Jeremy Dewar review Migration Beyond Capitalism by Hannah Cross, 202pp, Polity, 2021
While migration has been a universal feature of human society, the scale at which it exists today is unprecedented. There are 1 billion migrants in the world today, if one includes internally displaced people.
They are so ubiquitous that they appear natural. Hannah Cross’s book reveals that today’s mass migration is anything but natural. It is both a product of capitalism and a means for capital to expand further.
Writing from a Marxist standpoint, Cross identifies three elements needed for a clear understanding of migration: cheap labour, national chauvinism and class prejudice. This approach has the advantage of replacing liberal humanitarianism with a class analysis. Ultimately it is a flawed attempt, but Cross provides a battery of facts and insights, which strengthen the struggle against anti-migrant racism and for justice and rights for migrant workers.
Global working class
Capitalism has always been international and it has always engendered migration. The original accumulation of capital not only included the slave trade across four continents, but also the eviction of European peasants, many of whom emigrated to the Americas, Australia, etc.
In capitalism’s highest stage, imperialism, in which the whole world is divided and redivided, the working class has crossed the globe, growing to 3.7 million today. Neoliberalism, capital’s response to the economic slowdown after the post-war boom, has further broken down borders in two ways.
It has increased investment into the semi-colonies and low-waged economies, augmenting the working class. At the same time, it has opened up migration routes for the import of cheap labour from the global south to the north.
Enormous supply lines crisscross the continents in search of the cheapest production costs as they compete on the world market. At every point the objective of capital is to reduce wages, abolish labour rights, and divide workers along racialised and gendered lines, in order to boost surplus value. This fact points to the potential for class-based solidarity within the system. The shared experience of exploitation can overcome the bosses’ attempts to divide and rule. Cross takes aim here at the slogan of ‘Migrants welcome’ and its corollary, the idea that the left should be pro-migration. Of course there is nothing wrong with the slogan per se, just that it is often accompanied with arguments that migrants contribute to the capitalist economy and are therefore ‘good’ for everyone.
This hides the super-exploitation of labour and oppression of rights in the semi-colonies, facts we need to highlight in order to win workers away from racism. As Cross says, ‘There is no inevitability that an understanding of cheap labour will lead to national chauvinism. Fully understood, it will do the very opposite.’
Semi-colonies
Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, where the advanced countries have a surplus of capital that cannot be sufficiently profitably invested in the home market so needs to be exported. In the process this sets up an international division of labour, controlled by finance capital i.e. the big banks and financial institutions, and patrolled by the imperialist powers. Cross shows how capitalism destroys local pre-capitalist economies on impact, the most famous example being the Indian textile industry under British colonial rule. The same practices are at work today. However, this does not stop finance capital from utilising pre-capitalist social relations, e.g. the extended family, to cheapen the costs of social reproduction and therefore also wages.
Likewise tribal hierarchies are used to impose corrupt regimes, even where there is formal democracy, and to divide the working class in the interests of imperial profits. Militarisation and debt-bondage also result from these arrangements mediated in the globalisation period through the IMF. However, it is the local working and middle classes who have to pay for this through structural adjustment programmes, austerity, and job and wage cuts.
Neoliberalism has overseen an agrarian counter-revolution, rolling back the reforms of the 1960s and 70s. Peasant farmers are driven off the land by means of acquisitions by finance capital, cheap imports undercutting their produce, soil erosion by monoculture and climate change, etc. But there are not enough jobs in the cities to accommodate them and they are forced to emigrate.
Offshoring has led to a massive transfer of industry to the semi-colonies, most notably the maquilas in Mexico, tied to global supply chains. This system, which employs a quarter of Mexico’s entire industrial proletariat, sees US car companies effectively exploit migrant labour in situ.
But it is insecure work. The threat of relocation, e.g. from China to Vietnam, constantly hangs over the workforce, likewise that of Trump’s tariffs. Special economic zones (i.e. little or no taxes or labour rights) and other perks are made available to the companies. In total, more jobs are destroyed than created.
The same can be said of Nafta, the free trade agreement between the US, Mexico and Canada. One example in the book shows how imports of soybeans for pig feed destroyed the local soy-producing farmers’ livelihoods, leading to yet more migration—across the longest and most militarised border in the world.
Finally the imperialist powers also choose to import the skilled labour they want, creating a ‘brain drain’ which again depresses semi-colonial development. Up to 100,000 computer software engineers left India in one year, while the Philippines government hosted a conference urging western companies to employ their skilled health workers and others.
Taken together, Cross shows how this represents a transfer of wealth from the poor countries to the rich of an incalculable size. The UK alone has stripped an estimated £1 trillion from Africa.
Exploitation in transit
Migrants’ transit has spawned an industry in itself. The dangers they face on their journey include robbery, beatings, murder, rape, trafficking, and even slavery.
Their routes, subject to exploitation by criminals, produce hubs where thousands may congregate before the next leg. In Libya, the Gulf states and India, migrants play a huge role in local economies, with no real human or labour rights. Indeed large numbers of migrants can be deported at any time or ‘disappeared’, presumably dead or in slavery.
Likewise migrants can be ‘warehoused’, as in countries around Syria, with scant access to food, water, medicine or sanitation, waiting for a demand in a rich country to emerge. These ‘warehouses’ provide a ‘just-in-time’ production saving for imperialist capital.
In 1971, Britain introduced the overtly racist Immigration Act in 1971, distinguishing between the ‘old Commonwealth’ (Canadians, Australians and white South Africans, all wanted) from the ‘new Commonwealth’ (Caribbean, Indian subcontinent, Africa, all not wanted). Since then every government has tightened immigration.
The EU’s Schengen Agreement is a classic racist border regime: free movement for white Europeans, and ‘Fortress Europe’ for the Global South. Free movement has to be a universal right or it is a privilege that causes racist division. This leads Cross wrongly to support the ‘Lexit’ vote for leaving the EU, a position that at best argued for making life just as miserable for white immigrants attempting to enter the UK and at worst was an open declaration of war on the principle that workers should have the right to live and work wherever the choose. Brexit was a national chauvinist project, and its chief engineers, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, have shown this to be true ever since.
The militarised and largely privatised border regime has also produced its own economy, on both sides. G4S has expanded enormously from its immigration contracts and now provides ‘security’ to brutal regimes around the world. On the other side, the so-called ‘people smuggling gangs’ are largely composed of migrants, stranded and criminalised already by the system. Labour’s plan to ‘smash the gangs’ simply makes migration more difficult—and empowers both criminal gangs, and employers who exploit the insecurity of undocument workers.
Racism and migration
Successive governments and the billionaire-owned media have constantly repeated the claim that migrants are ‘illegal’, asylum seekers largely ‘bogus’ and that their real motive is to become ‘welfare tourists’. While ‘scientific’ racism is now considered embarrassing, it has been replaced by cultural racism, which depicts non-whites as a threat to women, children, or as Islamist terrorists and criminals. This affects settled, next-generation people of colour, too.
A truer picture would reveal the ghettoisation of many migrants in undervalued, manual and often ‘essential’ jobs, subject to the ‘hostile environment’. Women especially are forced into low-waged, non-standard contract employment. Since not only their immediate families, but also businesses and even governments are dependent on the remittances they can send home, migrants put up with harsh conditions. On the other hand employers can cherry-pick highly skilled professionals.
For a multitude of reasons, migrants can also end up in the informal sector. As Cross explains, this is a ‘problem’ that capitalism does not want to solve, since it presses down on wages, conditions and rights for all workers. It provides a decoy for the real crime of exploiting all labour, including native workers.
The infamous Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and its European counterparts raid workplaces, usually offering an amnesty to employers who ‘cooperate’, making it easy for these ‘gangmasters’ to turn in militant workers. ICE has been compared to the slavecatchers of old.
The author is weak however on the task of confronting racism. She relies on the unproven impact of undocumented migration on wages to deny official statistics. This leads her to downplay the threat of racism, claiming anti-racist protesters consistently outnumber the right: a claim that looks foolish now.
She even trumpets the 2009 Lindsey oil refinery strike as anti-racist—when their initial demand was the sacking of hundreds of their fellow Italian and Portuguese workers. Joint struggle in the workplace and communities alone cannot defeat racism. It needs a conscious ideological struggle too.
Programme
At the heart of this error is Cross’s lack of grasp of Lenin’s theory of imperialism and the role played by the labour aristocracy in particular. Building on the work of Engels, Lenin argued that imperialism allows the working class in the metropolitan centres to benefit from the crumbs of the surplus profits capitalists extract from the semi-colonies. These are mostly enjoyed by a labour aristocracy, whose relatively privileged standard of living under imperialism serves as a transmission belt for national chauvinism, racism and, in times of war, jingoism, to pervade the working class as a whole.
Today, when the imperialist powers are dividing into blocs and gearing up for war, racist rhetoric and oppression are on the rise, while their attacks on the whole working class, migrants and ‘natives’, in the imperialist centres and in the periphery, intensify. The ‘thousand tiny cuts’ that Cross believes can ‘erode’ capitalism will not have 30 years to peacefully develop. Her gradualist utopia of left wing social democracy and the middle classes abolishing differentials and opening borders will dry up.
We need a drive to make the unions fight racism and the war drive, mobilising their millions of members to defend their fellow workers in the workplace and the communities. But this has to be linked to a struggle for power, how-ever distant that may seem, both in the global north but also in the global south, where the contradictions of capitalism are a thousand times greater.
This necessitates the existence of revolutionary parties and a revolutionary International that can guide that struggle. The so-called International that Cross borrows from the late Samir Amin, a cross-class International with a reformist agenda, cannot become an instrument for fighting world imperialism. What we need is a new, revolutionary International, established on a new programme updated to fight today’s conditions.
