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

Re-open the Borders 165
and the mafia, who trade in human beings, drugs and stolen goods. Refugees
and migrants are therefore associated in people’s minds with crime, and the
process provides rich hunting-grounds for the prejudices of the media. Even
the broadsheets carry sensational stories of the doings of the human
‘traffickers’ and the terrible effects they have on the people who put
themselves in their hands, including forcing them into prostitution.
Governments also seem determined to transform refugees into objects of
contempt and targets for racist attack by making them destitute. The
government says it wishes to combat social exclusion, and threatens zero
tolerance. It is nevertheless creating another category of people who will be
driven into begging and providing services on the streets, when they find it
difficult to survive on vouchers worth 70 per cent of the minimum amount
considered necessary for the rest of the population. In addition, the plans to
disperse asylum seekers into sink estates and impoverished regions, blighted
by the lack of jobs and facilities, will subject them to racist harassment and
abuse. The situation of refugees forced by the Tories’ denial of access to the
benefits system to stay in south Kent, an area impoverished by mine closures
and the decline of English seaside resorts, provides an indication of things to
come. Refugees will be blamed for the condition of the housing in which they
are placed and will be isolated from their own communities, and they will
return, to London and other places, to survive by whatever means possible.
Again, when governments lock refugees up in detention centres and prisons
many people make the logical, but false, assumption that they must have
committed some crime. Such treatment of refugees makes it harder to
counter the unfounded assertions that immigrants are especially prone to
criminal activities, as well as to disease, squalor and all the attributes which
the racists regularly ascribe to new immigrants of whatever origins, and
which have been refuted in numerous official reports and by reality (see first
section of Chapter 2).
Immigration controls are inherently racist. Even supposing a system of
controls was adopted which did not discriminate between foreigners on the
basis of their colour, they would still discriminate against foreigners in
general, and in favour of the native inhabitants of the country operating
controls. Yet racism remains hard to understand. Why the English, or the
British, should consider themselves superior to foreigners, and how the
English, or British, should be defined, is a mystery. Notions of national
culture and national homogeneity have little basis in reality. Britain, like
most other countries, is the product of of immigration. The two things that
immigrants have in common is that they have nearly always been the object
of prejudice and hostility when they first arrived in Britain, and that they
have subsequently in different ways made large and valued contributions to
the wealth and culture of the country. In practice the racist opponents of
immigration are generally white, even though the nations they are defending
contain a great diversity of peoples, and their prejudices for the last 40 years
or so have been directed mainly at black people. When supporters of the far