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

6 Open Borders
period of brutal impoverishment of the Yugoslav population. ... The
“economic therapy” (launched in January 1990) contributed to crippling
the federal State system. State revenues which should have gone as transfer
payments to the republics and autonomous provinces were instead funnelled
towards servicing Belgrade’s debt ... .’ This in turn fuelled the populist
nationalism which led to the break-up of Yugoslavia and war.
In a more direct sense, repression and wars in the Third World are largely
made possible because both the regimes and those who fight them obtain
weapons from the industrialised countries, frequently with the help of official
loans. Many of the world’s most repressive regimes are supported, with aid
for example, by European governments and the United States. Both the
Nigerian and the Zairean governments, as well as many governments in
Latin America and Asia, were supported for years while they oppressed and
tortured their peoples and stole their wealth. When right-wing governments
are thrown out or voted out by liberation movements or left-wing political
parties and attempt to carry out reforms and to redistribute wealth to the
poor, the West intervenes by cutting aid, boycotting trade and sometimes by
military intervention, directly or through its surrogates. It thus has direct
responsibility, for example, for refugees from Chile and from Angola, among
others. The recent flow of refugees from eastern Europe follows the introduction
of capitalism and market systems and the break-up of Yugoslavia
and the Soviet Union, most of which was welcomed and supported by the
West. In 1999 more than half of all asylum seekers in Europe were from the
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, nearly all of them Kosovans. Those who
assert that refugees and migrants are a problem should examine the causes
of forced migration, rather than blaming and punishing refugees.
In Britain there have been three main historical phases of anti-immigrant
agitation, leading in the first two cases to the abandonment of what were
thought to be inviolable principles of free movement, and potentially doing
so in the third, current, phase. In the first phase controls were introduced in
1905 to restrict the entry of ‘aliens’, mainly Jewish refugees from eastern
Europe and Russia. In the second controls were introduced in 1962 to stop
the entry of ‘coloured’ British Commonwealth citizens. In the third, while
entry for political refugees is still in theory allowed, this principle is being
undermined. There are distinct parallels between the first two of these
phases. In both cases immigration controls were initially demanded by an
extreme right-wing racist minority, following a larger influx of immigrants
than previously. The demands for controls were not the result of any
economic imperatives or problems. They fed, and were fed by, a growth of
irrational prejudice against outsiders. Controls on the free movement of
people were at first opposed by high-minded rhetoric from mainstream
politicians of all parties, who eventually succumbed to racist pressures, or
allowed their own prejudices to prevail, and introduced controls. As each
measure of control was introduced, this, rather than appeasing the racists,