The needs of European capitalism and the suffering of immigrants

Since September 11th the state campaign against immigrants and refugees across Europe and the US has been stepped up. Recently there has been a further escalation of these attacks in the months leading up to the European summit at Seville in June, where a programme of action on illegal immigrants was supposed to be agreed. One group of leaders, who include Blair together with Berlusconi from Italy and Aznar of Spain, proposed stopping all aid to states not preventing their citizens attempting to emigrate illegally to the EU. This proposal was defeated by, amongst others, Chirac of France, proving the leaders of European capitalism are divided on this issue. In its place a general agreement to cooperate in limiting illegal immigration was made. This has led to the British home secretary, Blunkett persuading the French government to agree to close the Sangatte refugee camp, on the French side of the channel tunnel, in March 2003.

In the UK the Labour government has followed up its repressive 1999 “Immigration and Asylum Act” with an additional series of measures which extend its attacks on immigrants and refugees. These measures include:

• dispersal of asylum seekers throughout the country;
• detention centres in which immigrants and asylum seekers are confined like criminals (50 000 people are now confined in these centres annually);
• repatriation before any appeal can be made for those refused asylum (the 1999 act already abolished the right of appeal against deportation);
• separate education for children of asylum seekers to prevent any integration of families seeking refuge with British workers;
• withdrawal of the asylum seekers right to work if the application takes more than 6 months to process (sometimes applications can take between 5 and 10 years to process!);
• English tests for would-be immigrants and oaths of allegiance are at present being considered.

These measures, which have been designed to keep the issue of immigration on the boil, are clearly related to the success of the right wing bourgeois parties in the recent elections around Europe. These successes from Haider’s FPO in Austria to Le Pen in France, Liste Pim Fortuyn’s party in Holland and the 3 council seats won by the British National Party in Burnley, have been trumpeted in the bourgeois press. The Labour government has, without doubt, imposed these measures to head off criticism from the far right parties with an eye on future elections. The leftist parties, in turn, have branded the Labour party as racist. Although the Labour party is, of course, racist, as are all bourgeois parties, the truth is that it is simply responding to the needs of capitalism and in doing this it reflects the contradictory nature of these needs. On the one hand European capitalism needs immigrant workers, on the other it needs to keep the working class divided to control class struggle.

European capitalism and immigrant workers

Immigration policies generally express the needs of capitalism. ⁽¹⁾

In the period following World War 2, for example, European capitalism needed additional workers for reconstructing itself. While the economy was expanding workers from southern Europe, the Indian subcontinent and, in the case of the UK, the Caribbean were brought into Europe as fast as capitalism needed them. In the UK roughly 1.2 million workers were brought in the decades of the 50s and 60s. The start of the economic crisis in the early 70s brought this process to an end. In the UK the 1971 Immigration Act ended all primary immigration and in many of the European countries so-called “guest workers” were sent home. However, with the partial recovery of the labour market in the late 1980’s and 1990’s, the European economy required a fresh flow of immigrant workers. The reasons for this are to be found in the capitalist crisis itself and the particular demographic problems in Europe.

Capitalism worldwide is suffering from falling profit rates. One of the most effective ways this can be offset is to lower the cost which capitalists pay for labour power. The most obvious way in which this has been done during the last 2 decades has been to export capital to areas where workers’ pay is miserable and living conditions are atrocious. This has resulted in much of manufacturing being relocated outside the capitalist heartlands in peripheral countries, for example, Southeast Asia. However, this is not possible with all industries, particularly services, utilities, construction etc. which must remain within the capitalist heartlands. For these industries the capitalists need to bring workers to the location of the factories, services, building sites etc.

During the 80s and 90s European capitalism needed more workers, particularly skilled workers but also unskilled. It also needed to keep wages down. Immigrant workers brought into the EU will generally be paid less than native workers and therefore exert a constant downward pressure on wages. This will allow the fall in profit rates to be slowed and European capital to continue to compete on the world market.

A further problem for European capital, which is a particular one, is the decline in the birth rate of European workers and its ageing workforce. By 2015 20% of the European population will be over 65 years old! It is calculated that the EU population will stabilise at approximately 305 million in 2005 and will decline thereafter. Put bluntly there are not going to be enough workers to do the work and provide the surplus some of which will be used for the older members of society to live on. The major European states now claim they will not be able to fund pensions after 2015. The obvious solution is to increase immigration, and this is now openly called for by some members of the capitalist class, Europe’s economies cannot continue to grow and provide generous social services without a steady flow of immigrants. ⁽²⁾

In fact European capital has been achieving a steady flow of immigrants despite legislation prohibiting this but this stream is not nearly large enough. Workers have been coming as secondary immigrants, i.e. relatives or dependants of those already here and as refugees. Over the last 10 years the average annual number of refugees seeking asylum in the EU has been 374 000. During the last 5 years an average of 700 000 people per year have moved into the EU and at present there are 13 million non-EU citizens working and living in the EU. ⁽³⁾

This is merely the number of those who are here legally. Such a vast number of people could not possibly be working in the EU if European capital did not require them to be here. It is calculated, for example, that half the miners and refuse workers in Germany are immigrants. The German City of Stuttgart has stated that its public transport, its schools and its nurseries would collapse without immigrant workers. ⁽⁴⁾

A similar collapse would occur in the UK National Health Service if immigrant workers were removed. The extension of the EU into the former eastern bloc countries is aimed at providing further numbers of skilled and fit workers but this is still some years off.

The number of legal workers entering the EU is, however, insufficient for the needs of capital and many workers enter illegally. Workers who have come illegally do not appear on statistics, pay taxes or receive any benefits. These immigrants obviously serve the same purpose for capital as the legal ones in that they cheapen labour power. However, since they are here illegally and have no rights whatsoever, wages can be even lower, safety and welfare legislation ignored, and workers threatened with deportation if they complain. Illegal migrants tend to fill jobs in the labour intensive sectors of the economy such as agriculture, particularly in southern Europe, catering, construction etc. It is estimated that between 300 000 and 500 000 such immigrants come to the EU every year. ⁽⁵⁾

Over the last decade the number of illegal migrants to the EU must have amounted to between 3 and 5 million people! The utter hypocrisy of the capitalist class is shown by the delight they take in exploiting the most wretched and defenceless sections of the working class and pocketing the profits, while at the same time crying crocodile tears over their mistreatment by immoral “people smugglers,” namely their agents who bring them here. Similarly the supposed horror expressed by the bourgeois press at the inevitable deaths by drowning or suffocation in containers etc. which occurs as migrants try to reach Europe is nothing but humbug. It also needs to be remembered that many of the migrants trying to reach Europe to sell their labour power, have had their previous means of living destroyed by wars or disasters directly caused by the major imperialist powers themselves, e.g. Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Palestine, Yugoslavia, Central Africa etc.

European capitalists are, however, ambivalent about the illegal migrants. While the more labour intensive industries are happy to use them, the more advanced sections are not. A European commission report published in May, for example, complains that illegal immigration is actually damaging the EU economy as cheap labour was allowing sections of the economy to avoid restructuring and becoming more capital intensive. A section of European capital is now openly advocating making this illegal flow of immigrants legal, and managing it in a centralised way from Brussels. The present system is too inefficient because it delivers people at random, only some of whom are the ones European capital wants to exploit. They wish to introduce a system of screening of would-be immigrants so that the skilled and healthy are allowed in while the others are sent home. In advocating this, however, these sections of the bourgeoisie encounter the other primary need of the ruling class, to divide the working class in order to be able to rule over it.

Divide and rule

While European capital needs immigrant workers it also needs to keep the working class divided to prevent them uniting and fighting for their common interests. On the one hand, the operation of the capitalist system is drawing workers from all parts of the world into socialised production and thereby subjecting them to similar conditions and practically uniting them. On the other hand the capitalist class preaches xenophobia, chauvinism, racism, sectarianism and hatred, and maintains sufficient pay differentials and differences in living conditions to make the more privileged workers fear their poorer class brothers. When the economic cycle turns to recession and workers are thrown out of work these ideologies and divisions are used to explain the hard times. All the evils of capitalism are blamed on immigrants and the discontent of workers is deflected from the real enemy, which is the bourgeois class, and the real cause, which is capitalism itself.

The immediate division of the working class into native and immigrant and the further division of the immigrants into legal and illegal is therefore highly useful. The state can attack one group at a time. While they use their police and immigration services to physically attack and round up workers their politicians stoke up the fires of nationalism and race hatred. This was the tactic used in the early 70s, which brought in its wake the rise of right wing bourgeois forces like the National Front in Britain. The main racist attack is, however, always carried out by the state machinery and the thugs of the right such as the neo-nazis are at best minor auxiliaries. It is for this reason that the states of the EU are reluctant to give up national control of immigration and always have their nationalist and racist ideologies primed for use.

The Labour Party perfectly expresses this dilemma. Some sectors of it fear the disruption that racial tension can cause, while other parts (and, when Labour is in power, the most vocal parts) actively stir up racial hatred. In all this the Labour government is simply reflecting the contradictory needs of capitalism, which, of course, is all it has ever done since its foundation.

Communists and Immigrants

The working class is, in reality, a class of migrants who own nothing but their labour power. They are the dispossessed of history who have no alternative but to find a means and a place to sell their labour power. The alternative is starvation. Workers who travel between countries and continents are simply expressing the essence of the working class, namely that “Workers have no country”. The countries and nations to which workers are told they belong are in fact the countries of the bourgeois class. They are the countries where the bulk of their capital is located together with the state which defends this capital. Just as the working class has no interest in defending the capital, which exploits it, it has no interest in preserving the states, which protect this capital. The working class stands for the abolition of all countries and all nation states.

The appalling treatment of migrant workers at the start of the 21st century is a ringing indictment of the capitalist system. It shows the dreadful barbarity of the system and the utter cynicism of those who control it. It shows also that fundamentally capitalism remains the same as it was 150 years ago when it was analysed by Marx. The deprivation, indignity and misery it inflicts on the working class is now on a global scale and affects more people than ever before.

Communists support free movement of the working class since this can only produce greater unity and purpose in our class. Historically migrant workers have carried revolutionary ideas with them, either bringing them as they fled persecution in their native lands or assimilating these ideas from workers in the lands which gave them refuge. Such migrant workers gave the early organisations of the working class their international character. Free movement of workers today can only assist international organisation and internationalising the consciousness of the working class. It will bring nearer the day when this international class throws off its chains and undertakes the task of building a communist world.

(1) Immigration of the bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie is not considered in this text. Anyone bringing sufficient capital is welcomed into Europe.

(2) See Financial Times 13/05/02 “No room for the Intolerant”. Quentin Peel.

(3) See Financial Times 11/06/02

(4) See “Thinking the unthinkable” N Harris published by I.B. Tauris.

(5) See “Managing Migration”. Bimal Gosh. Oxford University Press. Equivalent numbers of illegal immigrants into the US are 250 000 to 300 000 annually.