The government has pledged to stop the flow of people crossing the channel in coffin boats, with little sign of success. The opposition, anxious to rebuild its Red Wall, is accusing them of doing nothing about it for too long.
How are the boat people to be described? The government calls them ‘illegal immigrants’. Charities prefer ‘refugees’ on the grounds that people will have more sympathy for them. Some will be (anybody from Afghanistan, for instance — who wouldn’t want to flee that hell-hole ruled by religious fanatics?). For others, they are ‘economic migrants’. Many, perhaps most, will be. For us as socialists, that doesn’t make any difference — they are fellow workers moving in a bid to find a better economic future under capitalism. They still have our sympathy.
We are living under capitalism which is a worldwide economic system, but divided politically into states (some 200 at the last count), and it is unrealistic to expect them to allow unrestricted immigration into their territory. It would cause them all sorts of economic and political problems. That doesn’t mean that they are against immigration as such. What they want is to control it.
The United States is known as a ‘nation of immigrants’. Britain is one too, with a population and working class that includes descendants of migrants first from Ireland and then from the other parts of its former empire. The Prime Minister and the Home Secretary are obvious examples. Even today, 40 percent of the population of London was born outside Britain.
With a declining birth rate, most European states still need, and actually want, more workers so as to keep and step up the flow of profits. What they don’t want is unregulated, disorderly immigration. But with conditions in other parts of the world so dire they can’t do much to stop it. In theory it might help if they stopped bombing or imposing sanctions on selected countries but geo-political rivalries rule that out. It’s a global problem to which there are no national solutions.
The slogan ‘No Borders’ is good in expressing an aspiration but is unrealistic under capitalism. It can be achieved only when we get socialism. As long as capitalism lasts there will be borders and border controls. The most that can be expected is capitalism coming to be organised into bigger and bigger political units within which there is free movement, as in the US and the EU.
Gary Lineker got it right. There is some scapegoating going on like in Germany in the 1930s. But not just like then. The same thing happened in Britain in the 1960s and 70s to scapegoat (legal) immigrants and, going further back, the anti ‘alien’ agitation of the first decade of the last century. Nationalism has never had anything going for it. It’s not only divisive but stupid.
As socialists we denounce all nationalist ideologies and the borders between so-called ‘nation states’, while pointing out that only a socialist world of common ownership can provide the framework within which global poverty can be eliminated once and for all.
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