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

4 Open Borders
Britain has sometimes been seen as the explanation for slow British growth
compared to, for example, French and German. Employers at times put
pressure on governments to relax immigration controls, especially in the
United States. The reasons why these capitalist pressures are not more
successful, or more determined, have little to do with the material interests
of capitalism. Thus for example the London Financial Times, a strong
proponent of the ‘free’ market, has acknowledged that it is inconsistent to
exclude labour from such freedom, but argued that increased immigration
would cause, not economic problems, but social problems, or problems of
‘assimilation’.
Immigration ‘problems’ are not a problem of excessive numbers of
immigrants. They are a problem of the racism of Europeans, North
Americans and white majorities elsewhere, who more or less explicitly
harbour notions of the superiority of the white ‘race’, whatever that may
mean, and the undesirability of destroying the supposed homogeneity of their
nation. In the past these notions have been applied to virtually all new
immigrants, whatever their nationality or race. In the last forty years the
main objects of anti-immigrant racism in Britain and elsewhere have been,
and are, people of African and Asian origin. In the 1950s and 1960s British
politicians tried to work out how to exclude ‘coloured’ Commonwealth
citizens without excluding white Commonwealth citizens and the much
larger numbers of Irish immigrants, without giving an appearance of discrimination
and without causing offence to the governments and peoples of
the ‘multiracial Commonwealth’. Eventually they abandoned the attempt,
and immigration controls, from 1962 onwards, were at first covertly and
then blatantly based on racist discrimination not only against foreigners in
general, but against particular types of foreigners (see Chapter 2).
The currently dominant form of anti-immigrant racism, that which is
directed against black and Asian people, and most recently Romany people,
is sometimes ‘explained’ by the assertion that they are more easily identifiable
as immigrants, or the children of immigrants, than most of the other
waves of migrants to Britain over the centuries. But similar things have been
said about the supposed ‘non-assimilability’ of other immigrants, and in any
case it is unclear why such distinctions should matter. The most convincing
explanation for the strength and persistence of anti-black racism is to be
found in the myths which the imperialists invented to justify to themselves
the extreme forms of suffering they imposed on their colonial subjects. These
myths survive, permeate British people’s consciousness, and infect the way
all of us think and act. It would nevertheless be surprising if prejudice against
black people did not diminish in the same way as prejudice against earlier
immigrants has. Meanwhile, anti-immigrant hysteria is whipped up not only
against black, Asian and Romany refugees but also against other recent
groups of refugees and migrants: Kosovans and other white east Europeans.
The primary targets of racism and xenophobia are now refugees. Since
the 1980s there have been rapid increases, from a low level, in the number