they now had access to the internet and cheap international phone calls. One result, he feared, would be a Western Europe overrun by disaffected youth gangs and organised criminal activity. Parry's demented ravings would be of less significance if it was not for the fact that he heads a Ministry of Defence research unit tasked with identifying future threats to British society. [4]
Asylum Distinct but related to issues of migrant labour, asylum-seekers and refugees are another aspect of immigration question. As such, they are subject to the same barrage of prejudice and disinformation. In this case, reactionary politicians and sections of the mass media seek to emphasise the problem of so-called 'bogus' asylum-seekers who have not fled persecution but who, instead, are in Britain to work illegally or to claim state benefits. The real issues are, of course, more complicated than that.
Britain is obliged by the 1951 Geneva Convention to provide refuge to those with a genuine fear of persecution by the state or who are not given sufficient protection by their state from third parties, whether on the basis of ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion or political affiliation (actual or perceived). The authenticity of any claim cannot, of course, be pre-judged before the application for asylum status. Only after a claim is made within Britain can the claimant can be interviewed, their case examined and a decision reached. The claimant also has the right of appeal against such a decision. Technically speaking, there is therefore no such thing as a 'bogus' asylum-seeker, only asylum seekers whose claims are deemed subsequently to be either well-founded or not. It is simply impossible to judge beforehand whether or not claims are made in bad faith. Instead, the substance of each case can only be decided on its own merits.
The reality is that most people who seek asylum in Britain do not get past first base. Their applications are rejected in their home countries, and transport operators now face severe penalties for bringing people to Britain without the requisite papers giving them right of entry.
Of those who arrive in Britain, many are among the 30,000-plus people each year who are turned away at the point of entry.
Four-fifths of those who apply for asylum at ports or within Britain have their cases rejected either initially or after an appeal. In 2006, for example, only 4,402 applicants out of 23,520 were granted permanent or temporary residence here. Another 3,775 applicants won appeals against earlier decisions to remove them. That is a total of 8,185 (around 10,000 including dependants) achieving asylum status last year — see Table 2 below.
Of the 179,120 people who were granted permanent settlement in Britain in 2005, only 19 per cent were asylum-related.
TABLE 2: Asylum cases decided in Britain [5]
asylum applications cases granted cases refused % cases
and appeals asylum or stay asylum or stay granted [6]
1997 53,590 8,280 48,855 14.5
2002 148,535 45,145 104,835 30.1
2003 131,130 27,920 121,545 18.7
2004 89,935 17,135 89,200 16.1
2005 59,650 11,030 52,795 17.3
2006 39,395 8,185 34,335 18.9
What these figures show is that:
• the number of asylum-seekers has fallen steadily since its peak in 2002, and are now below the level when New Labour took office
• fewer than one in five asylum seekers gain permanent or discretionary leave to stay in Britain
• the number of asylum seekers and their dependants granted residence last year (around 10,000) amounts to less than 0.02 per cent of the population.
During the period where their claim is being examined or their appeal heard, applicants have the right to live in reasonable conditions. But asylum seekers are not allowed to work, and they are not allowed to gain access to mainstream social benefits. They are instead only given accommodation in properties owned by the National Asylum Support Service (NASS), and given financial support by them, often in the form of 'tokens' for food that can only be redeemed at some supermarkets. They are 'dispersed' around the country in order that large numbers of asylum seekers aren't condensed in certain areas, but this often entails asylum seekers being isolated targets of racism in the dispersal areas.
Also of concern are the detention centres used to contain some non-dispersed asylum seekers while their claims are being considered or they are awaiting deportation. Some 2,600 asylum seekers are currently detained in these centres, and the government aims to increase that total to 4,000 with the expansion and creation of new centres. The overcrowding at these centres, the heavy-handed private security firms which run them, and the turbulent mix of nationalities at the centres have often boiled over into riots, as has recently been seen at the detention centre in Harmondsworth. Even more disturbing is the fact that whole families are often detained, making Britain one of few countries in the world willing to imprison children.
The other main determining factor in asylum claims is the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights. This convention rules that removal from Britain would be illegal if it breached certain human rights, such as the right to physical integrity (i.e. the right not to be tortured), the right to family life, etc. This has become problematic for the New Labour government for two reasons: firstly, that due to the complete failure of the Home Office to deal effectively with new asylum claims speedily between 1999-2002, most applicants had developed deep roots in Britain by the time their claims had been considered, and thus removing them would breach the Human Rights Convention; and secondly, that deporting failed asylum seekers to some states would certainly result in their torture upon return.
The latter problem has tied the New Labour government in knots as it has hastily moved the political goalposts in order to satisfy its own short-term interests. There was a fundamental contradiction, for example, between Blair's public condemnation of the Zimbabwean government on the one side, and the attempts made by the Home Office to remove failed asylum seekers to Zimbabwe despite fears that they would be tortured and imprisoned upon return, even fighting a prolonged legal battle to force through a resumption of deportations. Similarly, the government is keen to turn a blind eye to the certain torture that would occur when suspected 'terror suspects' are deported to their home states.
New Labour's knee-jerk legislation has further destabilised the asylum system in Britain. Only four major bills were passed through Parliament on asylum and immigration in the post-war period between 1945 and 1979, and two major and two minor ones during the 18 years of Tory rule after that. New Labour has managed four major bills in just ten years since then, each one contradicting the last in a flurry of badly-written legislation.
It should also be pointed out that large numbers of refugees have come here in recent years as the direct result of British military intervention in their countries. Between 1998 and 2002, for instance, the biggest number of applicants for asylum in Britain each year were from Yugoslavia, Yugoslavia once more, Iraq, Afganistan and then Iraq again. Not suprisingly, then, it suits the New Labour government to create a hostile climate around asylum seekers to divert attention from the role it has played — alongside the US — in creating the conditions from which people are fleeing.
At the same time, Britain has provided refuge for only a tiny proportion of the 2.5 million refugees driven out of Afghanistan and Iraq by US and British military intervention. As the world's fifth wealthiest country, we are a long way behind such Third World countries as Syria, Pakistan, Chad, Iran, Uganda and Tanzania when it comes to providing shelter for the world's refugees. [7]
What is needed now is a fundamental break from the right-wing and New Labour approach to issues of asylum, immigration and migrant labour. This should begin with an analysis of how and why they arise in capitalist society.
2. CAPITAL AND THE 'FREE' MOVEMENT OF LABOUR
Many workers who leave their local community, friends and even families to seek work elsewhere do not so out of choice or a 'spirit of adventure'. They have been compelled by economic, social or political conditions to emigrate. Hence to refer to what is anyway a wide range of different circumstances as the 'free movement of labour' is misleading. More often than not, especially when it occurs on a mass scale, the movement of labour is the product of direct or indirect coercion.
The coerced movement of labour has always been essential to capitalism. Over 500 years ago, subsistence farmers were forced off their land in England to create the world’s first permanent labour reserve. The process continues today in Asia, Africa and Latin American under the guise of International Monetary Fund and World Bank-financed land reform and structural adjustment programmes.
Without such a 'free' market workers could not be forced to sell their labour power for less than its value. Workers, on the other hand, have always sort to regulate the labour market and limit capital’s freedom of movement. Only in this way has it been possible to reduce the level of exploitation and to protect working class communities. In face of this, capital will constantly seek to move geographically. As Engels pointed out over a century ago, as soon as capital has established factories in one place and the workers have become organised, it will seek to shift investment elsewhere. Capital’s freedom is always labour’s coercion. When the jobs go, workers have to move.
In consequence, the past 300 years have witnessed migrations on a massive scale, many dwarfing anything seen today. In the fifteen years after 1845 four million people left Ireland — a million coming to Britain — in the wake of a politically-engineered famine. Over that century several million people left Britain for the United States and British-controlled territories overseas as capital was exported from Britain. In the 17th and 18th centuries, when capital wanted to safeguard the labour reserve at home, Britain forcibly transported slave labour from other countries to secure its colonial raw materials.Tens of thousands of Irish were deported to the West Indies in the 1650s. And up to 10 million people were seized from their homes in Africa and taken to America as slaves between 1600 and 1800.
Accordingly, progressive workers' movements have always sought to control capital movements and regulate the labour market — by enforcing the rate for the job, demanding equal treatment for all and opposing any attempt by employers to divide workers by race, gender or nationality. Some of the greatest trade union battles in Britain during the past century have been to prevent monopoly capitalists having the freedom to destroy working class communities by moving capital from shipyards, mines and manufacturing and investing it elsewhere.
Even in terms of orthodox 'business' economics, it can be argued that migration has to be combined with the regulation of the labour market if it is to promote genuine economic growth.
In terms of such economics, it would be argued that migration is generally beneficial to countries receiving immigrants because they will typically be people of working age, usually young, who will bring additional skills and working capacity. Correspondingly, the country losing them will have borne the costs of bringing them up, educating them and providing initial skills and will then lose the contribution they would otherwise have made to the home economy.
But the benefit to the host country’s economy will only be in circumstances where the labour market is regulated. Economic growth will only be positive where immigrant workers secure work without displacing existing workers and do so at the going rate. Immigrants will then generate additional wealth, pay taxes to sustain for services and, through their own expenditure, produce additional economic demand.
If, on the other hand, migrant workers displace existing workers at the same rate of pay, then the effect will be negative. There will be no additional generation of wealth and funds will have to found to support those displaced — whose skills will also tend to deteriorate.
If immigrant workers displace existing workers at a lower rate of pay, then the effect will be strongly negative. There will be less economic demand than there was before, and hence less stimulus to investment, and the economy will have to bear the costs of sustaining displaced workers.
If immigrant workers displace existing workers in circumstances where there is a sharp rise in the rate of exploitation (radically inferior conditions, longer hours, much lower pay and lower social benefits), then the economic consequences will be heavily negative and structurally detrimental for economic development:
• investment will tend to flow into areas that are labour-intensive, to seek the higher rate of exploitation deriving from these workers, and away from capital-intensive industries
• capital will reduce investment in training and skills on the assumption that these can be drawn without cost from elsewhere
• there will be a sharp reduction in internal demand
• there will be an increase in income inequality between capital and labour
• the long-run consequence of lower investment in technological investment in capital intensive industries and in capital goods will be a tendency for the rate of profit to decline and the economy to move into crisis.
Capital’s response to the mass migration of Irish workers to Britain in the later 19th century is generally seen to have pushed the economy towards labour-intensive rather than capital-intensive investment. Consequently, it was an important factor in the slowing of technological growth in Britain compared with that in the United States and Germany.
At the beginning of the 21st century, it is clear that there are strenuous efforts being made in Europe and the EU to ensure that migration brings maximum profits to capital — but with long term consequences that will be strongly negative for economic growth unless the trade union movement can succeed in enforcing collective bargaining that protects the rights of all workers.
A key part of this battle is to win an understanding of the role of the European Union and how migration is being organised in the interests of big business.
3. MIGRANT WORKERS AND THE EUROPEAN UNION
The collapse of the socialist states Patterns of migration have undergone seismic shifts in the last 15 years. Immigration staff would have never have seen an Albanian passport, for example, before 1992 and now they are an increasingly frequent sight. The central cause of the changing international situation and changing attitudes relating to immigration has been the collapse of the socialist states of eastern Europe. This has had a major effect for five reasons:
Firstly, the political usefulness of refugees and migrant workers from the socialist bloc for the ruling classes in the West had ceased. In the Cold War climate, the acquisition of 'defectors' or 'political refugees' from the socialist countries was seen by the mainstream media as evidence of the superiority of capitalism, and as essential to securing information and resources. In fact the term 'asylum' and 'refugee' in the Cold War period were almost solely applied in the popular imagination to political dissidents from the Soviet Union and socialist bloc. Two decades later and the political stock of such terms is overwhelmingly negative. The inference must be that in a post-Soviet world, refugees no longer provide the West with political capital, although (as we shall see later) they could be a rich source of surplus-value.
Secondly, the near-simultaneous collapse of a dozen neighbouring states spanning two continents had several practical implications. For obvious reasons, border control in the socialist countries (particularly on borders with states in western Europe) were solid, and the political turmoil of 1989-91 saw several thousand people from these states move illegally to other states (the most obvious example being the Hungarian/Austrian 'peace fayre' which saw the start of the fall of the German Democratic Republic).
It must be said here that opening the old borders was often a deliberate and politically-expedient policy from the new pro-Western governments in these states, and that many of those migrating were people returning to their ethnic nation-states (ethnic Magyars returning to Hungary from Transylvania, Poles leaving the Ukraine for Poland, etc.). Almost certainly, however, thousands went west to work in the EU illegally or legally, often due to the complete collapse of the economies in their home states. Restrictions on peoples such as the Roma were lifted, and so their travel around Europe was inevitable. Of greater practical impact was the collapse of borders within the former Soviet Union, especially in the Caucasus and Central Asia. This effectively meant that there were no longer borders between Afghanistan and the Ukraine, or between Turkey and Iran and Eurasia. It was the very collapse of the Soviet Union that the US and NATO had sought which made this mass migration possible.
Thirdly, the fragmentation of states which had previously been held together by socialist government and internationalist solidarity saw an upsurge in state violence and the persecution of minorities. The new ruling elites in the former socialist countries were as committed to an ethno-nationalist ideology as they were to neo-liberal economic policy, as can be seen by the actions of the Croatian government in Bosnia, the Romanian government's persecution of ethnic Hungarians, the Czech government's persecution of the Roma, the Russian war in Chechnya, and the separatist Russian ethnic minority in Moldova. This, along with a subsequent rise in ethnic minority nationalist movements such as the KLA in Kosovo, also saw mass forced migration as well as thousands fleeing persecution by the state.
Fourthly, the collapse of the socialist state apparatus, and the subsequent crash in the economies of these countries, led to an impoverished and demoralised working class who became desperate to escape states which were quickly becoming basket-case economies. The collapse also led to a substantial increase in organised crime, as 'mafia' style gangsterism made hay in the void left by socialist law enforcement. This has produced an industry devoted to the illegal export of labour to super-exploitative work in the West, including sexual slavery for women. The scale and influence of these gangster operations is massive and poses some of the greatest social problems linked to the issue of migration and immigration.
Fifthly, the majority of the new governments of the former socialist countries soon applied for membership of both NATO and the European Union. The latter, in particular, would have a large say in the policies of these states and in the fate of their citizens.
The strategy of the European Union Economically, the EU is deflationary and regressive. Its key economic regulator is unemployment. The convergence terms of the Maastricht Treaty, the remit of the European Central Bank and the provisions of the EU Growth and Stability Pact all state that the primary aim of monetary policy shall be to minimise inflation below 2 per cent. In plain language this means that whenever wages are placing an ‘inflationary’ pressure on profits, interest rates are pushed up to cut investment, increase unemployment and hence reduce workers’ bargaining power.
A key imperative of EU economic management is therefore to make this mechanism work quickly and without detrimental effects on the overall rate of growth and capital accumulation. In order to do this, the areas of highest unemployment must be made to impact speedily on the areas of highest wage pressure across the EU’s very big and diverse geographical area. Hence, the drive to create a single labour market, to make it fully flexible and mobile across Europe and to remove any restrictions imposed by collective bargaining at national level. Hence also, the priority given to integrating the new accession states on terms that created the maximum amount of surplus labour by driving workers off the land and out of previously state-owned industries.
Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, and Slovenia joined the EU on May 1 2004. Romania and Bulgaria joined the EU at the beginning of 2007. The EU has had a massive impact on the economies of the prospective member states, and has been in a unique position to influence the social policies of all of its member states. This has impacted upon the issues of migration in the following ways:
• The prospective member states all had to meet strict accession criteria on the economy, human rights, democratic transparency, corruption and state effectiveness. In practice, however, some criteria were more strictly enforced than others.
The main criterion for economic convergence with the EU was the reduction in the state sector, which was considered especially important by Brussels due to the large state-owned enterprises and industries in these countries.
In some cases, such as Hungary, this state sector was already much reduced and would instead bear comparison with Sweden, for example, rather than state sectors in other former socialist states. But this bore little relation to the diktats of the accession criteria. The state sector in these states was therefore reduced at an extremely fast pace and often entailed summary privatisation of state industries at vastly deflated prices to foreign capital. The result was that in states such as the Czech Republic, the state sector now only accounts for 10 per cent of Gross Domestic Product, which if anything makes the state sector underdeveloped in comparison with France, Germany and the Britain (where the state sector still accounts for between 40-60 per cent of GDP).
The EU was imposing neo-liberal economic criteria upon the prospective member states that would have caused massive social unrest in any other established member, and was forcing them through at great haste. The results were disastrous: unemployment, social unrest, racist attacks, premature death, infant mortality and HIV/AIDS increased exponentially as the GDP of these countries plummeted to an extent where they are only now regaining the GDP that they had in 1989. Evidently, the aim of this was to devastate the sectors of those societies — such as trade unions and other working class institutions, women's rights, social benefits and state industries — which would challege the influence of foreign capital, and make these countries less competitive. These nations now had low wages and worse social conditions than other members of the EU, and the logical reaction of some of the citizens in those states was to leave their native country to find employment in the more affluent member states.
Of course, a political backlash to these policies occurred at various stages during the 1990s, with the election of communist or former-communist governments; these governments (such as in Poland, Slovakia, and Romania) often put in place measures to mitigate the effects of neo-liberalism and to defend state enterprises and state property from foreign ownership. This was referred to by neo-liberal observers as 'retrenchment'; and was discussed as if it was merely an expression of nostalgia, rather than the legitimate expression of the interests of working people.
The EU has proved to be less stringent in protecting civil rights in these new states. The current Polish government has recently tabled motions to ban homosexuality and to have Jesus Christ recognised as the King of Poland; discrimination against Roma and national minority groups is widespread in eastern Europe; in some countries, socialist or Communist organisations and symbols are banned — all without rebuke from the European Union.
• The European Union officially has no internal borders, and individual citizens of the member states have the apparent right to move and live freely around the EU.
The only border controls to which this is subjected are at natural borders such as the British Isles or at the borders with non-EU states, as well as traffic into European airports from around the globe. Citizens also have the apparent right to work or buy property in any member state of the EU, and to move capital around Europe with little hindrance.
The extent to which member states comply with these demands varies as some states (such as Britain) have specific opt-outs on key issues, and can therefore amend EU policy to suit the needs of their own capital and for domestic political consumption. Furthermore, while the supposedly 'universal' neo-liberal values of the EU apparently protect the rights of its citizens, these rights are far from equally applied to all.
So Britain, with its natural borders and its opt-out from key sections of EU law, has been able to apply these rules differently to citizens from the new EU member states in terms of rights to residency and employment.
The current situation is therefore of a three-tier workforce in the EU, with the workers of the established members states free to buy property and reside anywhere in the EU (including, for example, holiday homes in Bulgaria and Romania); the workers of the accession states limited in their employment by the need to apply for a work permit; and workers from the latest, third tier of EU states whose employment in Britain has been limited to construction work and meat-rendering by the Home Office. In addition to that is a fourth tier of illegal workers from non-EU states who provide labour in scandalously low-paid sectors of the economy without any labour rights whatsoever.
This has in fact created an internal market for labour within the EU, where the employment rights of migrant workers can be revised by member states to suit their own political requirements. Therefore, depending on the dearth of the wages required, the requirements for employment can be amended as the established member states see fit. This is as blatant an admission of discrimination against migrant workers as the EU can supply, with workers being forced by the rules of the state itself to work in lower-paid, deregulated industries for less than native workers — or else left to be exploited by the black market.
• The European Union, having largely created a situation where mass migration was inevitable, and having created a three-tier employment system within the EU, has seen the standard of wages across the EU fluctuate depending on the nationality of the worker and the state in which he or she is employed.
It follows from this that wages for workers from eastern Europe are substantially lower than those in the more established states, and also that these workers are competing in the same labour market. The undercutting of wages, terms and conditions of the indigenous workforce inevitably follows, and the subsequent undermining of all institutions whose aim is to improve conditions for the working class. This is a key part of the neo-liberal project of the EU, using migrant workers to weaken the bargaining position of organised labour in areas precisely where it is strongest — France, Germany and Britain.
The revised EU Services Directive takes this policy to its next logical step. Although the directive no longer states that businesses registered in one member state can employ workers in another member state under the legal conditions of the ‘country of origin’, it requires member states to remove all legal impediments to firms from other countries and fails to impose any requirement on such firms to maintain a permanent establishment or to keep records.
Any trade unionist aware of the current problems faced by immigrant workers hired by contractors and agencies in accession states will immediately realise the consequences. Currently such workers usually work under two contracts, one for their country of origin and one for this country. In the future the original contract will be binding and there will be no records available in this country by which to identify legal breaches of health and safety or minimum wage payments. The controls exercised by agencies and contractors already represent a serious obstacle to labour organisation. This position will be made much worse when the EU Services Directive comes into force in January 2009.
Now, however, the EU Commission proposes to go even further – as outlined in the 2006 Green Paper Modernising Labour Law for the Challenges of the 21st Century. [8] This document, followed by the White Paper in June 2007, proposes a direct attack on collective bargaining rights and on the contractual position of all workers.
It does so ostensibly to overcome the ‘segmented’ labour force which it itself has created and to ensure that the interests of the workers in the bottom segment are not detrimentally affected by the ‘privileged’ contractual position secured by those workers’ with collective bargaining rights. It therefore proposes to remove negotiated rights to permanent employment at national level and to replace it by individual contractual rights that will apply to all workers across the EU. This would compromise all existing rights to permanent employment contracts and in turn give all workers rights to some limited form of unemployment benefit relief ‘conditional on’ seeking work. This new system is described as ‘flexicurity’. It is precisely what the French trade union movement forced the French government to abandon in 2006.
Taken together with the impact of the EU Services Directive, the proposed new regulations on labour law would massively reduce the bargaining power of organised labour, particularly in the public sector, and complete the creation of a fully ‘flexible’ labour market across the EU. The intention is to ensure that what is effectively forced economic migration is used as an employers’ weapon to push down wages and working conditions across the European Union.
Britain's 'managed migration' policy The system by which migrant workers take up employment in Britain is far from the ad-hoc 'swarm' which is presented by the monopoly media. In effect, employment is still restricted to certain spheres and permission has to be obtained from the Home Office. Although workers officially have the right to work and reside in any EU member state, this is tightly controlled so that British citizenship and indefinite leave to remain are not given to migrant workers as a matter of course. In practice, there is a world of difference between being beyond immigration control in Britain and being able to reside here permanently, much as there is a big difference between being free to take up employment and being free to take up any employment.
Barriers were set up to prevent workers from the new EU member states coming to work in Britain after their accession in May 2004. These were in the form of a 'visa' for which migrant workers had to apply on arrival, and which ascertained what skills they had and what employment they were suitable for prior to them being free to take up employment here. This process channelled migrant workers into unskilled manual labour at a rate and level set by the government, according to the needs of British business. This, if anything, was more restrictive than regulations which applied to nationals from other EU member states or countries such as Australia or the US, who could take part-time employment on their visas with little hindrance.
Even harsher restrictions were applied to nationals from Romania and Bulgaria on their accession to the EU, with a special unit being set up within the Home Office specifically to deal with visa applications from these countries, and employment being restricted to jobs more commonly associated with seasonal or unskilled, poorly-paid agricultural and factory work.
For workers from non-EU states, applications for a work permit must be submitted to Work Permits UK (WPUK), a unit within the Home Office whose mission statement is to 'serve business'. It is the employer who applies for the permit and who sponsors the worker, and the decision on whether or not to grant the permit is based upon 'business needs' and the case made by the employer.
All of these processes underline how both the number of migrant workers and the type of employment offered are manipulated by the state to meet the needs of business. This is a situation injurious both to the British worker, who is being undercut in a systematic way within certain industries, and the migrant worker who is channelled into low-paid employment at the behest of capital.
Other workers are even less fortunate. Between the 'managed migration' of the government's current policy and the gangmasters or 'snakeheads' exporting labour to Britain is the casualised, unorganised, unofficial market in labour which sees the hospitality and tourism industries almost wholly staffed by migrant workers, often illegally and beyond the reach of current employment laws. Such levels of unfettered exploitation would simply not be tolerated by the labour movement if they applied to British workers.
People trafficking The British government and state devote far greater resources to detecting and removing failed asylum seekers than to preventing the illegal trafficking of labour, including of women sold into sexual slavery. The criminal trafficking of people is run not only from the home nation of those concerned (particularly in eastern Europe), but also from Britain. One of the worst examples of this was the case of the Chinese cockle pickers in Morecombe Bay, 23 of whom died in 2004 while being illegally employed by a British gangmaster. Similar tragedies have included the death in 2000 of 58 Chinese asylum seekers smuggled into Britain in the back of a van, who suffocated due to intense overcrowding.
In response, the New Labour government has concentrated its puny efforts on tackling only a small number of the most ruthless traffickers and gangmasters, along with measures to tighten the controls and penalties relating to illegal immigration. The licensing of gangmasters has been restricted to a limited number of sectors (mainly agriculture, shellfish gathering and associated processes).
Meanwhile, the widespread and routine super-exploitation of migrant workers is allowed to continue through low pay, long hours, inadequate or non-existent contracts of employment, sub-standard accommodation, illegal or excessive deductions from wages, summary dismissal and the denial of such basic employment rights as paid holidays and maternity leave. Little is being done to extend and enforce rights for migrant workers, whether or not they are here legally.
These and other instances demonstrate that the British state repeatedly fails in its duty to protect vulnerable immigrants. Rather, the priority is to make migration meet the needs of British business. Such incidents remind us that migrant workers are among the most vulnerable and exploited sections of British society — something usually absent from their portrayal in the mainstream mass media.
Questions could also be asked about the effectiveness of the EU in protecting its borders when it is in the interests of the most vulnerable to do so.
Equally scandalous is the failure of the British government and state agencies to deal resolutely with the criminal gangs who deal in the forced prostitution of women and children. Little effort has been put into discovering the scale of the problem — wholly inadequate Home Office 'research' suggests that there were 4,000 women working in the sex industry as the result of coercive trafficking in 2003, which is almost certainly an under-estimate. The government cannot even provide basic information about the number, type and outcome of criminal prosecutions for sex trafficking-related offences, including the nationality of the perpetrators.
Britain has yet to implement the European Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings, which it refused to sign until March 2007. The convention guarantees victims of trafficking some protection, rather than simply deporting them back to the desperate conditions from which they came. Yet the Home Office draft action plan published the same month is hopelessly weak. It fails even to offer residence permits to women enslaved for sex, which would encourage them to come forward with evidence against the traffickers and pimps. Instead, most of the women apprehended will continue to be deported back into vulnerability and danger.
4. A LABOUR MOVEMENT RESPONSE
This pamphlet has reviewed some aspects of the current debates around immigration and economic migration. It has sought to show:
• The movement of labour is never 'free'. It is economically-coerced and has always been a key tool of capital. Conversely, the aim of the trade union movement has always been to control the movement of capital and to regulate the labour market and the movement of labour.
• Over the past decade, big business-aligned institutions such as the European Union have sought to maximise the movement of labour within the EU, and also into the EU, by economic interventions that destroy existing structures of employment in accession states and in other areas under EU and IMF economic control. Current EU policies are aimed at undermining the existing collective bargaining rights of workers across the EU and increasing the rate of exploitation.
• While orthodox market economics indicates that migration from one country to another can be beneficial to the host country (as well as harmful to the home country), this will only be the case if the migration adds to the existing employment, does not displace labour or undercut existing wages and conditions. If it does, unregulated migration will be highly damaging to long-term growth — even though highly profitable for capital in the short-run
• Currently, the same big business media that back free market economics have been seeking to use the phenomenon of economically-coerced migration to whip up hostility to migrants on racist and xenophobic grounds — at a time when the biggest volume of economic migration comes from ‘white’ and ‘British-originated’ countries
• Economically-coerced migration must be distinguished from asylum seeking. British and American military interventions in the Balkans, Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa over the past decade have created a stream of political refugees to this country seeking protection from torture and terror. New Labour’s interventions have aided the right-wing media and racist parties in stereotyping asylum seekers as ‘illegal’ and ‘bogus’ and equating them with ‘illegal’ economic migrants. These kneejerk legislative interventions have generally been inappropriate, discriminatory and counterproductive.
The combination of economically-coerced migration, new EU legislation, racist manipulation by the media, the continuing freedom allowed to gangmasters and sexual traffickers and the inappropriate responses of government are, in sum, doing grave damage to working people from this country and elsewhere both individually and in terms of working class values and cohesion.
How can and should the labour movement respond?
Political education We need a campaign of education across the movement in Britain to secure an understanding of the nature of both economically-coerced migration and asylum seeking, and the dangers posed by the racist and xenophobic exploitation of these issues by monopoly capital and other right-wing forces.
Justice for asylum seekers and trafficking victims There must be a reinvigorated campaign for the humane treatment of asylum seekers, including the closing of detention centres. We should resist the removal of asylum seekers to countries where they are certain to face torture or imprisonment, and end regulations whereby asylum seekers are denied the right to work and their children are denied equal access to higher education. Opportunistic interference by politicians in the asylum system and the judicial process should also be opposed. We must also be careful, however, not to denigrate in general the staff working within the immigration system.
An amnesty for illegal migrants This would make it possible to assist those who are working or living in super-exploitative or coerced conditions, and to tackle the gangmasters, traffickers, employers and landlords who profit from inhumane practices.
Trade unionisation New impetus should be given to the work of recruiting migrant workers into the trade union movement and thereby preventing them from being used to undercut existing standards. Where necessary, this work should involve the use of materials and union organisers in the language of the migrants workers themselves.
Extension of employment rights The fight to extend and enforce full employment rights to all workers from day one of a job must explicitly embrace the desperate needs of migrant workers, including those being supplied by agencies. Equal pay audits and strict enforcement of the national minimum wage should also form part of this approach. New regulations restricting the rights of migrant domestic workers, tying them to their employer, need to be repealed.
Controls on capital Big business has used the free movement of capital out of Britain and across the EU to maximise profit, undermine workers terms and conditions, and destabilise whole communities and regions. These processes go hand in hand with capital's ability to command labour, which is 'free' to be drawn in or driven out in the interests of profit. The labour movement and the left need to reassert the right of workers, communities and countries to exercise democratic control — popular sovereignty in fact — over monopoly capital.
Regulation of labour We should resist the temptation to demand that the free movement of capital be matched by the 'free' movement of labour. This standpoint weakens the case for fighting for the regulation of both, by and for the working class and the mass of the population in every country. Well-meaning calls for 'open borders' do nothing to challenge the interests of big business. Rather, they uphold the bogus 'free market' principles put forward by the forces of monopoly, exacerbate economic and social conditions in specific localities and play into the hands of the right including the fascists.
Instead, the trade union movement should aim to become directly involved in the regulation of economically-coerced migration. An appropriate vehicle would be sectoral skills and wages councils which would ensure employment at current trade union rates. The re-establishment of such councils should be urged, as in the past, in the interests of protecting and maximising long-term economic growth against the most exploitative employers and employment practices. In order to put an end to the discriminatory and anti-human practices of gangmasters, these skills and wages councils should have direct responsibility for the recruitment of workers in other countries on the basis of the rate for the job and for sectors where this will assist economic growth.
The regulation and control of border movements should be maintained, but with greater priority given to detecting and apprehending the gangmasters and traffickers. The control of population movements should take place on a non-racist basis, as part of the legitimate function of governments to regulate and plan economic and social provision within their borders.
Social provision More socially-affordable housing needs to be provided in areas where immigration and migrant labour are increasing demand, in order to meet the needs of local andincoming people. Cuts in the provision of English as a Foreign Language courses should be reversed and free adult provision be facilitated by local education authorities, colleges and employers with central government assistance as necessary.
International co-operation and co-ordination Much closer liaison needs to be established between the trade union movements and left political parties in host countries and those in the countries from which migrant workers originate. This would assist union recruitment drives and facilitate joint campaigns against trafficking and super-exploitation. In the case of EU countries, greater co-ordination would benefit the struggle against EU legislation and policies which undermine employment standards and the public sector, and which expand freedom for capital.
Notes
1. National Statistics, Population Trends No.128 (Summer 2007)
2. Jo Woodbridge, Sizing the unauthorised (illegal) migrant population in the United Kingdom in 2001 (Home Office, 2005)
3. Institute for Public Policy Research, Irregular Migration in the UK (2006)
4. Times Online, 'Beware: the Goths are coming', June 11 2006.
5. National Statistics/ Home Office, Control of Immigration: Statistics United Kingdom 2005 (Command 6904) and Asylum Statistics: 4th Quarter 2006 United Kingdom (bulletin)
6. As a percentage of initial decisions and appeals determined during the year, involving applicants from previous years but excluding current applicants awaiting an initial decision.
7. United Nations High Commission for Refugees, Refugees by Numbers (2006)
8. http://ec.europa.eu/employment_social/labour_law/docs/2006/green_paper_en.p
