Breaking down racist barriers
Open Borders - The Case Against Immigration Controls by Teresa Hayter, (Pluto Press £12.99)
Reviewed by Charlie van Gelderen
There can be few people more qualified to write a book about why immigration controls should be scrapped than Teresa Hayter. She is not only a diligent researcher, but also a dedicated activist, a partisan in the Campaign to Close Campsfield and the campaign to stop the former RAF barracks in Oakington, outside Cambridge, being turned into another Campsfield.
She has also visited and talked to asylum seekers in Winson Green, Rochester, Blakenhurst and Bullingdon prisons.
These experiences, the lessons to be learned from them, form the basis for this well-researched and well-written book. It is essential reading for all who want to get to grips with this issue which is only a problem because governments, aided and abetted by a jingoistic media choose to make it so.
In the present-day global economy, money is free to travel. Traversing national frontiers is no problem. Capital is literally flying all over the world.
It is not only capital in the shape of currency that can travel freely in today's world. This is also true of fixed capital - machinery.
Multinational enterprises think nothing of moving whole factories from one part of the globe to another, in search of higher profits, wringing more surplus value out of underpaid work force.
The movement of currencies, has little to do with increasing the world's productive resources. While, before 1971, over 90 per cent of exchange transactions in the world bore some relation to financing trade and future investments, and less than half was speculative, today these figures are reversed: over 90 per cent of all transactions are speculative. There are no closed borders against these currency speculations. Capital can go where and when it wants.
There is, however, no such freedom of movement for people trying to escape from abysmal poverty, racial and political oppression. For tens of thousands of people trapped in these conditions it is becoming, as Hayter demonstrates time and again, increasingly difficult to find a country willing to accept them.
While, once upon a time, people openly moved from one country to another in search of improved living standards for themselves and their families, and if successful were hailed as entrepreneurs.
Today, the wretched of the earth, coming from the under-developed to the more prosperous countries of the West, are greeted with scorn as "economic migrants", to set them apart from "genuine refugees."
As Hayter puts it: "Migration for economic betterment, rather than being considered, as it should be and as it was when Europeans did it, desirable, is now regarded as criminal and somehow shameful."
Ever since the Neanderthals and after them Homo Sapiens, emerged from Africa, human beings have been migratory, moving from area to area in seek of better conditions. Today they would all be characterised as "economic migrants"
As Hayter makes crystal clear, most people would, given a choice, prefer to remain in the land of their birth; with their families and friends; in familiar surroundings and their traditional way of life.
They emigrate for two reasons mainly - through poverty, when they are unable to provide for their families; or to escape from oppressive regimes where they are subject to imprisonment, torture and even death, often only because they are politically opposed to the party in power.
The irony of the situation is that the poverty prevalent in the so-called developing world, is worsened by the economic actions of the wealthier countries of the West - to which the refugees seek to flee.
Conditions imposed by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund through structural adjustment programmes are a major cause of emigration. The financial establishments on these countries do nothing to improve the living standards of these people. Quite the reverse!
Today the easy access to international news have made most would-be migrants aware of the difficulties they would have to overcome in the countries where they seek asylum. Controls imposed on would-be immigrants, are harsh and often brutal; the aim to try and stop the inflow.
They are also aware of the growing racism in these countries, a racism stimulated by the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the government and the media, although the proponents of the spate of anti-refugee legislation tried to argue that its aim was to minimise racist tensions.
Thus, Margaret Thatcher, in an interview with ITV's World in Action, January 1978, said that "if you want good race relations, you have got to allay people's fears about numbers."
These sentiments have been echoed by successive Home Secretaries and, far from the proclaimed aim of allaying racism, have actually stimulated it, leading to increased activities by the National Front and other extreme Right groups.
The Treaty of Rome which set the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957, was supposed to eliminate, not only trade barriers and free movement of capital within Europe, but also to stimulate the free movement of people. Migrants within Europe were to have full social and family rights.
In the 1970s immigration from outside Europe was virtually stopped, but the rights of 'third country nationals' already settled in European states, were severely curtailed. Fortress Europe was being created.
Britain would not agree to the Schengen Convention, under which border controls between countries in Europe agreeing to the Convention would be abolished by 1 January, 1990. Britain insisted on maintaining its own severely restrictive border controls.
It is within the discretion of governments to determine who is a "genuine" refugee and who is not. British governments, whether Tory or Labour, have an eye on the electorate who could be swept into a xenophobic view by a manipulative media.
There is no real distinction between the positions of Jack Straw and his predecessor, Michael Howard, both of whom are, incidentally, descended from immigrants, in Howard's case, only two generations ago.
Thus, in 1994, around 80 per cent of asylum seekers, amounting to some 16,000 were refused the right to stay.
A recent MORI poll found that the media-fed public have completely wrong and exaggerated views of the situation.
Those questioned hugely over-estimated the money asylum seekers receive, believing they got an average £113 a week whereas a single adult seeking asylum gets just £36.54 a week in vouchers to be spent at selected shops - only £10 may be converted into cash.
They also estimated that immigrants make up 20 per cent of the British population, while the real figure is around 4 per cent.
Arguing strongly for the abolition of existing border controls, Hayter stresses especially that these controls lead to great suffering and abuse of human rights; they are racist and help to legitimise racism.
She also trenchantly disposes of the case that the free entry of immigrants leads to the loss of jobs in the host countries, working conditions or the welfare state in Europe.
Drawing on empirical material and first-hand experience, Hayter shows that these imposed controls, at vast human and financial cost, do little to reduce the number of people trying to enter the countries of their choice.
She calls for the free movement of people to be recognised as a universal human right - for open borders.
This book provides valuable material for all engaged in the fight against immigration controls, for every one who recognises that the global economy require global recognition of the right of every man and woman to be treated as a human being and not as merchandise or political fodder for the xenophobes and racists.