The British labour movement needs more migrant workers.
It needs to be invigorated by the spirit shown, for example, in the Tres Cosas campaign of ancillary workers at the University of London, almost all migrant workers.
Our movement needs to be enlivened by the militancy shown by a series of battles in the last year by cleaners and fast food workers, again almost all migrants.
Historically, our labour movement owes a lot to migrants, right back to the start. The Chartist movement in the 19th century owed a lot to Irish migrants, who faced even worse narrow-minded hostility than East European migrants to Britain do today.
Migrant workers, knowing different conditions and different cultures, are less likely to accept things as “just the way it is” or “the way it’s always been”. Being people with the energy and drive to leave friends and family and accustomed surroundings in order to try something new, they are less likely to stick in ruts, more likely to be willing to take risks.
The response of the wealthy classes is, now as always, to feed on prejudices and fears, to try to divide the working class, longer-settled from migrant.
The Daily Express started 2014 with a front page slandering Bulgarian and Romanian workers now legally free to come to Britain under European Union rules.
“Benefits Britain here we come! Fears as migrant flood begins”, it declared.
The Tories are restricting migrant workers’ rights to benefits, and agitating in the European Union for limits on migration. Ukip outflanks them on the right. The Labour leaders apologise again and again about the Labour government in 2004 having made some unspecified sort of mistake in admitting Polish workers to Britain earlier than was absolutely required under EU law.
The slurs about migrant workers being an unbearable pressure on budgets and services are lies.
Even in the Express that is clear. It has right-wing Tory MP Peter Bone complaining that the Government’s benefit restrictions “do not tackle the main problem”.
Why not? “Most migrants come to the UK to work. Why wouldn’t they when they can earn ten times what they can back home?” [Actually, Bulgaria’s income per head is 38% of the UK’s on purchasing power parity measure, not 10%].
But, writes Bone, “up to 70,000 a year will come, putting even more pressure on our schools, hospitals, and housing”.
In fact the migrant workers are contributing more staff to our schools and hospitals, more labour to the construction of new housing — or at least they are to the extent that Tory government cuts allow anyone to contribute.
The “services under pressure” depend heavily on migrant labour. Migrant workers put in vastly more, in productive labour and taxes paid, than they claim in welfare and benefits. Migrant workers are part of the working class, and a highly productive part.
Even in capitalist conditions, countries with freer and larger immigration generally do better than more closed-off countries.
In the EU, the free movement of labour has been a pressure for the levelling-up of wages across the continent. The gap between Spanish wages, for example, and German wages today is much smaller than it was when Spain joined the EU. EU bosses are now trying to use the debt crisis to reverse that levelling-up, but the free movement of labour makes it more difficult for them to do so.
Our trade unions should make a special effort to welcome and integrate Bulgarian, Romanian, and other migrant workers, and to help them contribute to the labour movement’s campaign for improved services and standards for all.
Eugene V. Debs on immigration
I think this article by Eugene V. Debs is a useful statement on our basic position of open borders.