Don Flynn on migration
Migration as Economic Imperialism by Immanuel Ness published by Polity
There is a strong tendency at the liberal end of commentary on immigration issues to respond to right-wing doom-mongering by insisting that there’s not much to see here, calm down and carry on.
A recent example of this came in the form of Hein de Haas’s lengthy book, How Migration Really Works. Described as “a factful guide to the most divisive issue in politics”, Professor de Haas discussed twenty-two “myths” about migration which he claimed, if only looked at more dispassionately, really ought to set us all at ease.
Looked at in this way, there really aren’t too many immigrants in the world, around just three per cent of the world’s population. Most of them aren’t coming “here” anyway – they are just moving across their most immediate local border, with Bangladeshi’s crossing into India and sub-Saharan Africans migrating to the north of their continent. In any event, it is all working out for the best anyway. They are meeting demand for workers in whatever country they arrive in, and their remittances back home are helping to drive development.
The author of Immigration as Economic Imperialism eschews this complacency. The type of migration taking place in the world today is, first and foremost, organised along the lines of imperialism, and as such works to subordinate the interests of all the people concerned to the brutal business of capital accumulation. Its effects can be traced from the displacement of rural agricultural communities to Third World mega-cities as their peasant landholdings become unsustainable in the face of competition from Global North agribusiness corporations.
Problems of sustainability in stifling urban environments are not solved by shipping surplus populations overseas to find whatever work is available in countries further afield. Developing nation governments pursue the dream of what is effectively selling those of their citizens who can’t find work at home to richer countries, which will employ them in sundry hard-to-fill jobs – seafarers, care workers, farm workers, builders, hospitality staff, domestic workers and the like. But rather than applaud their willingness to labour in jobs not considered attractive by natives, the host countries set the seal on a stigmatised immigration status by branding them as unskilled, unproductive and getting too many housing and health benefits.
Ness is particularly withering in his analysis of the World Bank’s enthusiasm for remittances. There are many reasons for being sceptical about the value of remittances as a strategy for advancing development, with its negative effects in promoting inequality in home countries as the families supported by an income from an overseas worker are elevated to the gentry level, with living standards that outstrip their neighbours, being one of the most serious. But its allure as a ready-made solution to developing-world poverty is also challenged by the precarity of residence status in the host country. A welcome flow of money during good years can easily dry up if that nation’s mood for migration changes, and deportations and other forced returns start to increase.
The analysis set out here follows the standard Marxist reading of neoliberal imperialism and provides a convincing picture of the misery which is the standard lot of the migrant. But the proper object of materialist inquiry is not just to describe what is, but also the ways in which we might look to change it. Ness gives us too few clues on this matter. The radical solutions advanced from some quarters, to aim for the wholesale abolition of borders, are dismissed as a “utopian ideal” which is “not rooted in historical or material reality.”
The chapter missing from this book is the one that sets out the “historical and material reality” of migrant struggle for social, economic and political rights, which is developing at a necessary rapid pace in the United States as resistance builds against the cruel actions of Trump’s ICE enforcers. Europe, regrettably, lags somewhat behind, but nevertheless, the groundwork for a form of class struggle that embraces migrant and refugee rights can still be seen on good days.
The integration of migrant rights into a struggle for social justice that extends across the indigenous working class and others whose interests are marginalised by Capital is the way we move beyond the abject experience of migration, which is well described in this book. That is the way to reach the point where moving across national frontiers becomes something much closer to a basic human right.