People have always moved from one part of the globe to another. They have moved as settlers, to join family members, to study or to flee persecution.

But ever since capitalism began to establish itself as the dominant mode of production, the main type of migration has been labour migration.

Wherever capitalism has spread it has hungered for labour, without which production would not be possible. And with the global spread of capitalism came urbanisation - people were sucked out of rural areas and into towns and cities.

Often they would move for a mere chance of finding paid employment and giving themselves and their family a better life.

This process continues today. Billions of people are dependent on waged labour for their survival.

A majority of the world’s population now lives in an urban environment, and millions more flood into cities each year.

Often people move from a rural area to an urban area within the same country. But migration under capitalism can also involve crossing the borders of nation states.

The concept of a nation state is a relatively recent one. There are two forms of competition at the heart of capitalism.

First, capitalists compete economically for markets. Second, as capitalism developed it also created a system in which the globe is divided territorially into competing nation states.

The rulers of each nation state seek to do two things - to support the capitalists based within their own territory in their competition with foreign capitalists and to secure and to expand the territory under their effective control.

Controlling territory involves controlling the people within it. So capitalists have always been concerned with the population in “their” territory, not as human beings with needs, but as a supply of labour power.

But our rulers do not simply want our labour, they want a labour market - with workers forced to compete for jobs. One consequence is that while capitalists can never fully control migration, they can and do create a hierarchy among workers.

This hierarchy runs from those workers with full legal rights at the top, down through varying degrees of immigration status that make the worker less secure both in their right to live within a territory and their right to work there.

At the bottom of this hierarchy are those “illegal” immigrants whose status removes their legal right to work altogether, opening them up to the worst forms of abuse.

So international migration under capitalism creates a working class in each national territory that is united by its shared experience of exploitation, but divided by race and nationality. This create the potential for both conflict and solidarity within the working class.

Citizenship

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries nation states developed a powerful notion of citizenship - the idea that people should enjoy formal, legal equality but under the jurisdiction of one national power.

The revolutions that helped establish capitalism as the dominant system in Britain, France and the US during the 17th and 18th centuries involved “the people” throwing off the status of royal subjects to become a nation of free citizens.

As capitalism developed, and class divisions became more stark, the capitalists and their state increasingly proposed a bargain to working people - give us your loyalty and we will protect and provide.

This bargain was always on the bosses’ terms and has always been subject to challenge. Nonetheless it is true that national identity has become common sense.

This definition of “us” as a nation against other nations gives rise to potential conflict not only between states but also within them - on national or ethnic lines. Three important consequences flow from all this:

First, as long as states allow their own nationals to come and go, and as long as capitalists trade and operate across national boundaries, states cannot fully control immigration.

Second, the state can, however, institutionalise divisions among people within its territory according to nationality and immigration status. A section of the labour force then suffers uncertainty about its continued presence in the country and has fewer rights at work.

Those branded “illegal” suffer extreme exploitation and violence from employers and criminals. Any attempt to turn to the state for protection would only result in their deportation.

Third, the state’s declared preference for its “own” nationals, its designation of others as less deserving or even dangerous, and its declaration that it can control its borders, creates a politics of immigration favourable to right wing forces and racist agitation.

This lays the basis for scapegoating. Each apparent crisis is met with calls to tighten immigration controls or kick people out. Workers can only counter this right wing politics of immigration through their struggles to build unity.

Ed Mynott/Socialist Worker [UK]

tags: capitalism  exploitation  migrant labor  immigration  

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