Immigration and exploitation

Let's cut to the chase with the issue of immigration to the UK. I'm not a racist, and mine is an economic/political and social case about the need to restrict immigration. The economic case is quite straightforward, and has bubbled under during the great debate leading up to the referendum. It seems to me that immigrants are being recruited to Britain on a false prospectus, and certainly, the occasional interview with them seems to suggest that they think the UK is a land of milk and honey, prosperity and tolerance. My own view is that they are being exploited to become part of the reserve army of labour: in Marx's day, that was made up of the unemployed, and, later, of female workers.

Those who campaigned in favour of remaining were able to cite official statistics showing that the net economic impact of such immigrants was positive, that their payments into the State exceeded their benefits. That could even support my case that they are being ripped off. More technically, in the first place, that combines together high wage immigrants and low wage ones, and there's a strong suspicion that low wage ones are being paid only the minimum wage or less. 

Further, there has been some evidence that the net impact of immigration has not been to diminish wages in Britain, rather that government policy has done this. However, sometimes a relative lack of power and influence by the trade unions is admitted to be responsible as well. I don't know any data, but I am willing to bet that most poorly waged immigrant labour is not unionized, and that their introduction into workplaces has the effect of splitting the solidarity of the workers who are unionized. 

Finally, long-term economic impacts are unknown. However, the impact of population growth in Britain, combined with an austerity program, has produced undoubted effects on welfare provision, from inadequate school places, to an underfunded National Health Service. The increase in immigration is the largest factor in such population growth. 

Interestingly, the vote to leave seems to have finally weaned the Chancellor off his commitment to austerity too.There was much scorn for the pledge to spend all the money contributed to the EU on the Health Service instead, but some of it at least might be spent that way. The Leave campaign quoted the gross figure of payments to the EU as £350m per week.The Remainers patiently and patronisingly explained to the electorate that this was a gross figure and that the net figure was only about £110m --somehow they thought that was acceptable!

This still does not mean that we should hate immigrants, of course. Indeed, I see them mostly as the innocent victims of a continuing attempt to drastically weaken the place of organized labour in Britain. This has been much discussed sometimes in terms of 'deskilling' or mechanisation as the 'emancipation of capital from labour'. 

I'm not sure that working class opponents of immigration are all simply racist either. Contrary to popular belief, the British working class has actually been surprisingly tolerant towards immigrants, although in a variable way, depending on factors such as the social class makeup and the social attitudes of immigrant groups themselves. However, people are rightly resentful at being expected always to deal with the social disorganization involved, which can last for a decade or so before things settle down. It is particularly hypocritical to condemn such resentment, when you are able to live in a safely isolated gated community which admits only highly respectable immigrants of a similar social class, and pay for your own health care and education.

This is not to deny the presence of working class racism. However, I've also always seen that there is significant racism in the middle and upper classes as well, sometimes combined with class or gender prejudice. The upper classes only seem interested in racism if it suits their ideologies. With ideological intent, lots of things can be condemned as racism and thus denounced. The marvellously hypocritical denunciation of anti-semitism in the Labour Party is a good example: as soon as it has done its work to embarrass Labour, as a 'moral panic', we never heard of it again. 

Indeed, the campaign to regulate immigration was initially managed by seeing it as simple racism, not worth discussing. I am still not sure what led to the failure of that strategy - maybe it was feedback from actual voters supporting Leave? The racism tag even became a bit of a liability, showing how distant elites were from their voters.