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

Re-open the Borders 163
over £5,000’. This means that the cost of detaining 800 people in British
detention centres, prisons and police stations, and escorting them between
them, is around £48 million a year, about twelve times what it would cost
to pay them income support and housing benefit, let alone allow them to
work. Detention centres also have to be built or refurbished; the initial cost
of opening Campsfield detention centre, for example, was £20 million. There
is the cost of paying welfare benefits for asylum seekers who are not allowed
to work, and the even greater cost of the current British proposals for voucher
and dispersal schemes. The latter have required the Home Office to take on
500 new staff and cost about 50 per cent more than welfare benefits for the
same number of people would cost; in a parliamentary answer to the Liberal
Democrat MP Simon Hughes on 6 April 2000, Barbara Roche said these
‘support costs’ were £475 million in 1998/99 and £597 million in
1999/2000. According to figures supplied by the Home Office press office,
the total cost of supporting asylum seekers and other immigrants and of the
operations of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate to determine
whether or not they have a right to stay, to detain them, to deport them, to
detect them, etc., at Croydon, at the ports and in the London head office, was
£800 million in 1999/2000. On top of this there is the cost of public funding
for legal aid and the Refugee Legal Centre. The Immigration Service Union
has said, possibly with some exaggeration, that it costs £2 billion a year to
support and process asylum seekers.
The money would be better spent on making migrants and refugees
welcome, and on improving housing and other public provision for the
population as a whole, including recent immigrants, and thus reducing the
scope for racist scapegoating.
IMMIGRATION CONTROLS AND RACISM
There remains the question of racism. If it is true that objections to
immigration on economic and welfare grounds have little basis in reality, it
follows that immigration controls exist mainly because of racism in the
countries which apply them. This conclusion is reinforced by the fact that,
in Britain as in many countries, controls have discriminated between black
and white immigrants (see Chapter 2) so as to stop the former and encourage
the latter. To some extent this racism has a material base. It may suit
employers and the state, who hope to make immigrants into scapegoats and
so divert attention from the deficiencies of capitalism. It divides the workforce
and provides employers with exploitable labour, both within the industrialised
countries and in the world as a whole. But objections to immigration
are also based on irrational notions that cultural mixing is undesirable and
objectionable, and that cultural homogeneity is the goal. This is what drives
the far right, and what in turn has probably been the major force in the introduction
of immigration controls.