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

Introduction 5
of people coming from the Third World and eastern Europe to Britain and
other rich countries to seek asylum. The increase in asylum seekers followed
the closing of borders against people coming to seek work in the 1960s and
1970s. The government and others have made the false logical leap that this
means that asylum seekers are actually economic migrants trying to exploit
a loophole in immigration controls. A few are. But to claim that most asylum
seekers are ‘bogus’, as government ministers and the media often do, is false
and unjust. They come overwhelmingly from countries and regions in which
there are repressive regimes, civil wars and violent conflicts. Most of these
are not the areas from which people had previously migrated to work. There
is in fact a connection between the two types of migration, but not in the way
in which those opposed to immigration see it. This is that imperialism bears
much responsibility for both of them. Imperialism created links between the
colonies and the metropolis. While war, conflicts and repression are often
the product of many internal factors, including the chauvinism of religious
and ethnic majorities, various forms of nationalism and more straightforward
struggles for domination and wealth, it can be argued that some arise
from centuries of imperialist control, and in particular the imperialists’
divide-and-rule tactics and the boundaries they drew on maps. Imperialism
in its modern guise has created new forms of impoverishment, which may
exacerbate existing nationalist and ethnic tensions. When the long postwar
capitalist boom ended in the late 1970s, the rich countries succeeded in
transferring much of the burden of their own crisis to the Third World. The
prices of Third World countries’ exports of primary commodities and raw
materials collapsed. When at the beginning of the 1980s first the Reagan
government in the United States and then European governments raised
interest rates to unprecedented heights, they massively increased the cost of
servicing foreign debt for governments in the Third World (which had been
pressed to borrow at low or even negative interest rates from Western banks
seeking a ‘sinkhole’ for the money deposited by oil-exporters in the 1970s).
In order to force governments to continue to service their debt at these new
extortionate rates of interest, a cartel of the World Bank, the IMF, Western
governments and banks and Third World elites imposed cuts in public
expenditure on social services, wages and employment in Third World
countries which bore most heavily on the poor and urban wage earners. In
Algeria the massacres started when the military denied election victory to
the FIS, an Islamic party, whose strength was built especially among the
poor in urban areas impoverished by the government’s turn to more
orthodox pro-Western economic policies. The imposition of IMF/World Bank
‘liberalisation’ in Yugoslavia led to severe poverty and unemployment and
heavy indebtedness to Western banks and financial institutions. In their
attempt to get Yugoslavia to service this debt, the IMF/World Bank forced
the federal government to cut investment and transfers to the regions. Michel
Chossudovsky in a detailed article on this issue says: ‘Secessionist tendencies
feeding on social and ethnic divisions gained impetus precisely during a