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

170 Open Borders
Saskia Sassen in The Mobility of Labor and Capital argues that the growth of
export-orientated industries sometimes leaves people, especially young
women, stranded when they are thrown out of factories once the intensity
of work has worn them out; they then cannot return to their villages and
have little alternative but to migrate to low-wage jobs in US cities. IMF and
World Bank structural adjustment programmes have, sometimes quite deliberately,
created unemployment especially among urban workers in public
services, and required wage cuts. Their demands for cuts in public services
and wages have been in the cause of extracting repayment of foreign debt.
This creation of poverty must have increased the relative attractiveness of
migration, and the need for it. It has also sometimes led to political upheavals
and more repression, from which people have been forced to flee. In the clearcut
case of Yugoslavia, the policies of the IMF created poverty and
unemployment which was then exploited by nationalists and led to war,
ethnic cleansing and mass flight. The sans-papiers have increasingly argued
that, while they do not relish their exploitation in wretched jobs which the
native inhabitants of Europe reject, they have been forced into this situation
by imperialism. At the FASTI conference in Lille (see pp. 113), a sans-papiers
asylum seeker, who was able to remain in France because her son is French,
and who goes around with her son’s identity card in case she gets stopped,
said in a speech to the conference:
The Europeans come to Africa. They take all its riches. ... We only own 13 per cent of
our natural resources. It is France that is there, everywhere. ... It would be better to
go home, if we could work there in true cooperation. We’d be better off in the sun,
under the coconut palms.
At the same conference Madgiguène Cissé, a leading spokesperson of the
Saint Bernard sans-papiers, after speaking about the horrors of detention
camps, said it was not enough to demand their closure; it was necessary to
examine the root causes of migration from the South to the North. Describing
the effects of structural adjustment programmes, the disproportion between
the sums spent on debt repayment and the sums required for education and
health programmes, and the support by France for repressive regimes in
Africa, she concluded:
I shall end by saying that today demanding the closure of detention centres, or an
amnesty for sans-papiers who want their situation to be regularised, should mean
starting by demanding the inauguration of new relationships between the North and
the South, and the cancellation of Third World debt.
In other words an end to exploitation of the Third World and development
which in reality improved conditions there, and so made migration a matter
of choice rather than of desperation, would be welcome. Madgiguène Cissé
also made the point that the imperialists supply arms to the oppressors:
They tell you about the debt we must pay back, they tell you about public assistance
for development, but what they don’t talk about is that a large proportion of this