Introduction: The ‘immigration myth’ exposed                                                                                                                         

 

So, here we are in the middle of the middle of the usual pre-election rash of immigration stories. Interestingly, until last week, in this year’s general election the main parties had tried to play down immigration issues. This may, in part, have been because in its attempt to lose its old image, the Conservative Party avoided fueling the ‘tough on immigration’ arms race which characterised the 2001 and 2005 elections. However, the heat was turned up on the relatively low level popular resentment last week when Gordon Brown’s “bigotted woman” comment prompted the press to ask whether it was indeed ‘bigotted’ to raise the issue, and levels of underlying anger began to bubble up. In this module we have examined some of the conditions under which forms of racism and xenoracism develop. This week we follow the logic of Miles’ analysis of ‘race’ to one of its more radical conclusions. Racism arises not as a consequence of the prior existence of separate ‘races’, but as a result of a complex interplay of social and ideological conditions. Particularly significant among these conditions is the flow of labour around the globe as a result of relative poverty associated with uneven development, and the ways in which the flows of migrant labourers have been ‘managed’ and ‘controlled’. Racism directed against migrants seeking work or sanctuary across international borders results in ever greater restrictions on their ability to relocate within the law, which further fuels local media misrepresentation, popular resentments and ideological reactions. On the theory which we examine today, it is useless to imagine that, in order to combat racism and the xenoracialisation of migrants, we can prevent all international labour movement (as, under capitalism, uneven development and thus labour migration are always with us). Thus the clean break which is required (the ‘revolution’ Cohen describes below) is the abandonment of all restrictions on the movement of workers. Only this can, in the long run, eradicate the racism associated with population movements, and undermine the ideologies which reproduce the conceptual categories of ‘race’. This proposal takes us very far from the mainstream, and from the increasingly ‘tough talk’ from party leaders following Gordon Brown’s gaffe.

 

 This week’s session will look at some of the complex and controversial arguments around the proposed Marxist solution to the question of racism encapsulated in the slogans ‘no borders’ and ‘no one is illegal’. Our theorists are the Marxist writer, immigration lawyer and activist Steve Cohen, who died last year, the activist and writer Teresa Hayter, and the professor of economics Nigel Harris.  

 

“Immigration ‘problems’ are not a problem of excessive numbers of immigrants. They are a problem of the racism of Europeans, North Americans and white majorities elsewhere, who more or less explicitly harbour notions of the superiority of the white ‘race’, whatever that may mean, and the undesirability of destroying the homogeneity of their nation.” (Hayter, 2000, p.4)

 

Harris (2002, p.52) provides poll results from across Europe which suggest that racism is still widespread and indeed still ‘socially acceptable’ in many regions. In 1997 22% of Belgians said they were ‘very racist’, whereas Luxembourg with the highest foreign-born population share in Europe had the fewest citizens who were ‘very racist’ and 86% opposed all discrimination by ‘race’ religion or culture. Thus, we should not assume that high rates of immigrant labour in a country necessarily result in high levels of racism. If we were to read Robert Miles in a reductive manner (labour migration = racism), then Harris’ statistics might suggest his argument is faulty. However, we should remember that what Miles was most concerned with was the ways in which patterns of migration, in the context of historically structured conditions gave rise to the racialisation of groups within the citizenry. The arguments of Harris, Cohen and Hayter should be seen as a subtle and provocative application of Marxist and neo-Marxist theory to this difficult arena, drawing out some of the complexities and possibly some of the contradictions in Miles’ approach. For Harris, it is a

 

“favourite argument of political leaders… that control of entries to the country, especially in the case of black workers, is the precondition for reducing racism and xenophobia. It is a most unkind argument since it blames the victims for their condition, not those who victimize them. It repeats the old anti-Semitic argument of the Nazis – antisemitism existed in Germany only because Jews lived there; removal of the Jews would thus end anti-Semitism.” (Harris, 2002, p.53)

 

The number of ‘foreigners’ may indeed be a factor in the ubiquity of racism and the hold it has on a society, though Harris may go too far in suggesting that there is a strong correlation between the strength of racism and xenophobia and those regions where there are the fewest foreigners, there may be some truth in this – what do you think? “To follow the proper logic” he suggests, “the way to conquer racism in eastern Germany [for instance] would be to increase the number of black workers there, and to end xenophobia to allow in more foreigners.” (Ibid.) In fact, some research published by the Institute of Public Policy Research within the last few days supports Harris in finding that the greater the amount of recent immigration an area has had, the lower are levels of racism and support for the BNP (IPPR, 2010)

 

What Harris rather kindly calls “the national debate over immigration” has, he argues stoked up racism. Political arguments played out in the press over, for instance, the admission and deportation of asylum seekers is the cause of an increase in racist attacks. “Far from immigration controls reassuring populations, they lead to disbelief in the effectiveness of controls (and hysteria over illegal immigration), legitimise racism under the guise of stopping immigration, and intensify discrimination against foreigners in general.” (Ibid.) Harris, like the other writers we are looking at today sees a kind of inevitability about the ways in which capitalism is developing towards greater international mobility of labour. Marxists argue that it is the logic of capitalism which drives migrants to leave their native lands and it is capitalism itself which undermines immigration  controls and must ultimately result in their collapse: “The liberalisation of trade was the first great transition (1850-1980 and beyond), and of capital movements the second (1980 onwards). These processes reflected and speeded integration, the creation of a single world economic system. Although neither process is anything like complete, the third and greatest transition, the freeing of people to move, has hardly begun.” (Harris, 2002, p.93) Contradictions are thus opening up in developed countries around the reproduction of racist ideology in a context shaped by the need for and inevitability of greater migration – “the ambivalence of governments, with one foot in the politics of xenophobia, the other in a world economy.” (Harris, 2002, p.94)

 

“The control of migration is the last great bastion of the old order of national sovereignty. Indeed it is in precisely as the period of world economic integration has accelerated that the great powers have made efforts to block the logic of integration of workers, to dam the flows, creating closed national pools of labour.” (Harris, 2002, p.124)

 

Hayter adds that,

 

“[i]ntegration into the world market, together with continuing high levels of inequality and exploitation, have caused some enterprising people to attempt to migrate in search of work, as market economics would predict. But the logic of economic liberalisation has not been applied to the movement of people. According to this logic, economic liberalisation should of course include the free movement of labour as well as of goods and capital”(Hayter, 2000, p.3)

 

 

The history of immigration controls

 

Steve Cohen writes of the ‘ideology of controls’ rather as Miles writes of racism – as an ideology. For the former, as for the latter, a historical analysis of economic conditions can help to explain the emergence and reproduction of ideology, and for Cohen, the ‘ideology of controls’ arose hand in hand with racism to the extent that it is almost inseparable. We get the sense from Cohen that racism is inextricably linked, as an ideology, with notions of identity defined by who is and is not admissible to the ‘fortress state’, or ‘fortress Europe’.

 

Immigration controls are a relatively recent phenomenon. Britain had no such controls until a century ago. During its period of rapid industrialisation and of Empire-building, labour was formally free to move as it wished into and out of the nation state. Cohen’s argument is that, since their inception, immigration controls have served primarily a racist, and we might add racialising, function. He goes further and asserts that while “[i]mmigration controls are not in themselves fascist….it is shown that at least in the UK there exists an historical and inextricable relationship between immigration controls and both fascistic thought and fascistic organisation.” (Cohen 2006, p.7) Tightened immigration controls have consistently followed on waves of militant racist and/or fascist organising in response to changed immigration patterns. Cohen (2006, pp.22-3) details the successes of far-right and neo-fascist agitation by groups such as the British Brothers League, White Defence League, British National Party and National Front established to campaign against ‘coloured immigration’ and for ‘racial’ purity, successes demonstrated by successive  governments tailing their demands and tightening immigration controls around agendas set by the far-right. The first such spasm of anti-immigrant reaction resulted in the 1905 Aliens Act. This act was designed to stem the flow of Jews fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe and Russia.

 

“The transmission of the ideology of controls through the class collaborative mechanism of the employed and unemployed masses is only half the story. The other half of the story is that the individual components of this ideology both popularised  and synthesized at the turn of the century all the aspects of racism which have since dominated the rest of the century. The struggle for the Aliens Act legitimised racism by making it lawful. It gave it the authority of the modern capitalist state. It did this through invoking the central myth of ancient feudalism, the myth of Jew-hatred, the myth of antisemitism. There had been previous unsuccessful demands for controls not least against the Irish.” (Cohen, 2003, pp.62-3)

 

Cohen  goes on to illustrate how the myths of anti-Semitism were constructed, just as Miles did for the fuelling of anti-Irish racism. The difference is that antisemitism actually became a constitutive element of the way in which the state and the individuals within it defined themselves through the introduction of immigration controls aimed ay excluding Jews. Many now familiar devices were put to use in creating a racialised type – the Jew – which could be targeted and vilified as part of the justification for their exclusion. For instance, on the question of Jewish sexuality in relation to the Aliens Act, Cohen argues that W.H. Wilkins’ propaganda was typical of the period when he wrote about the rapaciousness and inconstancy of Jews, “[m]any of the immigrants are young women, Jewesses of considerable attraction. Mensharks and female harpies are on the lookout for them as soon as they disembark.” (Wilkins, in Cohen, 2003, pp.64-5). Just as the later construction of black male immigrant sexualities allowed the Times to account for violence against black people as being based on their alleged ‘misbehaviour, especially sexual’ (Times, 3 September, 1958, in Cohen, 2003, p.65)

 

The first immigration controls coincide with the height of the ‘biological racism’ which we have discussed elsewhere. Allied to this, the pseudo-science of Eugenics, based on a reading of Darwin’s survival of the fittest was becoming more influential. Cohen argues that it was the campaign for the Aliens Act which galvanized and popularised eugenic ideas around the racialisation of the immigration debate. This played into ideas about maintaining ‘racial’ purity and white supremacy, and reinforced lines of demarcation between ‘white’ and ‘non-white’. “Robert Rentoul, in his book Race Culture or Race Suicide? Had one chapter simply headed, ‘Some causes of national deterioration and degeneracy. Undesirable alien immigrants and emigration of our fit’ (1906, chap XV).” (Cohen, 2003, p.66). The relationship between biological ideas of ‘race’ and immigration control continued into the postwar period. William Beveridge in his Children’s Allowances and the Race (1942) wrote “Pride of race is a reality for the British… are we not bound to plan society now so that there may be no lack of men or women of the quality of those earlier days, of the best of our breed, two and three hundred years hence?” (Beveridge, in Cohen, 2003, p.66)

 

The press has consistently played a part in reproducing the ‘common-sense’ of immigration control ideology. In the 1930’s the Mail and the Express led the charge against Jewish refugees fleeing from Nazi Germany, Cohen quotes the Daily Mail from 1938: “To be ruled by misguided sentimentalism…would be disastrous… Once it was known that Britain offered sanctuary to all who cared to come, the floodgates would be opened and we would be inundated by thousands seeking a home” (Daily Mail, March 23, 1938 in Cohen, 2003, p.116). And from the Daily Express in the same week, the blaming of Jews for antisemitism,

 

“[T]here is powerful agitation here to admit all Jewish refugees without question or discrimination. It would be unwise to overload the basket like that. It would stir up elements here that fatten on anti-Semitic propaganda…They would ask ‘What if Poland, Hungary, Rumania also expel their Jewish citizens? Must we admit them too?’” (Daily Express, March 24 1938, in Cohen, 2003, p.116)

 

The second major phase of immigration into Britain came in the postwar period. This too heralded far-right racist agitation which resulted in further tightening of controls. “In the 1950’s and 1960’s British politicians tried to work out how to exclude ‘coloured’ commonwealth citizens without excluding white Commonwealth citizens.” (Hayter, 2000, p.4)

 

Hayter and Cohen agree that

 

“In Britain there have been three main historical phases of anti-immigrant agitation, leading in the first two cases to the abandonment of what were thought to be inviolable principles of free movement, and potentially doing so in the third, current phase. In the first phase controls were introduced in 1905 to restrict the entry of ‘aliens’, mainly Jewish refugees from eastern Europe and Russia. In the second controls were introduced in 1962 to stop the entry of ‘coloured’ British Commonwealth citizens. In the third, while entry for political refugees is still in theory allowed, the principle is being undermined.” (Hayter, 2000, p.6)

 

Immigration controls and racism

 

To return for a moment to basic principles, we should remind ourselves that, for Marxists, “The well known phrase ‘workers of the world unite’ does not mean ‘only workers with the correct immigration status’ unite.” (Cohen, 2006, p.151) Cohen’s position is clear and uncompromising; immigration controls cannot be made just and are always racist: “Racism and justice are incompatible. The latter can only be achieved by getting rid of the former. And that means getting rid of immigration controls.” (Cohen 2006, p.4)  

 

“[I]mmigration controls are never about what they and their apologists present them as – overcrowding, lack of housing, no jobs, drain on welfare, whatever the latest justification happens to be. Rather they are about racism and the identity of the British state based on who can come and who can stay – that is based on the state’s construction of population and therefore of itself.” (Cohen 2006, p.33)

 

How does Cohen justify this ‘marginal political position’?

 

1) “As long as there are [immigration] controls some will be excluded and these some will be the poor and impoverished, the colonised and neo-colonised workers from outside the imperialist heartlands.” (Cohen, 2003, p.47)

2) Controls are the historic consequence of nationalism, and forms of racism arising out of imperialism. They cannot be stripped of their historic roots and made racism-free.

 

The relationship between immigration controls and racism is a complex one. The vast majority of people in Britain support some forms of immigration control, indeed a large proportion want these controls to be tightened. Most of these people would not consider themselves racist, but would justify the exclusion of some groups of people from the UK on economic, practical, or, more problematically, cultural grounds. Cohen’s argument is that such thinking is shrouded in ideological fog. His aim is rather like that of the critical pedagogues we met earlier in the module. In asserting the principle ‘workers of the world unite’, he forces us to consider that we can’t see the wood for the trees: we can’t see the racism of the state because of the complex justifications which have built up around bourgeois statist ideology:

 

“Immigration controls do not survive and thrive just because of institutional and state repression, just because of bodies of armed men and other material adjuncts. There is also a whole series of ideological constructs within civil society that ensures their popular acceptance. In turn this popular acceptance has enabled the twentieth century British state and nation to define itself in terms of who is allowed to come and stay here. Black people are excluded from this self-definition. It is immigration controls as much as Empire that have given Britain its national identity…Immigration restrictions provide the British state with its own brand of identity politics.” (Cohen, 2003, p.57)

 

Immigration controls, then, function to racialise not only the ‘other’, but ‘the British’ themselves. In this respect Britain is not unique[1]. As immigration control legislation has spread around the globe, it has become a formal expression of the exclusionary impulses, in-group defencism, orientalism and racism which we have discussed elsewhere in this module. Cohen argues that the ideologues who support controls “very clearly understand how controls shape national identity in a way calculated to completely obscure class allegiances between metropolitan and third world workers, between white and black workers.” (Ibid.) Hayter claims that even those with some understanding about the truth behind the ideology, also accept the inevitability or ‘commonsense’ of the ideology of controls and its concomitant racist assumptions:

 

 “Increasingly, Labour promises to provide help for integration and good race relations were coupled with promises to make sure no more immigrants came to add to the ‘problems’ immigration was supposed to have created. Even those people who accepted that social and economic problems were not the result of immigration, and that immigration controls were not intended to reduce the overall numbers of immigrants, but only to reduce the numbers of certain types of immigrants, nevertheless argued that British people needed some reassurance that immigration was being restricted.” (Hayter, 2000, p.34)

 

Hayter wants to argue that the existence of immigration controls have indirectly strengthened institutional racism in the enforcement arms of the state – in policing in particular – as some police violence against black people has been made possible by the ‘need’ to deport them. Racism in the police, whilst a reflection of patterns of belief in society more widely, is especially important in reinforcing societal racism, seeming to condone it by, for instance, failing to take hate crimes seriously.

 

Hayter echoes Sivananadan’s sentiment that “[t]he primary targets of racism and xenophobia [xenoracism] are now refugees.” (Hayter, 2000, pp.4-5) Most recently, anti-immigrant hysteria has been whipped up, not only against black, Asian and Roma refugees but also against other recent arrivals – some refugees, some not, Kosovars, Poles, and other ‘white’ east Europeans. It was in 1999 that the tabloids turned ‘asylum seeker’, previously a neutral term, into a swear word, “a racist epithet as repugnant as ‘nigger’ or ‘Jew’” (Harris, 2002, p.135). Terms such as ‘asylum-seeker’ now have an ideological weight and can play an ideological role in reinforcing  commonsense (xeno-)racialised understandings of the other

 

Common sense is, of course, regarded by its adherents as politically neutral. Cohen draws an interesting parallel with Arendt’s observation regarding the passivity of the onlooking citizenry in the face of the Nazi’s final solution. Whilst immigration controls are not morally equivalent to the death camps, “the moral status of the silent, passive bystander who eventually looks away, is exactly the same”. (Cohen, 2006, p.25) The racism inherent in systems of immigration control is regarded as neutral because such racism remains fundamentally unquestionable. Arendt’s description of the “banality of evil” of the Jewish genocide is paralleled by Cohen with the “amoral, administrative mindset which can seem to be also underpinning the evil of today’s immigration laws… Just as the liquidation of European Jewry was sanitised as the final solution so today the brutal arrest, imprisonment and deportation of the undocumented is translated into the bureaucratic speech of managed migration.” (original emphases) (Cohen, 2006, p.7) This is strong stuff! It will be interesting to see what you feel about it.

 

 

Non-people & sans-papiers: the (xeno-)racialisation of asylum-seekers and illegal immigrants

 

“Once they left their homeland they remained homeless, once they had left their state they became stateless, once they had been deprived of their human rights they were rightless, the scum of the earth.

 

Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them.

 

The prolongation of their lives is due to charity and not to right, for no law exists which could force the nations to feed them; their freedom of movement, if they have it at all, gives them no right to residence which even the jailed criminal enjoys as a matter of course; and their freedom of opinion is a fool’s freedom, for nothing they think matters anyhow” (Arendt, in Cohen, 2006, p.8)

 

Hannah Arendt is referring here to the heimatlose, the displaced Europeans of the inter-war years, but, Cohen asserts, her words are as true of today’s refugees and illegal migrants. The stateless are pariahs, ‘non-people’, outside of legal norms and beyond legal protection. What is relevant about this for us is that the refugee, the illegal or undocumented migrant (‘sans-papiers’), as a ‘non-person’, becomes a kind of blank slate onto which residents of their receiving countries can draw a character. This character will reflect prevailing prejudices, racisms, and historical factors far more than it does the individual humanity of each person[2]. In the absence of an identity, the migrant becomes that overdetermined, racialised category of ‘asylum-seeker’. Hannah Arendt proposes that it is perhaps only in being criminalised that the undocumented can gain the status of a person – by committing an actual crime and becoming an actual criminal. Her other suggestion for a much less reliable way to attain personhood is to “become a genius”! (See Cohen, 2006, p.151) Furthermore, Cohen argues that it is into this vacuum created by the abrogation of basic universal human rights for those who fall between states that fascistic agitation has stepped.

 

Looking back over the history of immigration controls since 1905, Cohen asserts, we can see common patterns emerging which shape the debate about immigration, and the ‘ideology of controls’, and which reveal the features of the racialised categories which emerge. We can track the process of racialisation and its consequences though waves of migration and the tightening of controls. For example, the history of immigration controls is bound up with the creation of racialised sexual identities. Agitation for the first piece of immigration control legislation in Britain, the 1905 Aliens Act, depicted Jews and Jewish sexuality as a threat to the white nuclear family. “Jews were demonised as either pimps or prostitutes”. Similarly in the post 1945-period, black people were again often stereotyped as either pimp or prostitute. Some of these kinds of characterisations arise out of fears about overpopulation, with migrants giving birth to many children (Cohen, 2003, p.9). Long associations have also been made between racialised immigrant identities and disease. As we have seen, the ascription of ‘race’ as a cause of for instance, unsanitary social conditions results in the attribution of an inherent ‘uncleanliness’ to a racialised group. Again, in agitation against Jewish refugees from the pogroms of Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century, the evening standard demarked Jews as a “filthy, rickety jetsam of humanity, bearing on their evil face the stigmata of every physical and moral degradation.” (Evening Standard, 5 January 1905, in Cohen, 2003, p.10). We are reminded here of the more recent case of the Dover Express (referred to by Cole in last week’s readings) identifying refugees and migrant workers as “human sewage”. (Such claims become conflated with broader patterns of racism around sexuality, and sexual attributes, e.g., the charges of grooming and of rape levelled against Asian men (lasciviousness as a quality of their ‘Asianness’) in Bradford by BNP leader Nick Griffin and others.) Arendt’s comments notwithstanding, criminality has also frequently been associated with the racialised identities of ‘asylum-seekers’. A Daily Telegraph article from 1909 explicitly conflates criminality with the ‘alien’ – a term synonymous with ‘Jew’ – “aliens of the very worst type in their own county… the Russian burglar, the Polish thief, the Italian stabber, and the German swindler… people whom this country would be glad to get rid of…” (Telegraph, 22 February 1909, in Hayter, 2000, p.26) Hayter discusses the way in which newspapers give prominence to instances of crimes committed by immigrants, whilst offering little coverage of those committed against them: murders committed by ‘illegals’ make for headlines, as do deportations of foreign criminals at the end of their sentences. These reports tend to take the form of criticisms of the Home Office for failing to deport foreign criminals, raising the question of ‘double punishment’, and reflecting differential treatment of criminals of different ‘races’. Hayter offers examples such as the Daily Mail’s 1998 banner headline “BRUTAL CRIMES OF THE ASYLUM SEEKERS” (Hayter, 2000, p.30) clearly attributing characteristics of ‘brutality’ and ‘criminality’ to this racialised category in toto, and, in doing so making ‘asylum seeker’ a term of abuse. Such headlines tend to appear in frenzied clusters around single news items which spawn a run of associated ‘stories’, stoking racism with ever more outrageous hyperbole. The last of such frenzies was before the 2005 general election, and before that in the autumn of 1998. The public pedagogy of immigrant-fear is stoked by such crime stories, reinforcing the identification of racialised minorities with illegality and threat.

 

It may be a rather banal point, but it is one worth making that, as well as playing a part in activating the racialisation process, immigration controls in their current form serve to effectively reproduce categorical divisions between ‘national’ and ‘foreigner’ which tend to directly (as in the case of Commonwealth citizens) or indirectly utilise pre-existing ‘racial’ types, making them, unavoidably national-chauvinist and racist:

 

“Many, probably most, of those who now believe that immigration controls are an obvious necessity would not see themselves as racist…[However] [t]he current situation in Britain is that the many millions of foreigners who are nationals of the European Union or who have British parents or grandparents are free to enter and settle in Britain. Others are not. The former are mainly white, the latter often black. Non-discrimination would imply either imposing the same restrictions on Europeans and white British Commonwealth citizens as are imposed on other foreigners, or allowing virtually free entry to all. But even on the unlikely supposition that immigration controls ceased to discriminate on mainly racist grounds between foreigners, they would still discriminate against foreigners in general, as opposed to natives. They are therefore, many believe, inherently racist.” (Hayter, 2000, p.21)

 

The xenoracialisation of the ‘Other’ naturally tends to focus on the most recent arrivals to a country, shaping and reforming the malleable characteristics of the ‘racial’ type in question – ‘the Roma’, ‘the Kurd’, ‘the Albanian’, ‘the Somali’ – whilst previous generations of immigrants can be idealised – no less a form of racialisation – as different from and better than the new ones, a practice sometimes engaged in by established immigrants themselves.

 

We should note the historical relationship between some of the developments we highlighted in week 4, and immigration controls. The role of terror in constructing a set of negative characteristics around a racialised ‘type’ of immigrant is not new, nor is it unique to Muslims. Following the killing of six British paratroops by the Lehi Zionist group in 1947, the Daily Herald and Sunday Pictorial ran stories about Jewish terrorists infiltrating Britain, whilst the Sunday Times “took a position of collective guilt and demanded that all British Jews denounce terrorism in Palestine.” (Cohen, 2006, p.68) Subsequently, as a result of an upsurge in attacks on Jews and their businesses and property in London, Liverpool, Salford, Manchester and Liverpool further restrictions were imposed on the immigration of Jewish refugees.

 

 

The racism of economics

 

In a section of his most recent book entitled The Racism of Economics, Cohen offers a critique of the current Government’s points system for ‘managing migration’, presented in the March 2006 document, A Points Based System: Making Migration Work for Britain, and now in operation. The scheme works on the basis of offering the most lucrative immigration deals to the most highly skilled. On the face of it, this system, like Australia’s might appear to break the link between ‘race’ and immigration control by using criteria other that nationality as the first determining factor, thereby raising the possibility of ‘non-racist’ controls. However, the determinants of entry are not the needs of the individual but the needs of the economy. Cohen argues that this system merely serves to reinforce common-sense notions of immigration, masking ‘race’ behind an ideological fog of economics. Under the points system ‘racial’ exclusions will be continued and ‘racial’ categories remain unquestioned. “British capital is not neutral on the issue of racism” Cohen claims in a manner somewhat more heavy-handed than Miles,

 

“[i]t produces and reproduces a virulent nationalism through the exclusion of the unwanted and the mistreatment of those who gain entry. Phrases such as ‘managed migration’ present themselves as value free…They are presented as some form of benign restructuring of the national economy. Yet they conceal a deep racism. This is clear from the Executive Summary of A Points Based System: Making Migration Work for Britain, which justifies the control of work migration in order to appease ‘settled populations…concerned about the impact on jobs, public services and their way of life’…The inextricable link here between economics, nationalism and racism was emphasised in the parliamentary review of A Points Based System: Making Migration Work for Britain. The Home Secretary justified this on the grounds that ‘the country will operate on the basis of the number of economically active people who are in this country’. This is a spurious Marxism in reverse – rendering economics the prime force within society but expelling those unable or deemed unfit to contribute. It is economic chauvinism.” (Cohen 2006, p.106)

 

Cohen (2003, pp.74-5) makes a distinction between economic and social racism. He argues, after Sivanandan, that there is a debate between the two positions now as in previous decades. Capital sees the need for labour of a particular type, either low-waged and unskilled, or skilled in specific ways (e.g., medical or technical), as we saw clearly explained by Miles – this comes cheap if it is the labour of black people. However, whilst capital requires black labour, it does not want its presence within its national boundaries, for ideological reasons – this is economic racism. Social racism, by contrast, wants neither the labour nor the presence of black people, and comes into conflict with the economic racism of sections of capital. Cohen further argues that official multiculturalism praises the contribution made to society by immigrant labour whilst implicitly limiting this category to two types – the skilled and the sweated (2003, p.76) – a further articulation of economic racism.

 

Hayter’s analysis of the intersection of economic and social racisms articulates the complexity which Miles wanted to highlight in his avoidance of a strictly economistic Marxist account of the production and reproduction of racialised categories. In the case of both the first and second phase of immigration controls, their introduction, as both Hayter and Cohen note, followed agitation by extreme right-wing racist minorities in response to larger than usual influxes of immigrants. The demands for controls were not the direct result of economic imperatives, though the movements of people may in part have been so. Rather they were fed by pre-existing prejudices about outsiders, and in turn reproduced these racist beliefs and, as Hayter puts it, rather than appeasing racists, led to the demand for tougher still restrictions on movement.

 

 

Xenoracism and schooling

 

Cohen (2003,p.32) outlines the NUT’s opposition to attempts at educational apartheid – children of asylum seekers are not a ‘problem’, but offer an opportunity for all children to learn about empathy, respect and kindness as their teachers help them develop positive attitudes which challenge racism and stereotyping. Cohen reads then Home Secretary David Blunkett’s case for separate education for refugee children as ‘explicitly racist’ – schools are being “swamped” by asylum-seeking children, said Blunkett. (Cohen, 2003, p.32)

 

Of course, not all teachers will uphold the principles exemplified in NUT policy. Many express misgivings about including refugee children in mainstream classes, sometimes out of well-founded concerns over inadequate funding. However, racism is also a factor in determining teachers’ approach to the immigrant children in their classes.

 

Ofsted (2003) suggest that by and large schools can provide a community within which refugee children can grow and become accepted. This sense of togetherness is another strong reason for the Government to attempt to avoid integration of refugee children into mainstream schools, because once a sense of belonging has developed it is much harder for children to be deported. Why? Because once children have accepted a new friend among them they are willing to fight to prevent that friend from being torn away.

 

The smashing of immigration controls

 

Cohen’s & Hayer’s is a Marxist vision of a world without borders, within which the workers of the world can, indeed, finally unite. There is no doubt that it is utopian, but it is also a principled application of some of the theoretical positions we have discussed in relation to racialisation and migration in previous weeks. Cohen notes, honestly, that “[i]t is certainly the case that the smashing of controls –because such action will be required as they will not disappear spontaneously – will probably require a revolution.” (Cohen 2006, p.5) But, the “refusal to contemplate a world without restrictions on movement, is a refusal to challenge the fundamental racism represented by immigration controls.” (Ibid.)

 

Steve Cohen

References

 

Buchanan, M. (2007) ‘Are We Born Prejudiced?’ New Scientist, 2595, pp. 41-43

 

Cohen, S. (2003) No One is Illegal: asylum and immigration control past and present, Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books

 

Cohen, S. (2006) Standing on the Shoulders of Fascism: from immigration control to the strong state,  Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books

 

Harris, N. (2002) Thinking The Unthinkable: the immigration myth exposed, London: I.B. Taurus

 

Hayter, T. (2000) Open Borders: The Case against Immigration Controls, London: Pluto Press

 

Institute for Public Policy Rserach (2010) Exploring the Roots of BNP Support, http://www.ippr.org.uk/publicationsandreports/publication.asp?id=743

 

Ofsted (2003) The Education of Asylum Seeker Pupils, Ofsted Publications Centre