Open%20borders%20The%20case%20against%20immigration%20controls%20-%20Teresa%20Hayter

Re-open the Borders 159
levels of immigration, including Spain, have the highest levels of unemployment,
while the opposite is true of Switzerland. It can be argued, in fact, that
an influx of refugees and migrants may cause boom conditions, as the Cuban
exiles have in Miami and the pieds-noirs possibly have in the south of France.
A principal argument for the thesis that immigrants do not cause unemployment
is that they tend to take jobs which are shunned by the natives,
and therefore provide an essential means of enabling economies to function
and expand. Some have argued that if immigrant workers had not been
available there would have been more modernisation, and that employers
would have been forced to improve conditions and so make the jobs
attractive enough for local workers to take them. But it is perhaps more
likely that the jobs would have disappeared altogether, or been moved
abroad. If this is so immigrants have enabled industries and services to
survive and thus created more jobs for the population as a whole, both in
these industries and from the demand they create, as well as contributing to
the general expansion of the economy. Nigel Harris in his Paris paper
comments:
Many of the sectors involved are relatively marginal so the lack of a labour supply
would lead to closure rather than raising wages to meet local native expectations
and/or increasing the capital intensity of production. Imports would then presumably
replace local production, and key services would not be provided. Almost certainly
this would reduce native employment – for those natives employed in the sectors
concerned, for those employed in providing goods and services to the former labour
force, and for those dependent upon the complementary inputs of those industries.
The benefits of forcing closures here are difficult to see.
The economic studies are, as usual, not necessarily conclusive, and are often
contradictory and confusing. But supposing there was, after all, any negative
effect on wages and conditions arising from the availability of the cheap
labour of immigrants, the biggest effect would arise from their illegality. This
is what makes it hardest for migrants to struggle for better conditions and
wages, and most useful to employers in supplying, they hope, a malleable
and docile workforce. Once immigrants have a secure legal and residence
status, as Commonwealth migrants have since they first came to Britain in
the 1950s, and as all workers would once immigration controls were
abolished, all the evidence is that they are as willing to join trade unions and
organise as the native workforce, or more so. Supposing it were true that
immigrant workers and their legally inferior position weakened the
bargaining strength of the working class as a whole, then the obvious
response is to make more effort to incorporate them as fully as possible into
union structures and to fight for their full access to all the rights enjoyed by
local workers. However what has the most potential to weaken and divide
the working class is not the existence of immigrants, either legal or illegal, but
the racism of white workers. The hostility of some of the latter towards
immigrants may cause them to blame immigrants rather than their