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Capitalism Thrives on Cheap Migrant Labor

by jo swift at 02:29PM (CEST) on September 3, 2006 | Permanent Link | Cosmos

Capitalism & exploitation

always go hand-in-hand

Muscella, Georgia, 1936
Peach pickers being driven to the orchards.
They earned seventy-five cents a day.

Our rulers see foreign workers as both

a target for racist scapegoating,

and as a source of cheap labour and easy profits

People have always moved from one part of the globe to another. They have moved as settlers, to join family members, to study or to flee persecution.

But ever since capitalism began to establish itself as the dominant mode of production, the main type of migration has been labour migration.

Wherever capitalism has spread it has hungered for labour, without which production would not be possible. And with the global spread of capitalism came urbanisation - people were sucked out of rural areas and into towns and cities.

Often they would move for a mere chance of finding paid employment and giving themselves and their family a better life.

This process continues today. Billions of people are dependent on waged labour for their survival.

A majority of the world’s population now lives in an urban environment, and millions more flood into cities each year.

Often people move from a rural area to an urban area within the same country. But migration under capitalism can also involve crossing the borders of nation states.

The concept of a nation state is a relatively recent one. There are two forms of competition at the heart of capitalism.

First, capitalists compete economically for markets. Second, as capitalism developed it also created a system in which the globe is divided territorially into competing nation states.

The rulers of each nation state seek to do two things - to support the capitalists based within their own territory in their competition with foreign capitalists and to secure and to expand the territory under their effective control.

Controlling territory involves controlling the people within it. So capitalists have always been concerned with the population in “their” territory, not as human beings with needs, but as a supply of labour power.

But our rulers do not simply want our labour, they want a labour market - with workers forced to compete for jobs. One consequence is that while capitalists can never fully control migration, they can and do create a hierarchy among workers.

This hierarchy runs from those workers with full legal rights at the top, down through varying degrees of immigration status that make the worker less secure both in their right to live within a territory and their right to work there.

At the bottom of this hierarchy are those “illegal” immigrants whose status removes their legal right to work altogether, opening them up to the worst forms of abuse.

So international migration under capitalism creates a working class in each national territory that is united by its shared experience of exploitation, but divided by race and nationality. This create the potential for both conflict and solidarity within the working class.

Citizenship

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries nation states developed a powerful notion of citizenship - the idea that people should enjoy formal, legal equality but under the jurisdiction of one national power.

The revolutions that helped establish capitalism as the dominant system in Britain, France and the US during the 17th and 18th centuries involved “the people” throwing off the status of royal subjects to become a nation of free citizens.

As capitalism developed, and class divisions became more stark, the capitalists and their state increasingly proposed a bargain to working people - give us your loyalty and we will protect and provide.

This bargain was always on the bosses’ terms and has always been subject to challenge. Nonetheless it is true that national identity has become common sense.

This definition of “us” as a nation against other nations gives rise to potential conflict not only between states but also within them - on national or ethnic lines. Three important consequences flow from all this:

First, as long as states allow their own nationals to come and go, and as long as capitalists trade and operate across national boundaries, states cannot fully control immigration.

Second, the state can, however, institutionalise divisions among people within its territory according to nationality and immigration status. A section of the labour force then suffers uncertainty about its continued presence in the country and has fewer rights at work.

Those branded “illegal” suffer extreme exploitation and violence from employers and criminals. Any attempt to turn to the state for protection would only result in their deportation.

Third, the state’s declared preference for its “own” nationals, its designation of others as less deserving or even dangerous, and its declaration that it can control its borders, creates a politics of immigration favourable to right wing forces and racist agitation.

This lays the basis for scapegoating. Each apparent crisis is met with calls to tighten immigration controls or kick people out. Workers can only counter this right wing politics of immigration through their struggles to build unity.

Ed Mynott/Socialist Worker [UK]

Keywords: immigration, capitalism, labor, migrant, exploitation

Technorati Tags: immigration, capitalism, labor, migrant, exploitation

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Re: Capitalism Thrives on Cheap Migrant Labor

by bernarda on Mon 04 Sep 2006 08:40 AM CEST | Profile | Permanent Link

An interesting historical review of immigration to the U.S. is given here.

"Following the Civil War, the floodgates opened once more, and between 1865 and 1910 about 25 million immigrants entered the United States. Those immigrants also changed the ethnic character of the United States, even more profoundly than had the Irish. For large numbers of the immigrants in the late 19th century and early 20th century came from areas which had seen few immigrants to the United States before. They came from Poland, Russia, Romania, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Turkey and many other southern and eastern European nations. Like the Irish, they tended to ghettoize themselves into communities, many of which remain to this day. There are still parts of the United States where one can hear Swedish, Italian, Polish, Yiddish and many other languages spoken in the streets. The new immigrants filled up the cities faster than they could be accommodated with comfort and found themselves jammed into tenements, crowded apartments and shoddy houses with few sanitary facilities at all. In 1880 in New York City a majority of the population did not speak English. The worst slums in the world were supposed to have existed in Chicago. And yet they continued to come in pursuit of what has been called the American dream.

America has always needed cheap labor, and that provided much of the impetus for immigration, as it still does. In the last decades on the 19 century the building of the transcontinental railroads demanded huge numbers of laborers, and it was Irish and Italians and Chinese who did much of that work. By 1910 United States had over 200,000 miles of railroads, about as much as the rest of the world combined, and when that great building boom subsided, the immigrants remained.

Since most of the Chinese who came to the country to work had been males, and few came with families, when the railroads were finished, they found themselves living in ghettos in the western cities with little female companionship. The social problems which arose from that were predictable, and the American response was to pass laws to restrict and discriminate against those of Asian ethnicity.

Since much of the wealth in the nation was consolidated in the hands of predominantly white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, the social tensions that resulted from immigration and the great disparity in wealth that grew larger in the age of industrialization were multiplied. In the 1920s the doors began to close for a time. Severe restrictions were placed upon immigration, and a quota system was established whereby those who were admitted to the United States were most likely to gain entry if they were of the ethnic groups already well-established here. When an annual quota of 150,000 for immigration was established (as opposed to years when almost a million had entered) approximately 60% of those allowed to enter the country had to come from Germany and the British Isles. The rest of the world had to divvy up to 40% left over. As World War II approached an international troubles multiplied, immigration slowed once more, only to begin again after the war when millions of displaced persons, wartime refugees far from their homes, sought new beginnings her and elsewhere."

http://www.sagehistory.net/gildedage/immigration.htm

Considering that the American population at the time of the Civil War was less than 20 million, that is quite a change in population. The wealth of the nation is still today largely held by WASP plutocrates.

What is "illegal" immigration but arbitrary standards created by racist politicians supported by their racist electorate.

Now Republicans just don't like mostly darker Spanish-speaking people. But notice in the article, "In 1880 in New York City a majority of the population did not speak English."

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