Border control queue at Heathrow Airport. Photo 1000 Word/shutterstock.com
The massive increase in immigration – both legal and illegal – has formed a constant background to events in Britain for over two decades. This is no accident. The Blair Labour government and all its successors failed to deal with illegal immigration, and above all encouraged the far greater amount of legal immigration.
To create a better future, British workers have to deal with this situation. No one else can: only our class is capable of being a united force for progress. That means taking control to make it politically impossible for governments and employers to continue as they have.
What workers say to each other about immigration has long been misrepresented and ignored by politicians and the media – and by too many in the trade union movement.
Uncontrolled immigration aids finance capital and weakens the workers of Britain. There is an increasing understanding about the nature of this artificial growth in the British working population through the mass import of labour. Immigration is a state-sponsored and ideological attack on British wages and living standards with nothing progressive about it.
Workers have also come to recognise that inflation is a class weapon used to reduce workers’ living standards. The fight for wages and conditions over the past couple of years has returned trade unions to their core purpose.
'What workers say to each other about immigration has long been misrepresented and ignored by politicians and the media - and by too many in the trade union movement...'
Parliament and government, promoters of immigration and inflation, merely represent capitalism, personified by a group of economic adventurers and financiers. Overwhelmed by their own contradictions, they are desperate and dangerous.
Finance capitalists see workers as pawns to make profits and increase the dominance of capital, and nation states as an obstacle to their global activity. Yet they can’t do without workers, and nations are proving resilient.
To head off effective opposition to open borders, the ruling class lies, smears and distorts – with the added effect of dividing the working class here. The tales they spin are depressingly familiar.
“Britain can’t cope”; that’s why we need to be in the EU or tied to the US. “British workers are lazy” – stupid and racist too; that’s why the economy does not grow. “Migrants create more than they cost”; all those arrived by boat or hidden in lorries are victims in need of our protection.
And the denigration of workers and nation goes deeper than that. We are told that “we” must be ashamed and apologise endlessly for everything – nothing created or won in Britain, by British people, is worthwhile or valuable. Divisions and individualism are celebrated; unity, cohesion and collective action are denigrated.
In sum, the capitalist class hopes to do away with what makes a working class. It is what capitalists have always sought, ever since our ancestors left the fields for factories.
But the nature of work is collective. Sooner or later, workers combine and cooperate whatever the employers try to do. That’s their contradiction. Ours is that we repeat the cycle, letting the opposing class off the hook again and again.
Unless there is open debate and discussion within our class about these twin attacks of migration and inflation and how to respond, we will be disarmed again. There is no future in remaining as supplicants to any capitalist government – no matter which face it currently bears – still less to the EU or US, bastions of international finance capital.
It may be an uphill task at first to reverse the attack, but the need is pressing. We can start by facing up to the underlying cause of our problems – it’s capitalism and not the people who come here legally or illegally. They are workers too – and we are not their oppressors.
Controlling immigration into Britain is not denying the human rights of those who want to come here to work. It is asserting the right of British workers to oppose the attacks on their work and their nation by finance capitalists and their governments who use immigrants to their own ends.
And we also need to deal with the confusion in the ranks of workers. Explicitly, our existence as workers unites us. Differences in history, region, culture and experience are secondary – do not let them become weapons to divide and defeat us.