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

Preface to the Second Edition xxv
refugee camps in Hong Kong and did research in Vietnam, gives a gripping
fictionalised account of some of their stories).
The more governments cast around for ever more brutal and repressive
ways of trying to keep people out, the clearer it becomes that it is impossible
to win any particular improvements in immigration controls, important
though it is to expose and campaign against their harshest consequences. The
suffering imposed on asylum seekers and other migrants is not some random
or unintended consequence of immigration controls. It is deliberate government
policy. Governments believe in deterrence, or the potential for reducing the
number of people applying for asylum by making conditions harsh. Even
supposing there was any prospect that governments might abandon this
belief, suffering is an inevitable consequence of immigration controls, which
give to the state the right to choose between the deserving and the undeserving.
The people best able to decide whether they need to migrate, or to seek refuge,
are migrants themselves.
It is also not enough to argue, as some do, including Nigel Harris in his new
book Thinking The Unthinkable, that people should be free to migrate for work,
just as capital and goods are supposedly free, and that decisions on whom to
employ should be left to employers rather than determined by the state. If
migrant workers do not have citizenship rights, they will constitute, as they
now do, a threatened and precarious underclass, and they will be open to
extreme forms of exploitation. Trade unions and all workers have an interest
in supporting the rights of migrants, in order to prevent their own rights and
working conditions being undermined (see above). New migrants need to have
exactly the same rights as all others who are living and working in a particular
country or area, whatever their nationality. A demand which is now
widespread in France and other European countries is for citizenship based
on residency, rather than on nationality. New migrants must have not only
the right to work, but the right to join trade unions, to employment protection,
to go on strike and to vote, and they must have full access to all the benefits
enjoyed by other citizens, including health care, education, unemployment
benefits and social security. They must not be threatened with deportation
if they attempt to assert their rights.
Finally, it remains true that whatever the economic rationale for securing
a cheap and compliant workforce through ‘managed immigration’, ultimately
immigration controls are explicable only by racism. If governments merely
wanted a compliant workforce they could allow employers to make free use
of the vast reservoir of labour which now exists in the world because of
centuries of imperialist theft, as many employers in the United States and
elsewhere urge. It is perhaps conceivable that immigration controls could
disappear under capitalism (see for example pp. 152–5). Many disagree,
believing that free movement of people will only become a political possibility
once the capitalist expropriation of the wealth of the Third World, and the
wars to enable this, end. But while the abolition of immigration controls